Transition Culture

21 Apr 2015

6 Inner Transition innovations that changed my life

When I travel to meet Transition groups in different places, the two things they are most keen to hear about tend to be REconomy and Inner Transition.  While REconomy will be the subject of our next Theme, this week we are celebrating Inner Transition, and the launch of Sophy Banks’ series of new films on the subject.  Here is my contribution, a celebration of 6 ways in which Inner Transition has transformed my experience of trying to make change happen.

It wasn’t very long into the evolution of Transition in Totnes, in 2006, that Hilary Prentice and Sophy Banks came round to my house to discuss the seeds of what would eventually become known as ‘Inner Transition’, or the ‘Heart and Soul’ of Transition.  I remember little about the hour that we passed in my lounge, but I do remember that something felt instinctively right.  Their argument was that any successful Transition process needed to be as much about the inner life of the people and groups making it happen, with attention paid to group health, dynamics and resilience, as it needed to be about solar panels, carrots and Energy Descent Plans.  It made a lot of sense.  And it still makes a lot of sense today: which is why so many people want to hear more about it.

Now, 9 years later, the concept of Inner Transition runs through Transition like a golden thread (although admittedly more in some places than others).  Transition has always stood on the shoulders of many great movements that came before it, and has tried to learn, where possible, from their experience.  Burnout and conflict have long been the Achilles heel of bottom-up activism. 

For example, among the road protestors I knew, burnout, often manifested as deep cynicism and resignation, was rife.  Project after project whether permaculture, community activism of many types, or all manner of other ambitious world-changing efforts, collapsed under the weight of conflict and poor communication, squashed, inevitably, by the collective weight of all the un-named elephants in the room.  Transition felt too important to not strive to learn from that. So here is my entirely un-subjective selection of 6 ‘outputs’ of the Inner Transition work of Sophy, Hilary and others that I have benefitted from, or which have transformed my experience of doing Transition:

Home Groups

One of the first manifestations of it that I became aware of was the Home Groups, the forerunner of Transition Streets, where small self – facilitating groups met to give each other support – which could be personal or practical. A Home Groups resource pack offered tips about good listening, as well as some energy saving suggestions. This approach was a major part of many other consciousness raising movements including the women’s, civil rights and peace movements.  

Home groups gave members a space to ‘digest’ troubling information, to process it and its implications, with other people as well building strong connections and celebrating successes together.  Several groups formed at an evening event run by the group – others started  among people who had attended my ‘Skilling Up for Powerdown’ evening class , and were wondering what they could do next.  The Home Groups was an idea that would never have occurred to me. 

It was one of the key contributors to the later success of Transition Streets, and deeply informed it when we set down to first sketch it out.  It’s also something Naomi Klein picked up on at her recent Guardian Live event:

“It’s something that the feminist movement has done well, and a lot of people in the Transition Town movement who are part of this Inner Transition piece of it, come out of the feminist movement, because there’s an understanding that if you’re going to collapse peoples’ world views, you have to stick around to pick up the pieces”.

Mentoring

Another element of Inner Transition that has been very powerful has been the idea of mentoring.  As you may have noticed, ‘doing’ Transition can be very exhausting, stressful and draining (as well as exhilarating, inspiring and energising).  There are times when a Transition initiative comes under pressure in ways that we simply aren’t prepared or trained for.  About 4 years ago, Transition Town Totnes came under a lot of pressure from a local media outlet, targeted mostly on myself and one other member of the group.  It was deeply stressful and troubling, and during this time, the mentoring was hugely valuable.  It was very helpful in cultivating self preservation strategies and not taking things personally. 

The Totnes Mentoring Project is, in essence, a group of mentors, counsellors and therapists who offer their time free of charge to those working at the centre of Transition (see right: the poster on the office wall).  This work is the subject of one of the new Inner Transition videos (see below).  For me, it has made a huge difference.  To have a space where you can safely discuss your fears, your worries, your fear of failure, and sometimes fear of success (!) has proven a powerful antidote to burnout.  I can’t recommend it highly enough.

Being and Doing

Another Inner Transition development that has been a revelation has been naming the distinction between ‘being’ and ‘doing’.  I’m a doer.  I do stuff.  So are many of those involved in Transition.  And we live in a culture that tends only to value our ‘doing’.  It is generally expected that we only bring our head, or our hands, to work and leave the rest of us outside the workplace. 

