Transition Culture

21 May 2014

The May 2014 Round-up of What’s Happening out in the World of Transition

Crystal Palace Transition Town’s market is celebrating its first birthday.  The market has been a huge success since its inception, with local paper the Croydon Advertiser reporting “Extremely strong winds caused havoc among stallholders at Crystal Palace food market on Saturday.  But despite forcing three traders to pack up and go home, the bad weather failed to mar the market’s first birthday celebrations”.  Congratulations from us too.  The market also appeared in the Guardian in a piece about the resurgence of markets.  Here are some of the CPTT organisers celebrating with a sing-song appropriate to the circumstances: 

And here are a few of the traders on what the market means to them: 

The group will also be celebrating their third birthday with an event on June 11th.  And they’ve been busy in the St John’s Community Garden too:

Crystal Palace Transition Town have been one of the groups behind the creation of the area’s Edible Bus Stop, which we’ve reported on previously here.  With the Spring and everything, it is now a riot of plants. “Is this London’s best bus stop?” they tweeted.  Here is a photo.  You wouldn’t mind a bus being a bit late if you got to spend time here would you? 

Transition Town Horncastle recently hosted an energy festival for people to learn more about the benefits of renewable energy.  Members of Transition Town Dorchester left inspired and ready to seek a suitable site for a forest garden after a visit to Martin Crawford’s site in Devon. In the rain (see right).  

Also in Dorset, members of Transition Town Bridport have helped prepare a new polytunnel garden at a local school as part of their HOME in Bridport initiative.  

Salisbury in Wiltshire is ready to launch Transition and have invited Rob Hopkins along to a public meeting at the local Guildhall to help catalyse and inspire people to get involved. 

Transition Langport recently tweeted that they are “very excited & proud to have been shortlisted for the #Westbourne100 for our #Plastic Bag free #Langport campaign”.  

Transition Town Worthing are busy too.  Two of their recent tweets give a sense of how things are going for them: 

We’re heading to @TTWorthing‘s pre-launch event for the #Worthing #farmdrop‘s producers. Such exciting times for @farmdrop! #foodpioneers  

We doubled our membership on facebook in just over two months – #transitiontowns #worthing is on the up!

They also partnered up with Brighton Permaculture Trust, Low Carbon Trust and Open Eco Homes for a weekend showcasing local eco homes in Worthing. A video and more info on the event in the Worthing Herald.  Transition Bristol are holding their ‘Small Green Sunday’ this Sunday (May 25th).  Here’s the flyer: 

 

We are all in deep admiration of the story this month of how the West Solent Solar Co-operative, formed by members of New Forest Transition, raised £2.46 million in local investment for a community solar farm.  The full story is here.   

Bucks Free Press reported how Transition Town Marlow had been given “Go-ahead to plant Marlow town orchard for community scrumping”.  It quoted Helen Dann from the group as saying: 

“When we plant orchards we can teach children where food comes from, and the importance of nature. Orchards help a town to maintain its local distinctiveness and identity as we group together to save vulnerable local varieties of apple, pear, cherry, plum and damson.

“In a similar way to community gardens, community orchards are a great opportunity for everyone to learn new skills, such as fencing, wildlife watching, horticultural skills gained from pruning and maintenance of the fruit trees, and jam, cider and fruit juice making skills, once the fruit is picked.”

From Transition Town Totnes, the April Skillshare newsletter, details of the CARD project (Community Action for Retrofit Delivery), funded by a grant from the Energy Saving Trust and starting with the nearby village of Harbertonford, the latest community consultation on the Transition Homes project which covered natural building materials, design constraints and project overview and finally, some inner nourishment in the form of a (weekly) Time to Breathe session, this one in honour of Earth Day. 

Now on to some local currency stories.  While we’re still in Totnes, Tuesday May 20th saw the relaunch of the Totnes Pound, with a great event to launch it into the world. There was a very good piece in the Guardian before hand which gave a good sense of the different schemes underway across the UK, and how they are boosting local economies.  Here is the poster for the Totnes launch event: 

New social enterprise Totnes-based brewery New Lion Brewery also brewed a special bottled beer available on the night called ‘The Totnes Pound’.  Here’s the label:

According to South West Business, the city of Bath is considering a local currency, the ‘Bath Pound’.  Jay Risbridger, one of its founders, was quoted as saying: 

“They have seen the benefits to Bristol – it’s really a no brainer. It makes absolutely no difference to the local council if they get their business rates in local pounds or pound sterling. It will be a really crucial part of it and will make the businesses feel secure.” 

