Transition Culture has moved
I no longer blog on this site. You can now find me, my general blogs, and the work I am doing researching my forthcoming book on imagination, on my new blog.
Come find me at robhopkins.net
Showing results 1 - 5 of 506 for the category: General.
Today is the day of the publication of The Power of Just Doing Stuff. I’d like to mark this historic occasion by presenting you with this short video of the recent poignant and moving launch event we recently held with the Mayor of Totnes to welcome the book into the world. Please put in Facebook, Twitter, whatever, and share it around. Do join me between 4 & 5pm (BST) for our Twitter Q&A (#doingstuff).
If there was one picture that captured the times we are living through it is this. It appeared on the BBC website recently with the following caption:
Kevin McGuire walks his dog past a vacant shop in Belcoo, Northern Ireland. The empty shop is one of a number that have had graphics placed on the windows to make them look like working shops ahead of the G8 summit which takes place nearby later this month.
Let’s take that a bit more slowly. Here is a shop, one of many that has gone out of business due, among other things, to the growth-fixated policies of the G8, situated in a place G8 ministers will be driven past en route to their summit. Rather than their being able to see how things are actually unfolding in the real world, the division and misery being caused by their approach to the economy, the windows have been plastered with stickers that present it as a fully-stocked, thriving shop.
We’ll start this month’s round up in South Africa. We loved this video from German TV about Transition Town Greyton, and the work they are doing. Wonderful stuff. Altogether now: “Stuff your bottles, clean up your town”…
This month’s round up comes to you with a new added source of material, Twitter. There are hundreds of Transition initiatives on Twitter, and they offer a more intimate insight into what’s happening on the ground, stories that wouldn’t necessarily warrant a blog or make the local press, but which offer a great sense of what people are doing. Hopefully you’ll agree that this month’s round up is all the richer for it. Feels to me like the fullest and most vibrant we’ve yet produced.
It’s now 12 days until the launch of The Power of Just Doing Stuff, all very exciting. The full list of Transition Thursdays, launch events around the country, will be published later this week, but we thought you might like to know about the first two events where you’ll be able to get your hands on the book and hear more about it. The first, on Saturday 15th June at the 2013 Schumacher Lectures in Bristol, will be a pre-launch, and then the actual formal launch will be in Crystal Palace, London, on Tuesday 18th June (yes, the first Transition Thursday is, in fact, erm, a Tuesday). Do come along to either (or both)… Here’s more information on them:
I spoke at the Hay Festival last week, a very well-attended and enjoyable session. Every day during the Festival, the Daily Telegraph produces ‘The Hayley Telegraph’, a free magazine given away at the Festival, which includes articles by, or about, some of that day’s speakers. Here is the article I wrote for the edition published the day I spoke.
The new economic frontier is a chance for community resilience
There’s a TV advert I remember from the 1980s that has stuck with me. It features a recently unemployed man telling his wife that he and his friend are “going it alone”, that “the bank says yes”, and that they are going to set up their own business. I think the ad was for a car or something. It captured the spirit prevalent during that decade, where business was the new frontier, anything was possible, and there were no limits.