Any concerns about our home life, about the state of the planet, our hopes and dreams, are all left at home.  This separation is deeply unhealthy, and at Transition Network one of the ways we address this is by alternating our monthly meetings between ‘Being’ meetings and ‘Doing’ meetings.  The Doing meetings focus on practical issues, work planning, updates on each others’ work and so on.  The Being meetings are a reflective space that invites reflection on the question “how are we?

And how are we working together?”.  When everyone is working to achieve things and to make stuff happen, it is a hugely valuable approach, to make space to stop, check in and reflect.  I’m left wondering how people manage in organisations that don’t do it.   

Checking in

This is something that feels so accepted now as just something that we do that it no longer feels like an innovation as such.  But I don’t recall doing it in previous organisations I’ve been part of, and I can really see the difference it makes.  I am also involved in another community project, one that is almost entirely ‘Doing’ focused, and recently, in exasperation, I suggested we introduce check ins to how our meetings work. 

The reason it felt so important was that people were bringing their arguments, their stresses, their troubles from the day they were having outside the meeting, and, unspoken as they were, they were dominating the meeting.  There was no mechanism by which people could notice and then ‘park’ their stresses in such a way that enabled everyone to focus just on the meeting itself.  And if someone is having a hard time others in the meeting can be sensitive to that – so we embed our values of caring into how we work together. We introduced check ins (“how are you?”) to the start of our meetings and it made a huge difference.

According to Transition Network’s ‘Inner Transition activities for meetings’ document, you might also ask one of the following:

• Something you’re enjoying about this time of year
• Something you love about living in this place
• Something you’d like to pass on to the next generation
• Something you’re grateful for
• Something enjoyable that happened since the last meeting
• Something you learnt from an elder
• Something creative you do
• A place in nature you love 

It really does make a difference. 

The value of the ‘Keepers’

In Transition Network, we started a couple of years ago to introduce, at the start of each meeting, 3 ‘Keepers’ to support the role of the main facilitator or chair. This came from National hubs meetings where we saw it used to good effect.

These are the Keeper of the Record (taking notes, or creating a record of the meeting in some other way), the Keeper of the Heart (keeping an eye on how people are doing, when energy dips, any tensions or charged issues that need naming and so on), and a Keeper of the Time (keeping the whole thing running to schedule).  In meetings that include participants who are attending via Skype, we have added a Keeper of the Technology. 

Naming these roles at the beginning of meetings means putting in place a support structure that greatly increases the likelihood of the meeting running to its full potential.  It’s a kind of mindfulness practice, and it makes a big difference. 

‘Digestion’

I mentioned how useful digestion is in the context of Home Groups.  But it’s a tool that is very useful in other ways too.  I feel like when you present people with a lot of big ideas and potentially distressing information you have a duty to provide space for them to digest it.  One of the ways in which I use this idea is when I am giving talks.  Rather than just going straight from the end of my talk into questions and answers, I always invite people to turn to the person next to them to discuss whether there was anything especially surprising, upsetting, inspiring in the talk, how they are feeling, and what questions it brought up for them. 

It means that when we then do go into questions, the questions are so much richer, to the point, and illuminating.  I recently gave a talk before which a very angry looking older man, with cheeks purple with rage, introduced himself by asking “what are you going to do about immigration?”  We had an interesting discussion about this (which started by my pointing out that there wasn’t actually that much I could do even if I wanted to), but it was clear, as I started my talk that he was still energised by the issue, and there to make a public point about immigration.  As I started speaking he put his hand up to ask a question, and I suggested he wait until the end.  When I finished we did the 5 minute digestion, and his was then the first hand up.  Resigned to the inevitable question about how realistic it is to do Transition in a nation awash with immigrants, he actually asked about straw bale walls. 

These six are just a small selection of Inner Transition innovations I have particularly noticed in my experience of doing Transition, and which can be traced back to that first meeting with Sophy and Hilary.  There are no doubt many others that I haven’t named here, or even that I’m not aware of.  And certainly many of them are things that were around before in different guises, so I’m not saying they are “new”, just that they were new to me.  Like all the best things in Transition, Inner Transition has brought with it an invitation to innovate, and it’s an invitation that has been embraced in initiatives around the world. 

For me, Inner Transition, at its best, is deeply practical.  It has transformed Transition into something that feels supported, held and which sees resilience in its broadest sense.  Resilient communities need resilient individuals and resilient groups, who see being able to look after each other as being essential to their being able to look after the world.   This is all too important to risk being squashed underneath the weight of those elephants in the room.  More useful to have the wherewithal to make friends with them and take them for a walk to the park.  