Meanwhile, the neighbouring Bristol Pound is going from strength to strength, now launching Real Economy Pop-Up Markets across the city, making local food available affordably to people in different communities.  They write: 

Real Economy pop-up markets will have a range of fresh produce stalls, cooking demos, music, makers and bakers. With a focus on home-grown Bristolian enterprise, each market is unique and will showcase the delights that the local community has to offer.

And the Bristol Pound will be, one assumes, most welcome at all of them. 

Peterborough in Transition have got together with the folks at the Green Backyard to open a new shop!  Here’s a short video about the Green Backyard: 

So the shop is called Backyard Food, and sells local food, and some other stuff too.  Here’s a couple of photos: 

We wish them all the very best.  Abbots Langley Transition held their Community Market again recently and Transition Town Kinsale recently held their Springamagig, their annual benefit fundraiser in the amphitheatre at Kinsale Further Education College.  Here’s the poster: 

Transition Loughborough tweeted: 

Wednesday evening work parties start again at the community allotment from 5pm tonight. Sowing, planting, weeding, watering, harvesting!

As part of the St Albans Film Festival, Transition St. Albans ran a screening of the film Trashed.  They are also doing a survey, so if you live locally and have the time to answer 10 quick questions, click here. 

There has been the usual outpouring of Transition initiative newsletters too recently.  Here’s a selection: Transition Linlithgow, Transition Letchworth, Transition Stroud, Transition Cambridge, Transition KW, Crystal Palace Transition Town, Transition Town Totnes and Transition Town West Kirby.

Transition Stourbridge have been out cleaning up along the banks of the River Stour.  Here’s a photo (left).    

In Bedfordshire, the different groups from across the county got together for a day to share experiences and to enthuse and inspire each other.  It was an event that John Bell very kindly wrote up for us here.  

Transition Town Tooting have already started thinking about their Foodival event for this year.  Here’s a link, and they posted the following photo too: 

 

Ealing Transition announced recently:

“Just up the Uxbridge Road, our new neighbours in Transition, Southall Transition, are holding their first public event on Friday this week.  Formed by a diverse group from the Southall community, they are certainly off to a flying start!”

You can read more about what they are up to in Southall here.  Transition Dorchester tweeted:  

Come to our AGM Saturday 3rd May 4.00pm. Bonfire and barbie to celebrate the spring. Wood to burn, convivial chat, bring something to cook. 

Transition Town Wivenhoe have started a Bike Kitchen, helping people fix their bikes every Monday and some Sundays.  Here are a couple of photos:

Transition Usk are now up and running, and held their launch event on May 14th, with members of Abergaveny Transition coming along to share their experiences.  Transition West Bridgford just held their Open EcoHomes weekend.  Transition Kentish Town in London held a public meeting to discuss the idea of setting up a community energy company.  They wrote the following which I thought was rather beautiful: 

We set up Transition Kentish Town four years ago. We’ve done all kinds of things together – film showings, marmalade making, nettle and elderflower workshops, gardening adventures, apple pressing, draught busting, seed swaps, talks and films.

One of our bigger projects was setting up our community-led veg box scheme in 2012. The idea was to start something that went beyond volunteering, something that could generate income and jobs, build an alternative food supply chain outside the supermarket economy, and lock in social change.

We’re coming together today with our neighbouring Transition Initiatives in Dartmouth Park and Tufnell Park to see if we can create another ambitious social enterprise: a community-owned energy company.

Good luck folks. The meeting was described later on Twitter by one person who attended as “awesome”. Back in Totnes, one of the recent highlights was the Totnes Entrepreneurs Forum.  It had a plug in the local paper, and in the Totnes REconomy newsletter, and the actual day was amazing.  

The day featured a setting out of the Circular Economy at the local scale, getting people to interact as much as possible, and ended with the ‘Community of Dragons’ event which was quite extraordinary.  Five businesses pitched and received all kinds of support from people across the community.  Here’s a photo of the pitching event: 

 

Transition Homes, the project in Totnes seeking to build 25 affordable homes on the edge of the town, just held their public consultation event.  Here’s a short film about it: 

Rob will go to Germany in the summer and speak at 19h on July 2 in Berlin and on July 3 in Bielefeld to present the German version Einfach.Jetzt.Machen! of his latest book (together with the co-translator and contributor Gerd Wessling and fellow Transition activists from all over Germany).  There will also be networking and sharing possibilities for all German & Transition Initiativen in Bielefeld that day; starting from 16h on July 3rd in the University of Bielefeld.

