19 Nov 2012
For many people, the highlight of the 2012 Transition Network conference was the ‘Transition Town Anywhere’ activity, where a resilience local economy was built, lived in, celebrated and then taken down again over the space of one morning. Ruth Ben-Tovim, one of the event’s organisers, tells us how the event came about, how it worked, and how you could do a version in your community. She started by asking “how many people does it take to build a town?”
“About 240 in the case of the 2012 Transition Conference. Over five hours, the very large Grand Hall at Battersea Arts Centre was filled with a self–built, living breathing Transition Town Centre Anywhere. Many of you who were there and many who weren’t have asked for more details about this activity, so as promised, here it is. Also in response to several requests, at the end of this post there are details about how you could bring the Transition Town Centre Anywhere group activity to your Town if you would like to.
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17 Sep 2012
A few weeks ago I attended the West Country Storytelling Festival at Embercombe. A remarkable event, the highlight for me was hearing Dr Martin Shaw speaking at several events. Martin is a painter, mythologist and wilderness teacher, and author of ‘A Branch from the Lightening Tree”. Sometimes I hear someone speak and think “that person is holding an important part of all this”. I was especially touched by one thing he said in a workshop about the relationship between storytelling and sustainability:
“I have not a clue whether we humans will live for another 100 or 10,000 years. We can’t be sure. What matters to me is the fact we have fallen out of a very ancient love affair – a kind of dream tangle, with the earth itself. If, through our own mess, that relationship is about to end, then we need to scatter as much beauty around us as we possibly can, to send a voice, to attempt some kind of repair. I think of it as a kind of courting – a very old idea. This isn’t about statistical hysteria, it’s about personal style. Any other response is just not cool”.
Intrigued, I met him the following week for an interview that covered storytelling, myth, and what it might all mean for Transition. Here is the audio if you’d rather listen to it, or the transcript is below:
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12 Sep 2012
Suzanne Dennis will be running, along with Lyndsey Stewart, a workshop at the 2012 Transition Network conference on the role of mentoring in Transition as a way of avoiding burnout and building personal resilience. I asked her more about what the workshop would cover and what participants might expect to get out of it:
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11 Sep 2012
Sue Milner will be co-presenting two workshops at the Transition Network conference 2012 with Iona Fredenburgh. The first is called ‘Conflict: Gateway to Community Tools to Practice and Use in Impossible Moments’, and the second is called ‘How on earth can we get along together? Tools for unlocking the creative resources from our diversity issues’. I asked Sue to tell us more:
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22 Aug 2012
One of the workshops that will take place in the first session of workshops at the conference will be led by Sophy Banks, one of the originators of Transition Training. Here she is to tell you more about what to expect from it:
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