I’ll close with the fourth in the series of Inner Transition videos being unveiled this week in which Sophy Banks and Hilary Prentice reflect on the history of the Inner in Transition:

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20 Apr 2015

Sophy Banks introduces our Inner Transition Week.

This week is Inner Transition Week here at www.transitionnetwork.org and over the course of the week, we’ll bring you stories, and a collection of specially-commissioned new films, as well as pointing you towards the tools we’re using to support the inner and outer in Transition.  

We’ll hear from Rob Hopkins and Fiona Ward of Transition Network on the impact Inner Transition has had on them – people not usually associated with the inner bit of Transition, but who, it turns out, have a lot to say. Hide Enomoto, one of the people involved in taking Transition to Japan, talks about how important the inclusion of inner has been for him. And we’ll hear from people around the world who are involved with exploring and experimenting with the sometimes elusive and often wonderful thing that Inner Transition is. 

If you have a story to share please send it in – and we’ll include it, if possible on Friday. I’m always interested to hear your stories even if we don’t manage to post them on the website this week! 

Today – Personal resilience and avoiding burnout

In most Transition groups I work with, over half the people present have experienced, or been close to, burnout. What a paradox this is: that in a movement that’s all about sustainability we often create unsustainable expectations and ways of working! So why is that and what can we do about it? 

If you’re interested and looking for pointers, many of the answers I’ve found are on the Personal Resilience pages. You’ll find ideas that will bring a healthy balance to your group on Project Support Inner Transition pages and here is a group activity designed to check your group and personal sustainability.  For now though, and as a way of kicking off this week, I’d like to introduce you to two of the new Inner Transition films, produced by Emma Goude of Green Lane Films, which we’ll be unveiling this week.  

The first looks at how Inner Transition can help to avoid that unspoken but ever-present risk for people doing any kind of activism, burn-out.  

The second explores how Inner Transition supports personal and collective resilience:

So here’s a taste of what’s coming up during the rest of the week:  

Tuesday– Rob on “Six Inner Transition innovations that have changed my life”.

I met Rob back in 2006, in the very early days of Transition Town Totnes. From the start it “felt right” to have a group addressing the inner. Rob reflects on his favourite Inner Transition inventions and the effect they’ve had on him and the movement. 

There are short films on the benefits of mentoring, and a history of how Inner Transition got started in Totnes and then in the Transition movement.

Wednesday – The journey to Japan

Hide Enomoto came across Transition at an event in Frome, Somerset, and immediately knew it was something he had to find out about. With others he attended a Transition: Launch training in 2007, and started the first Japanese initiative in Fujino the same year. There are now dozens of initiatives in Japan.

In this interview Hide talks about how important the integration of inner and outer dimensions was in the process of bringing Transition to Japan.

Two short films will explain “What is Inner Transition?” – hearing what is means for people across the movement, and Jo Homan explains why she started Macy Mondays, an ongoing support group for Transition leaders in North London.

Thursday – Inner Transition in Reconomy

Fiona Ward, creator of Reconomy, shares how Inner Transition has impacted her personally, and been an important thread in the development of Reconomy.

We’ll offer films exploring how Inner Transition helps in creating successful public events — especially the controversial ones, and the importance of processes like Open Space in bringing new people into your initiative.

Friday – Inner Transition without borders

On our final day we’ll hear stories from the international inner Transition group, and what it’s like to be part of a disucssion with people in very different cultures and circumstances. There’s an invitation to join the international conversation and details of Inner Transition workshops that are taking place in Sweden, Portugal, Italy and the UK. 

Today’s film features Hilary Prentice talking about “A worldwide movement towards consciousness”.

Feel free to post comments, or send feedback and suggestions by email.

We hope you enjoy the week! 

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13 Apr 2015

Anne-Marie Culhane: "Art is about magic, and it’s about change".

One of the names that recurs throughout Lucy Neal’s Playing for Time is that of Anne-Marie Culhane.  Anne-Marie is an artist living in Cornwall but just in the process of moving to Devon. Rather than trying myself to describe her and what she does, I’ll leave that to her:

“I make things happen generally. I call myself an artist. But I’m generally exploring the world through my practice, which is very broad and involves a lot of time working with other people, most of the time responding to particular places that I’m working in. Also part of that practice or the process of that practice is creating my own interpretations of place.

I use drawing and I use writing and I use poetry, but that’s often a way to get towards the piece of work which is involving other people, and to get a deeper understanding of the place I’m working in so I can then create something which is very responsive to what I find there.