Also from Germany, this is quite fun.  Rob Hopkins’ recent article ‘Why I closed my Amazon account’ has been translated into German and then read out on YouTube with accompanying images by a woman there who is campaigning against the expansion of Amazon in her community:

 

Also in Germany, Transition Bielefeld recently appeared on local radio to discuss their Repair Cafe:

 

In France 14  journalists and writers of the association JNE ( les Journalistes-écrivains pour la nature et l’écologie, the jounalists-writers for nature and ecology) decided to visit Totnes, the heart of the Transition movement. To pay their travel they decided to get money from crowdfunding via kisskissbank.com. Before the end deadline they raised 113 % of the required money to cover their travel costs.

The people who decided to fund them had in return the choice of different packages of their stories, including some issues of publications in other related magazines. They made a first report of their journey at the end of may. You can read their story with a lot of nice pictures of Totnes, Ben Brangwyn, the local market and other locations ; just take a look in this article (in French)

On the Transition Network site we heard from Aveiro em Transição in Portugal, when various members of their Core Group were asked to share their thoughts on the impact the group has been having.  It makes for fascinating reading.  In Australia, Mundaring in Transition recently had their launch event, which was captured in this article.  Transition Network’s Rob Hopkins also made a short video for the event.  Here it is… 

From Brazil we heard recently from Monica Picavea about Transition Brasilandia’s Sustainable Health Fair, a fascinating look at what Transition looks like in that setting, and when Transition meets public health.   

In the US, Jamaica Plain New Economy Transition were the subject of a great article on the REconomy blog.  Here is a map of the food forest they are planning to plant soon, but the whole piece is very inspiring.  

Also in the US, Transition Town Media (PA) celebrates International Happiness Week and here Dr. Joni Carley, who initiated and helped orchestrate the event, reports on the successful outcomes of Happiness Week which involved collaborating with over 30 local organisations.  Finally, Transition Town Manchester (VT) are busy getting new recruits to their Community & Educational Garden and also held a Wild Edible Walk and Talk.

Then there’s this, which is just frankly the kind of random thing one comes across sometimes when you type ‘Transition Town’ into YouTube as a search.  I can offer little explanation other than it appears to be Transition Missoula.  And a kazoo. 

Lastly, but by no means leastly, Transition Network’s Sophy Banks recently gave a webinar for Transition US which explored the ideas around Inner Transition.  It’s an inspiring immersion in the subject, which will give you plenty to reflect upon before we meet again next month. 

That’s it for this month!  Do send us your stories, and see you in a few weeks…

 

 

 

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20 May 2014

Angela Raffle of Transition Bristol: "Health and sustainability are like twins"

Angela Raffle is a founder member of Transition Bristol and a public health worker in the city.  She was one of the people that produced the Bristol Peak Oil Report. But her experience was that because the government says that fossil fuel depletion isn’t a concern, the NHS finds it very hard to act on the issue.  Since 2010 her focus has been on finding ways to bring the public health message and Transition together in issues as diverse as transport and food, with varying results.  As part of our month on ‘Transition and Health’, we wanted to hear her thoughts on the challenges, and the opportunities, of seeing Transition as public health.  

Where are the largest areas where energy consumption can be reduced within the NHS do you think? Where are the places where it could make the biggest impact quickest?

Procurement is the big one, and a big chunk of that is pharmaceuticals. That’s the entire pharmaceutical industry, in terms of the drugs, the packaging, the whole advertising schamoozle that goes behind it, flying people all over the world to conferences. It’s a very difficult one. Some of the pharmaceutical companies are taking it seriously, but we’re in this situation with the NHS that it’s a very politicised institution, it’s bound by government policy, and economic growth and jobs in the pharmaceutical industry are more important to the government than human health in a way.

Per capita the carbon footprint of the NHS is probably about half a tonne per head per year. If you gave people the choice “would you like to fly less or give up your entire entitlement to the NHS?” they’d say actually “I’ll fly less”. The NHS can reduce its carbon footprint a lot.

