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
Archive for “Social enterprise” category
Showing results 126 - 130 of 132 for the category: Social enterprise.
20 Dec 2010
Well now, here’s an idea. At last week’s ‘Confronting Change’ event in London (see left), a question was asked about politics, and how Transition might be accelerated in terms of mainstream politics. Polly Higgins, who is a barrister, and who is promoting the idea of international legislation to outlaw ‘ecocide’, suggested that, in the same way that certain key pieces of enabling legislation have led to great advances in the past, perhaps the time is right for a Transition Enabling Act, designed not to ban lots of things, but positive legislation that enables all that needs to happen in order for Transition to scale up rapidly over the next 5 years. This was met with much excitement, with Michael Meacher MP saying that were such legislation to exist, he would be happy to help drive it through the House of Commons. So, how about it? What we need now is your input, debate and discussion…. (read on…)
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8 Dec 2010
We (Transition Training and Consulting) are looking for up to 10 Transition Initiatives (based in the UK) that would like to participate in this project, helping us to shape it and deliver it. Deadline for showing your interest is 17th December. The aim of this project is to help transition communities to grow social enterprises and influence existing local businesses such that they contribute to the wellbeing of that community, and society overall (including the most disadvantaged and marginalised), rather than pursuing economic growth at all costs. We have used the term ‘business’ here but include, as appropriate, all types of private, public and third-sector organisations.
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6 Dec 2010
I read Michael Brownlee’s recent piece ‘The Evolution of Transition in the US‘, with a mixture of fascination and a sense of disquiet that increased the deeper I got into the piece. The concept of Transition has been regularly critiqued, a positive process which has helped to shape what it is today. Most critiques run along the lines of “Transition, nice idea, but it isn’t [ … ] enough”. So, for Alex Steffen, Transition isn’t technologically savvy or optimistic enough, for the Trapese Collective it isn’t politically savvy enough, for John Michael Greer it is guilty of ‘premature triumphalism’, for Ted Trainer it isn’t sufficiently rooted in alternative culture or focused enough, while for others it is too riven with New Age thinking and pseudoscience. Now, according to Brownlee, it is fatally flawed by not having the ‘Sacred’ at the heart of what it does.
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1 Dec 2010
Well, today has been one of those days. The plan was that I was meant to be speaking at the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s event on ‘closed loop economies’ at Bradford University which looked like it was going to be great, and then going on to give a talk for Transition Hebden Bridge before heading home again. I was really looking forward to both. I didn’t reckon though on the wild wintery weather affecting the north, south-east and east of the UK. The whole thing went rather pear-shaped in the end, and meant I spent about 13 hours today on trains!
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23 Nov 2010
Transition Town Totnes has been running now for just over 4 years, and recently a group of us sat down to try and capture what has actually been achieved by the process. It has been a very illuminating process, one that is very useful to do in terms of being able to get a sense of what has actually been achieved on the ground (I highly recommend it). The name of the report, ‘So, what does Transition Town Totnes actually do?‘, comes from the question often asked by visitors to the town who come to see a Transition town, wander round the High Street and wonder why there are still cars and not windmills everywhere. This report is designed to explain all that is going on below the surface (as well as on top of it…).
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