What is art for you?

Art to me is about changing the way that I, or other people, experience or see the world or their place in the world. It’s about magic, it’s about transformation, it’s about a moment of recognition or wonder. It’s about change. That’s either within me or about a collective sense of change or exploration.

In that, there’s a lot of questioning.  There are a lot of questions for me in art not accepting accepted views on how we might perceive each other, how we might perceive places, how we might look at the world, and it’s a constant ongoing journey into finding different ways of seeing and doing and knowing and being.

I was really interested about how, in your work, you take something that Transition groups would be doing anyway and add an art layer over the top. One example is your Fruit Roots project in Exeter.  A lot of Transition groups might say “let’s go and talk to Exeter University about planting loads of fruit trees”. They might then get the green light and organise a load of people and have a work day and plant loads of fruit trees, but your work adds another layer over the top of that, a richness and a depth and a whole different discipline to that. I wonder if you could just talk about that: what do you bring to something like Fruit Roots and what does it add to that activity?

I’ll talk about the project at Loughborough because that’s a lot more developed. I’ve just started working at Exeter University and I’ve been working at Loughborough University for four years. It’s a long-term project, so that’s a big thing for me, having a longer-term engagement with places, because I’m really interested in seasons and cycles.

I work a lot with food. I think food is really political, really inclusive, and really fundamental, and it’s an interesting and engaging way of drawing people back into contact with the land. A lot of my work  asks “what is that relationship to the land?” And of course that can be viewed in one dimension, so you can say – it’s about getting food, or – it’s about finding resources that I can use.

But actually, if we look at the roots of most culture, contemporary culture, it comes from agriculture, it’s in the word. It comes from how we relate to the land and how we’ve been given abundance or bounty back from the land, if we relate to the land in a way that doesn’t exploit it or diminish it.

There’s a celebratory element to that, a thanksgiving, a deepening of knowledge which I want to draw into all the work that I do around food. It’s not just about fulfilling a need. It’s about how that relates to us in terms of our relationship with the whole ecosystem or Gaia or whatever you want to call the bigger planet that we live on, and then reflecting on that.

You can go and plant a tree and walk off, and you’ve planted a tree. Or you can go and plant a tree and think about what that means in terms of what you might have learnt about how the tree is structured and how the tree works with the other elements, and you might draw metaphors from that. You might also look at the tree as something that connects you to the past and to your ancestors, and also that connects you into the future so you can bring your imagination into the planting of the tree.

It’s also changing the landscape to allow the possibility for biodiversity to develop, so it’s saying from this one act – it’s a bit like John Muir’s principle of everything’s attached to everything else and it’s a really fantastic way, if you work with nature or with food or with trees or with planting and then you can experience the cycles of that, it’s just a fantastic way of drawing people into the richness of what it is to be alive and part of the bigger seasons and bigger cycles and bigger patterns.

To me, that’s where historically a lot of our culture has come from, our songs and our stories and there’s perhaps been a bit of a break with that since people have been coming away from the land and have been less attached to that connection. Our connection to the land now is predominantly one-removed, a leisure thing. We look at it and say isn’t that beautiful, but actually any active relationship with dealing with plants or trees or landscapes and being in them just allows a lot more possibility.

Presumably having that layer in adds a lot more edge and potential for engaging much more widely and in a much more diverse way with the local community.

At Loughborough I backed things together, so I had a series of back-to-back led by an artist.  There’s a route now that is a kilometre long, which has about 160 fruit trees on it. The idea is that that becomes etched into the cultural life of the campus. It’s a route because it makes it easier for people to get it into their heads. The route becomes a locus for walks and talks and performances and seasonal events, and they can be about biodiversity, experiencing nature at different times of day, having feasts or musical performances, and quite a lot of those events I curate or I programme, so they bring different audiences together. That’s a really big thing for me.  I really enjoy bringing different groups of people together.

If there’s an event and somebody who’s comfortable about going to events that connect them to nature, so they come on a walk to do with bats. But then I’ll back something onto that which is a more creative, exploratory event and they come and they feel comfortable within the environment and the people that are there, then they come on and do something else that they might not have done before and learn something about themselves and maybe about being with other people that they wouldn’t have learnt before. So there’s a kid of overview and a design. I’ve done permaculture design, and that’s been a massive influence on how I conceive a project.

What can you tell us about some of the other work in portfolio?