How do you characterise the pressures that the NHS finds itself under at the moment?

I see health as wider than the NHS. Health is an outcome really, and everything that the Transition movement is doing is good for health because it’s about clean water, clean air, good food, safety, security, connection with nature and towns that are liveable.

The NHS is a delivery mechanism for a huge and complex range of different forms of care. At the moment it’s a very difficult environment to work in because it’s going through enormous structural changes and the 2011 Health and Social Care Act which led to the 2012 Health and Social Care Bill has really fragmented the NHS a lot. It’s become a really heartbreaking field to work in, to try and get unified change.

In theory we’re looking at discussions around public health which seem to open up the potential for local food, the idea that hospitals could become more like market gardens or looking at things like where food comes from. Local food as strategies for public health seems to open up some interesting avenues that weren’t there before, do they?

Yes, it’s a really fruitful area of work. The big North Bristol NHS Trust which is Southmead Hospital is the first hospital in England to get Silver in the Soil Association’s Food for Life catering award. That flowed really from quite some years back when Prince Charles ran some May Day events. The Chief Executive of that large organisation was at one of his events and came back saying to her catering managers “how do we do this?”

They’ve worked really hard at it. They’ve built a new hospital and put kitchens in. Nottingham Trust is also similarly done really well, though I think that there’s been recent changes to their catering contract so some of that work has taken a step backwards. It’s about having enough people in the right places within the NHS organisation who see that even though it might cost a few pence more per head per meal, that price is worth it because it’s better for health, it’s better for the environment and better for local businesses.

Public health was recently moved out of the NHS and into councils. Why was that and what difference does that make to what you’re doing?

In some ways it made no difference to what I’m doing because I was already working with local government on transport, food, planning, built environment, that kind of thing. It hasn’t only moved public health into local government. It’s also created new organisations, NHS England and Public Health England, so at the moment public health people are saying, where is everybody? Half our colleagues are in organisations and we don’t quite know where they are, everybody’s in new jobs.

It’s my 13^th restructure in my career in public health. It’s immensely diverting because of the amount of paperwork. It’s like getting a divorce, knocking your house down and rebuilding it all in the same go. The links in local government are good but the funding cuts in local government create challenges.

Clinical Commissioning Groups, on paper at least, could potentially have a role if you had the right people in those, of really driving the process of local procurement and investing in on-site renewables and so on and so on. Can they do that, or is it a rather naïve interpretation of them?

They are very stretched, short of skills, criticised daily by politicians, and under threat of judicial review for any decision from people who quite understandably want to throw a spanner in the works with the current reorganisation which they see as simply selling the NHS to the private sector. The Health and Social Care Act had clauses and phrases within it which changed what’s at the heart of the NHS. When the NHS was established, its system aim was to deliver care fairly, free at the point of delivery universally to everyone no matter who they were.

The 2012 Act changes the duty of the Secretary of State to make sure that happens, so that healthcare becomes a commodity now. It won’t happen overnight but I’m just trying to be really honest with you because it’s only a matter of time before the NHS is just a brand and behind it are a lot of large multi-national organisations. So clinical commissioning groups, many of them are doing wonderful things, and people within the NHS have a strong culture of caring about not just personal health but community, the health of the whole community, the health of the whole ecosystem.

They are doing what they can and the NHS Sustainable Development Unit headed up by David Penchon [who we will be interviewing here next week] is helping them as much as they can, but there are also these other forces. It’s familiar territory to you – to us – in the Transition movement because in a way what the Transition movement is doing is setting up new prototypes that work at a local level irrespective of what’s going on in the big multinational corporations. In a way health will start doing that. We’ll start seeing community-owned companies saying “this is really fragmented, we’re going to set up to take over community care for old folk” or whatever.

There are already big links.  There are GP practices in Bristol which allow people to grow fruit and vegetables in the land around the practice. There are all sorts of visionaries. All I’m cautious about is any massive top-down led approach saying resource depletion and the environment mean we should all do this.

What would be the best way for community groups, Transition groups listening to this, to support their local health institutions in this kind of shift? What would this kind of shift look like if it was working in the kind of way that you’d like to see it working?

One of the strongest things is people who work in the health sector participating actively in Transition and those who don’t work in the health sector and who are aware of some of the issues we face extend a hand of friendship to people in the health sector and recognise the constraints that health sector workers are under.

This is the same across so many spheres. Every time I hear someone criticise the NHS my heart sinks because I take it personally, and I have to tell myself “no I mustn’t take it personally”. The NHS is very large and everything you say about it is probably true somewhere. So just forming those connections at a local level and seeing where it leads.

If you were to be able to wave a magic wand, if you became a Health Secretary of State tomorrow, what would be the three key things that would need to be changed in order to make the NHS more resilient, playing its part in terms of climate change and peak oil and so on?

I would want to see an honest appraisal of resource depletion and its impact on the health sector. I would commission that straight away. Because without that, it doesn’t matter how many people in the health sector are saying “the way we’re evolving our new models of care are less and less resilient and more and more resource intensive”.  It doesn’t matter how many people say that at a local level. The driver from the top becomes you can’t talk about that, there is no problem with energy and resources. So number one I’d commission a review from people who are independent of government and could look at the evidence and say what they felt they needed to say.

Number two, I’d reverse the key clauses in the 2012 Health and Social Care Act so we would still have a nationwide system committed to delivering care fairly and according to need.

Number three, I would put into the requirement for every health sector organisation clear measures that are about their transport footprint, their food procurement. Probably those two. The NHS has been good on energy use in buildings, but they haven’t really had any legitimate emphasis on their impact on transport and their impact on food.

I’d also want to invent what India are doing which would probably be quite hard legally, which is to have our own pharmaceutical industry that looks at using the simplest medicines and the most important medicines instead of this endless pursuit of more and more drugs that do less and less good.

So would I be correct to summarise that if the inspiration was to spark within the NHS there is quite a lot the NHS can do but the difficulties come with the procurement rules and the restrictions from the top down as to the degree of freedom that individual hospitals have?

I think you’ve really hit the nail on the head there. Once a year everyone in the South West gets together and we have a really brilliant residential school at Dartington, and we ran a session on contentious issues and used the example of fracking. Everybody at the workshop tables were asked to say if they were producing a health report on the impacts of extreme energy extraction what it would look like, and if they woke up in the future and the public health movement had done everything they could wish for what would it be like. Everybody came to the conclusion that big picture wise, from the public health perspective we shouldn’t even be thinking of extreme energy extraction for very many sound reasons.

In contrast, Public Health England were given a brief to say, in effect, we are going to do extreme energy extraction, please see if there is any evidence that this will cause direct damage to human health. Of course the answer to that is there isn’t much direct evidence yet. But that’s not the question we want to ask, so when you say the freedoms people have within the system, to take those big picture questions the freedoms aren’t really there. It doesn’t mean people can’t do a lot, we can do a lot but we have to be a bit creative about how we do it. And as you say, you have to join health and sustainability. They’re like twins and you do it on that double argument. 

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12 May 2014

Sarah Timmins: the Low Carbon Nurse

Sarah Timmins is a qualified adult nurse who is now doing a postgraduate qualification to become a health visitor.  She recently started the blog ‘UK Nurse Against Climate Change‘ which she describes as “my own private journey into a year, and hopefully much longer, of trying to raise awareness of climate change and its devastating effects on human health”.  “I’m passionate about what I do, I love nursing and I want to do something which will make a difference”, she writes.  So how’s it going, and what’s it like being a nurse within the NHS trying to raise awareness about climate change. 

On your blog you wrote about how ‘The Lancet’ and the UCL Institute for Global Health Commission called climate change “the biggest global health of the 21^st century”. You wrote “that’s a big statement, why should we get involved as nurses?” That’s my first question: why should nurses get involved with climate change?

We’re here to protect the public’s health. Especially nurses who are more involved in the public health field, but all nurses as well even if you’re working in a care home or in a paediatric unit, you are still there to protect health rather than just treat illness. The government’s got a big drive on preventing ill health as well as treating the symptoms of all the illnesses and actually if there’s something so big as they’re suggesting it’s going to affect every person on the planet, it really should be a health issue we take on board and try to do something about.

What form has that taken so far? What have you been doing so far?

The main thing I’ve been doing is trying to raise awareness really. It’s surprising how little it’s actually talked about. I think the more people talk about things, the more normalised it becomes then people start to take action, so raising awareness online or just through having conversations with people. Also, health visitors in particular have four principles that we work by. A few of them are searching for health needs and influencing policy that affects health. I’ve been trying to get involved with that through getting involved in the Divestment campaign which I feel personally would send out a very positive message.