At the moment I am working on a project in Lincolnshire which is Arts Council Research funded with another artist called Ruth Levine, and that’s looking at huge-scale arable farming.  I’m really interested in wheat and I’ve made a series of masks from wheat.  There’s a long story behind all that.

It comes out of a contemporisation and an exploration of rituals around harvest, and celebrating the seed and the continuation of the seed and of cycles, which is what a lot of corn dollies and things made out of straw were represented. But I explored it as a medium and started making these masks that can be worn for events or activism or in different situations.

They’re made for performance. Then, like corn dollies, they’re used once for the performance, so they have a life as an object, I perform in them and then they’re put back in the ground. So they’re destroyed, they’re not kept as objects that have an actual value.

On the back of that, I’m doing a residency on three different farms in Lincolnshire that farm the land in extremely different ways, just because I really want to grapple with my understanding of where our food comes from. Most of my work has concentrated on urban growing and small-scale community gardens and allotments and linking up those kinds of projects.

But I really wanted to go right to the other end of the spectrum, so I’ve gone right to massive scale industrial farming to really see and feel what it’s like to be in those places and to make some working response to that. But using wheat as the thread, so the three farms that we’re working with all grow wheat at different scales, and we’re just going to be making some work in response to that. This will include people being invited to come on the farms and get closer to the places where some of their food comes from, but that’s at a development stage.

I’m also doing a residency at the moment with Tim Lenton at Exeter University. He’s professor of climate change and it’s in the Earth Systems Faculty. We are exploring how to invite people to engage with the concepts around Earth Systems and he’s very influenced by James Lovelock, Gaia theory and how people can explore those concepts in more experiential ways.

This comes out of from what I’m picking up from him and from other research is real frustration in some of the scientific community about how the messages get communicated, and about how that message translates into action. It’s a really fantastic residency. Our work seems to back up to each other really well.

One of the things that’s been really interesting with Lucy Neal’s new book ‘Playing for Time’ is it seems to pull together all kinds of people working sometimes independently to each other or knowing of each other’s work puts them, not necessarily as part of a movement, but driven by that idea of art in service to the wider ecological crisis. I wonder if you had thoughts about why Lucy’s book matters, and what bringing all those things together does?

There’s a really lovely quote by someone you probably have heard of called Dougald Hine from the Dark Mountain Project, he’s a friend of mine.  He said “if someone were to ask me what kind of cause is sufficient to live for in dark times, the best answer I could give would be to take responsibility. Not an impossible, meaningless responsibility for the world in general, but one that is specific and practical and maybe different for each of us”.

That, hopefully, is what Lucy’s book is saying. From the people that you’ve spoken to already, you’re probably getting a whole different range of responses to a kind of common desire to take responsibility and how we all do that. It’s incredibly important that people do that in a way that’s unique to them, rather than copying or following other people.  When you do something, if you’re doing it genuinely from yourself, it’s going to be unique.  There’s something in her book which will show an eclectic range of different ways to take responsibility.

So, for example, with the project that I was involved in called Abundance, we created a handbook for that which can be downloaded free on the internet. It took two years to write because we were really clear that we didn’t want it to be something that people copied. The tone in which it’s written and the style in which it’s written and the language is about saying “this is something that worked for us in a particular circumstance with a particular group of people”.

If you were going to do this project, it’s going to be completely different for you depending on what your interests are or what the landscape’s like, so take it where you want and do with it what you want, this is just our learning and it’s for you to take from that what helps you, but ultimately the project will be shaped by you. As a model, hopefully that set the tone for what I believe, which is that we can all take responsibility but be true to ourselves in what that means for us.

What do you think The Arts bring to Transition, and what does Transition bring to The Arts?

Any culture develops art in forms of celebration, in forms of reflecting what’s going on. You wouldn’t want to have a Transition Town that didn’t ever celebrate anything!  To create something that works as a celebration needs to have some kind of genuine root, a connection to an event or season or something that’s happened. It needs to be considered, it needs to be something that has care and attention to detail, and for me that’s all part of an arts and creative practice.

There may be new songs or music that comes out of the process of how people are working together or the challenges of that, that’s going to generate creative responses, poetry. It’s an integral part of culture. I guess as an artist I can’t imagine living without any of that, it wouldn’t be worth living.

One of the things that defines Transition and community work is the fact that it’s about bringing people together in ways they might not have done before. I guess many people’s mental picture of an artist is somebody working on their own in a garret or in a field with an easel. It’s seen as a solitary practice, but that’s not the case for you, is it?