What kind of reception have those conversations and you raising that issue had within the work context?

Some positive. A lot of people don’t know much about it, so when I bring up the impact it’s going to have on people’s health, not just 200 years into the future but what’s happening now and in the near future, people seem to be quite surprised, but they do get on board with it. People have responded to different degrees.

Some people have said they’d like to get more involved and others have just said “oh, I didn’t realise that”. It’s good that they’ve then gone home and they might then process that and when they watch the news start thinking about things in a different way. It’s good to get people a bit more positive about it.

In your daily experience as a nurse, where do you see the biggest carbon generating aspects of modern healthcare?

Pharmaceutical use and wastage in medicine in this country is a huge problem. If you’re using carbon to produce these drugs and then not using them that is a horrific problem that needs addressing. But also the main thing that I’ve come across is the use of cars. The transport, especially that community nurses use. It’s such a conundrum because we have to use our cars to drive around to people’s houses and there are times when I will see nurses who will drive two streets away and I think “you could walk!” It’s such a little thing but a policy addressing that issue I think will go a long way to making a difference.

What’s your vision of what a low carbon NHS would look like?

I’ve seen a lot of positive things. I’ve been looking at what a lot of different hospitals around the country are doing and I know that some of them have implemented policies with their building regulations which is really good, automatically shutting off their lights, responding to when people walk into the room, that sort of thing so they’re not left on all night.

Also they’ve introduced green spaces and allotments for healthcare workers within the hospital environment as well. More healthcare workers utilising cycling and walking, active transport would be really key I think. You can’t try and encourage people or patients to do things if you’re not willing to do them yourself.

I was really surprised to see The Lancet coming out so strongly about climate change and the need to really shift how we do stuff, and the role that healthcare has to play in that.

They have been really positive in making such a strong statement. I would be really keen to see the nursing community be as strong with their position on climate change and low carbon environments as well. The medical community seem to be all guns blazing at the moment with it, and it would be nice to get the nursing press on board as well.

Do you have any sense of how you might try and bring that about?

We’ve been talking to a couple of organisations about creating a global network of nurses on climate change, trying to get more nurses involved in it, not just in the UK but globally. There are a couple of organisations in the US and Australia who are a lot more involved with this, and I’m keen to get UK nurses mobilised.

A good place to start is always Universities. Students are ever so enthusiastic, so it would be really good to get it into the curriculum of public health nursing as a standard practice so that all nurses learn about sustainability and about the health effects of climate change, because it is such an important issue.

Actually something I’ve been thinking about would be putting in on Trust inductions, trying to get NHS Trusts to really put their position forward – this is the sort of thing that’s really important to us, and it’s as important as your fire training and your health and safety training. This is our sustainability policy and we think it’s important. Every healthcare worker should get training on it when they go into a job. It’s a pipe dream but I’ll certainly try.

You’ve just started doing a blog, how are you finding it and what are your hopes for that?

I’d like to keep going with it and explore different themes and get more deeply involved with it. I’m hoping to reach more people, more nurses, other healthcare workers and maybe get them involved too. It would be nice to reach more people really.

As a health visitor, how do you notice, if at all, in the UK setting the impact of climate change on the people who you visit and the people you’re looking after?

I work in quite an urban environment so the obvious thing is the air pollution. I seem to have a lot of young patients who have a lot of allergies, pollen allergies and asthma and I know that the pollen season’s getting longer and it’s been suggested that this is linked to climate change. There are lots of hospital admissions every year from asthma attacks and respiratory disease. It would be ignorant to bypass that and think there’s nothing we can do about it. There’s plenty we can do. There are cities around the world who implement low emissions zones to try and combat air pollution and it’s really important to notice that really.

I hope that more people realise a little bit more about the impacts it might have on people’s health, go away, read a bit more, have more conversations and let’s try and change something. 

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12 May 2014

Frances Northrop on ‘Healthy Town Totnes’

When people talk about ‘green jobs’ the health and care sector is not often on the list. We often think first about green technologies, renewable energy production, retrofitting and food and it was no different when we first sat down to plan the Economic Blueprint work in Totnes. When we agreed the key sectors that play a fundamental role in our community’s sustainability and resilience, and could create new livelihoods, the opportunities to grow the local food, retrofitting and renewables economy were obvious choices. 

But adding in Health and Care? This seemed much less so, at first glance. Its inclusion was even questioned by some people in TTT who couldn’t see the how this should be a prime focus for Transition work. However to me, the person who initially suggested its inclusion, this seemed like a contradiction. I felt that to provide for our local resilience it is essential that the local community is as healthy as possible, both physically and mentally and many others agreed.

Our position was that caring for those that need extra help in our community could bring some new livelihoods and approaches to providing care and highlight the opportunity to find new ways to use other means of exchange to look after each other better, and in a way that went beyond the current ‘one size fits all’, siloed way of delivering services.

Besides the on going public spending cuts, which are leading to increased crisis (or worse, no) intervention due to lack of spending on prevention services, a number of issues threaten to complicate and challenge our future health and wellbeing. These include a growing population that is living longer, but without sufficient pension provision, and with expectations that medicine and care will be provided as needed.

Additionally the dire state of our economy is resulting in growing numbers of unemployed and insecurely employed people, particularly amongst the young, and the resulting stress and poverty is impacting on wellbeing, with serious effects on our mental health, further exacerbated by a lack of good affordable housing and climate change is projected to bring health and social impacts as a result of more floods, heat waves and other extreme weather events, as well as new water or food-borne viruses and diseases. Clearly the current system cannot continue to meet all of our needs, and is already under extreme pressure. 

But there is much we can do in our own communities, using the assets we have and a focus on prevention and early intervention. Coupled with the provision of healthy food and comfortable homes this has the potential to meet our needs in a far better way – using a holistic, place-based approach and this is what we have been pursuing over the year in Totnes. Our starting point was a conversation with several council officers about their concerns regarding the axing of the Social Fund in its current (then) form.

Compounded by the myriad of other cuts and benefit ‘changes’ that were on their way they were all deeply worried about how this would impact on the most vulnerable members of the community and wanted to be able to raise awareness amongst residents and existing health and care agencies. Working together with the three tiers of local government and Totnes Caring, the primary source of support for the care of the vulnerable in Totnes, we started to think about how we could bring people together to discuss the threats we face in a positive, Transition type way which would enable us to commiserate, rage, cry and feel the frustration of being utterly powerless but then take all that energy and focus on how we could turn this on its head, take advantage of our shared knowledge, skills and the compassion we had in bucket loads and do something which would take back the power and create something truly special which met real, not perceived, needs. 

Our first action was to organise a ‘Totnes Welfare Conference’ in October last year which invited statutory and voluntary organisations who support the vulnerable in Totnes to came together to talk about how we might work better, together and how Totnes could build on the strength of its community with many successful voluntary and charitable organisations, and for generally being “a town that cares” to face the major challenges ahead. Most crucially we asked people to step out of their professional roles and the potential for siloed thinking that this could engender and approach the day as an individual who could (and would) become vulnerable at some stage in their life. 

On the day we started with an inspiring presentation from the great Hazel Stuteley then had two breakout sessions, the first on ‘imagining what a truly caring town would look like’ with everyone in groups answering the question: “If, in the two hours you have been in here Totnes had been transformed into the most caring town it could possibly be, how would that look, feel, smell like?” The second session focused on celebrating our already caring town and asked, “What we are proud of that happens here already?”  

A full write up of the day can be found here but the two sessions created an overwhelming sense of opportunity, solidarity and impetus to act which was palpable. There was also an fantastic sense of liberation on the part of the people who were representing statutory services who had been truly inspired by being given the opportunity, in a safe, supportive environment, to talk about how they would ideally provide their service if they weren’t hindered by the increasingly institutionalised nature of public service delivery. 

Everyone (over 50 participants!) left the day signed up to be involved in the next steps and a follow up meeting resulted in the inaugural Totnes Health and Welfare Day. We also agreed that the project needed a name and ‘Caring Town Totnes’ was born! 

The main aim of this day was to enable organisations to meet each other and explore the potential for greater links and for people in the town to “drop in” and see some of the services on offer and share ideas for how to enhance provision in the area. The film below captures the results of the day beautifully, and the response of everyone involved was, again, overwhelmingly positive and engendered further enthusiasm for the next steps. 