I do have, or I have had in the past when I could afford it, a space to work. My work takes place on many levels. As I said earlier, when a project’s developing, there’s a lot of time which is given over to thinking, reflecting, maybe drawing, writing, getting to know, listening.  That process for me is creative and that process has to be in part solitary.  Actually that’s not entirely true.

Part of that process is solitary, part will come from dialogue with people spending time in the place that I’m working. And then once there’s a sense of what the project might manifest as, there tends to be a very collaborative element which goes on which could involve a community, which might involve experts in particular fields of knowledge, it may involve people in communities, it might involve other artists, so quite often there’s a sense of an idea that is beyond the capacity of my skills and so I would ask another artist if they want to work with me on that project.

There’s not ever a real sense that I’m working on something in a solitary way or not like I’m putting something out there saying “this is my viewpoint on the world”.  Generally there’s a thank you list as long as your arm at the end of every project that I do, because it’s a collective process and so it’s not about one person putting forward an opinion on something. That’s really important for me.

The places that I work in tell me stuff, feed me, call me in a certain way. It’s a collaboration with a particular place as well as the people that live there. Which is why it’s really important to know that I sometimes don’t transfer from one place to another and will be shaped by that particular place, which comes back to permaculture design. The idea that you spend a lot of time observing and listening in different ways. In permaculture it would be ideally a year at least, so you can really feel how the different rhythms of the place and the people that live there impact and change over time, as well as the elements.

Here is the podcast of the full version of our conversation:

Anne-Marie is just one of over 60 artists who have written sections for Lucy Neal’s forthcoming book ‘Playing for Time: making art as if the world mattered” (see cover, right).  The book is now published.  TransitionNetwork.org readers can get £5 off Playing for Time.  Simply enter this discount code at oberonbooks.com – ONPFT2015.  Valid until 31 Dec 2015.

 

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13 Apr 2015

Why should admitting to not having a TV be "dangerous"?

Few articles about the UK’s upcoming election have raised my hackles as much as an article by Stuart Heritage entitled Ed Miliband admitting to not watching TV is a big mistake.  Heritage picks up on a quote in a recent interview with Ed Miliband for the Radio Times in which he said “I tend not to watch the news, actually” and wrote:

“This, combined with hints elsewhere that he isn’t keeping up to date with Game of Thrones, seems to border upon a dangerous admission that he doesn’t watch TV at all”.

Heritage seems to believe that not watching television is a dangerous social trait, which somehow renders people suspicious, untrustworthy, and deeply shifty.  He continues:

“And this, obviously, will not stand. We’ve all met people who don’t watch television, and we’ve all been immediately creeped out by them. It’s a generally accepted fact that the only people worse than people who don’t watch television are people who don’t own televisions, and the only people worse than those people are people who use internet comment sections to tell other people that they don’t own televisions”.

Far from it being a “dangerous admission”, I am proud to shout from the rooftops that I haven’t had a television for 20 years.  Last TV I had was a small black and white portable with a round wire aerial you had to wiggle around that we used to watch ‘Blind Date’ on.  To the best of my knowledge, my televisionlessness is not a fact that has creeped anyone out (do tell me, dear friends, if I have horrifically misread the signals here).  I am proud also to say that my kids grew up without one, and that they, presumably against the odds, managed to grow up as rounded, caring and delightful young men, more than able to make conversation on a range of topics.

One of the key questions that struck me, reading Heritage’s piece, was who actually does watch TV anymore?  Not many people I know.  Everyone under 20 that I know would rather watch stuff on YouTube, and other channel-specific  online players than actual TV.  When I do occasionally get to watch TV, I am staggered by the inane rubbish that passes as popular culture. 

My dearly beloved and I recently had two nights away, staying in a place with a TV.  We were genuinely excited that we could put our feet up and be entertained.  Having last had a telly when there were only 4 channels, having now 50 or so to choose from was sure to yield some indispensible content.  We were rather looking forward to it. 

We leapt about the channels, and in spite of our best efforts found that we ended up watching ‘Storage Wars’, where aggressive pushy North Americans come to blows over the unknown contents of shipping containers.  It was morbidly fascinating for about 5 minutes and then just depressing.  We tried some of the endless property shows where people get shown round houses just slightly out of their price bracket and wonder whether they should risk penury to appease the presenter.  Or pointless celebrity shows with people who are just famous for having been mildly famous once.  And of course the awful panel shows seemingly amusing only to the people on the panels.  Or that really cheap TV where they put cameras on the front of police cars and just edit the footage together (actually I quite enjoy that stuff).  A Golden Age of TV is isn’t.

And as for Heritage’s assertion that not being up to speed with Game of Thrones is an indication of dubious moral character, I would strongly beg to differ.  I sat through (well, actually mostly slept through) the first 3 seasons of Game of Thrones (my wife loved it, oddly), and I hated every misogynistic, abusive, unnecessarily violent minute of it.  I gave up very quickly on the pointless storyline that made no sense, and the characters I didn’t care about (i.e. all of them).  It was like flipping backwards and forwards between the Adult Channel and a Lord of the Rings DVD.  I hated it, although I appreciate that some people like that kind of thing.  Not sure which useful and constructive values it brings into the world other than the idea that you really can’t trust anyone at all under any circumstances. 

Extending Heritage’s logic, everyone in the time presumably before telly must have had an absolutely rotten time.  Endless dreary days sitting around, nothing to talk to each other about, morosely sitting waiting for John Logie Baird (see right) to pull his finger out and invent television so they’d finally have something to stimulate conversation.  No games, no conversation, no imagination, no creativity. God, it must have been dreadful. 

I think what Heritage is trying to say is that not being up to speed with Game of Thrones, Storage Wars and all the other banal stuff that fills the channels somehow means that in any social gathering you will be left without any way of conversing with anyone, with no common ground whatsoever.  That ‘popular culture’ is the only common ground left to us.  That without a basic grounding in Eastenders you will left lonely and friendless.  That Ed Miliband risks being unable to find anything to talk about with voters, ending up like someone shunned by fellow partygoers as some kind of dull social pariah. 

The reality is of course very different.  It has never happened to me that in spite of having no TV I have ever failed to find common ground with people.  When he writes “it’s a generally accepted fact that the only people worse than people who don’t watch television are people who don’t own televisions”, I could just as easily turn that on its head and say that actually I think the degree to which people get out and make the world a better place, give time to meaningful activity in their community, start new projects, learn new skills, grow some food, is inversely proportionate to the amount of time they spend watching TV.  Does a world teetering on the brink of runaway climate change need people watching more, or less TV?  Discuss. 

‘Storage Wars’ or planting out pea seedlings?  The Jeremy Kyle Show or helping organise a street party?  ‘Location, Location, Location’ or draughtbusting your home with friends and neighbours?  It’s an easy choice for me.  Does watching TV better root you in your culture and the time and place you live in, or distance you from it? 

Heritage is so wrong: personally speaking, I would be far more interested in hearing Ed Miliband saying that he is too busy helping projects in his community, spending time with his kids, teaching his kids to whittle sticks, going to see actual live music or comedy, or growing parsley in his raised beds to watch Game of Thrones.  Would he find that he has somehow lost the ability to make conversation with people?  Of course not. 

We chose not to have a TV in our family home because we didn’t want to give a high pressure salesperson for junk food corporations have unrestricted access to our children’s minds.  And because as a family trying to raise our children in a way not driven by consumerism, why would we want those values continuously undermined?  Research about the impacts of television on young children’s minds, and on their imaginations, is truly frightening.  Some psychologists now argue that children under three ought not have any exposure to it at all.  It can lead to less sensitivity to violence and a greater acceptance to the idea that violence is a way to resolve difficulties.  It can hamper educational development, increase risk of obesity and much more.  Kids growing up unable hold their own in a conversation about Storage Wars should really be the least of our concerns. 

Does all this mean I am disconnected from popular culture?  Of course not.  I listen to the radio.  I read the news online.  I, erm, talk to people.  I watch things on iPlayer – I get to watch key things as and when I want to (which isn’t very often).  I watched all of Wolf Hall in the hope that something interesting would happen.  It didn’t.  I watched Sherlock which is brilliant.  I still get to watch Match of the Day, just a couple of days after everyone else.

By making time to actually do things, meet with neighbours, do things with my kids, get involved with Transition stuff, grow my garden, I actually have REAL things to discuss with people.  The irony of the term “reality television” is striking.  I couldn’t name anyone from TOWIE (although sadly I do know what the letters stand for) but I do know the name of most people in my street, and which of them keep chickens.  Which is most real? 

“To demonstrate a blanket lack of television knowledge”, Heritage writes, “is ridiculous”.  But to assume that television knowledge is what makes people interesting and relevant is vacuous and even more ridiculous.  Come on Ed Miliband.  Come out of the TV closet (or should that be cabinet?)!  You don’t watch TV.  That’s fine.  Celebrate it.  Tell us about what you do instead.  Your knowledge of your family, your street, your garden, tell us much more about you than your understanding of Game of Thrones.    

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8 Apr 2015

Mike Thomas on Community Engagement

To open our in depth exploration of Community Engagement, one of the elements of our Support Offer, Transition Network’s Transition Initiative Support Coordinator Mike Thomas sets the scene:

We are all part of a community in one way or another. Often it is our commitment to improving the community we live in that leads to us starting up a Transition group. Involving your community should not be seen as a chore, it is part of the fun of Transition, as you personally get to meet lots of new people, run some great events, empower people to do things for themselves and build a stronger community feeling where you live. 

If Transition was a train then Community Engagement would be the engine and the people in your community would be the passengers and drivers, because ultimately Transition is a community led process. Without support from your local community, it will be very difficult to develop Transition. People in your community will support your projects, provide you with volunteers, come to your events, campaign for you and much, much more. On the other hand an unengaged hostile community can be a major barrier to Transition by criticising what you do, refusing to support you and sometimes actually actively campaign against you. So it is important to have a really meaningful relationship with your community. 

It is crucial to involve the community as early on as possible when developing Transition. Transition should feel owned by the community, but don’t expect this to happen instantly as it can take a long time for Transition to be accepted. Also community engagement should not be seen as a process that you do just at the beginning; it’s a constant ongoing part of Transition. 

When thinking about your community it’s useful to realise that the wider geographical community is often made up of smaller diverse communities. This provides opportunities and challenges for Transition as you will have communities based around geographical areas as well as communities based around identity such as religion and interests, as well as age and disability.  

Each of these communities may need to be engaged in different ways and have different needs, or you may need to think about how you make your engagement activities as accessible as possible. It can be useful to do the big list exercise in the Networking and Partnerships support element to list all the different communities in your area in order to think about some of these issues. 

From our experience there are four main reasons for engaging your community in the Transition process: 

• To raise awareness about Transition and why you are doing it.

• To help people to understand the larger issues that Transition attempts to address, such as climate change, poverty, health

• It provides a practical example of people making a difference in their community, showing that you can make a difference.

• It inspires people to get involved in Transition

The aim of Community Engagement is not to get everyone in the community actively involved in your Transition group, if this happens then great, but it is unlikely [replace with “that’s just never going to happen”]. It is much more about including the community in the Transition journey, so they feel part of it and not outside of it. Many people will not have time or the interest to be fully involved, but they may have time to come to an event or to provide some support to what you are doing. This is much more likely to happen if people are included in what you are doing in your community. 

It is very important to be open about what you are doing and to provide opportunities for people to input and to also feedback. You can involve the community in shaping the Transition vision for your community. There are many ways of doing this such as running an Open Space session, putting on a World Cafe event to get people to actually feed into the Transition vision of the community as well as fun events like swap shops, music events, street parties and picnics. Running small practical projects can be a great way to engage people in a hands on way, things like tree planting, or getting together to clean up a dirty part of the community.

We have put together a list of potential events you could put on, but really you will know best what your community likes so use that knowledge to your advantage when planning events.  Sometimes people don’t have to engage at all, but the fact that you are giving them an opportunity to engage is in itself a powerful thing. People will remember that there was an opportunity to.

Some people in your community will want to be more involved in Transition and as more people come into the project you will need to integrate them. This needs to be thought about in advance, so that people have a good experience of getting involved in Transition. Having an induction process for people is a great way of doing this, someone can meet up with the new person and explain how the groups works, tell them what is going on and what they could get involved. Your group can support them to form their own self-sustaining projects, or involve them in your existing theme groups that work with particular focus such as food, energy, communication or well being (if you have them established).

If you succeed in getting the community to support you then you will find it much easier to achieve your aims, as they will support you, help you and most importantly persuade others to. Don’t forget that community engagement should be fun and bring rewards for both you and your community. So get out there and make some new friends, throw a party, build a great vision for your community together and don’t forget to have very good cake available at all times.

We have focused on the principles behind community engagement here, to give an overview of why community engagement is important. We have a further set of resources in our Community Engagement element that includes: 

• A guide to planning and putting on events

• A guide to running open space events which are really good for community engagement

• A load of suggestions for potential events. 

It is also worth looking at the Network and Partnership Element as well, as this includes The Big List exercise, that you can use to think about the different communities that are in the wider community.

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