Since then we have been busy considering all the feedback and later this month will be setting up a steering group for the project and establishing working groups to look at setting up a community hub, further participatory and networking events, needs analysis and further engagement/consultation with the community and the pilot of a commissioning hub. 

The commissioning hub is an exciting aspect of the work that has emerged through conversations with the Clinical Commissioning Group for the area and Devon County Council. DCC have identified a pot of money for a Community Impact Fund, principally to fund social care social enterprises and are in the process of asset transferring a large community building to us so we can create the community hub and have a base for the commissioning service.

We have been successful in being accepted as an ‘Our Place’ community which will fund some of the co-ordination of this work and we are truly excited about how this will not only create networks of support but also new livelihoods by creating and growing social enterprises and further developing models of social investment through the local credit union, community shares, peer to peer lending, skill sharing and the gift economy, linking in with the wider Reconomy work here in Totnes. 

But the overwhelming positive thing about this work has been the sense of solidarity, goodwill and energy that has emerged. Whenever I talk to people about the project, they are truly delighted by the liberation of the approach and the opportunities it provides, using words like thrilled, brilliant and in the case of the lady who runs the Memory Café just welling up and giving me a huge hug.

Of course I have sleepless nights about ‘enabling’ the austerity agenda but this stuff has a potential that is just too good to pass up on principle, and I hope will join up with other amazing work happening across the country to show that the appropriate response to limited resources is not rhetoric about fecklessness but an acknowledgment that we’re all vulnerable and that together we’re stronger and happier. 

Frances Northrop is Transition in Action Manager with Transition Town Totnes.

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12 May 2014

Transition Emerging: a snapshot from Canada

We are grateful to Rivka Kushner, Chris Buse, Blake Poland and Rebecca Hasdell for the following, which came in just slightly too late for our month on impact but which we’re posting anyway.  The Transition Emerging Study: Examining the Trajectory of the Transition Movement in Canada looks at the work underway to understand Transition in that context.   

“How has the Transition movement unfolded and taken root in Canada, what seems to be working, and how do we know? These are core questions guiding the Transition Emerging Study (TES), which seeks to understand how initiatives are seeking to build community resilience in the Canadian context. 

The Transition Emerging Study starts from the premise that Transition Towns are an intriguing  example of how social movements are responding to emerging global and local challenges. We are interested in Transition initiatives as places where cultural change occurs through creating new spaces for social learning about how to ‘live well in place’ in preparation for an energy-constrained, economically uncertain, and relocalized future.

The purpose of the study is to generate information about ‘lessons learned’ and ‘promising practices’ of Transition initiatives that can be useful to Transition movement leaders, participants, and for people engaged in environmental and community development work. Below, we briefly describe the TES research team, the study’s methods, and what we have learned so far about the emergence and impact of the Transition movement in Canada. 

The Research and Advisory Team 

TES is a three year research project funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada . Our  team includes social science researchers from 7 universities across Canada, and students in several of these institutions. A Movement Advisory Group, comprised of Transition leaders across Canada, meets several times a year and advises the team on methdodology and study implementation including issues of relevance, fit, utility, and knowledge translation.  

Research Methods 

TES utilizes a range of methods to help answer our research questions. It can be thought of as a collection of smaller studies, where each study informs the next. Table 1 outlines each phase of our study and the associated timelines: 

We are currently in Year 2 of the study. The Web Scan consisted of an exploratory analysis of TIs in Canada through online searches. This provided the foundation for our study because it generated a database of TIs in Canada, preliminary information about where TIs are located and how long they have been active/inactive, and the range of activities taking place. The Founder Survey was an electronic survey that was completed by TI (co-)founders and steering committee members identified through the Web Scan.

The survey included questions about organizational and logistic matters, events and meetings, perceived strengths and impact of TIs, and challenges facing the movement. Our next data collection method was 20 in-depth interviews of TI (co-)founders and steering committee members, sampled from the Founder Survey to give us a range of initiatives based on location (e.g. urban/rural/suburban, north/south), size, length of time in operation, and ‘vitality’ (level of activity).

These interviews provided a personal narrative of how the initiative emerged, how it operates, who is involved, and key challenges and successes. A second TES survey was directed at TI participants, regardless of level of involvement.  The survey asked participants about their perceptions of the TI, involvement in activities, individual environmental practices, and the diversity of participants in the TI. 

Transition in Canada 

From the Web Scan, we know that as of 2012, there were 88 TIs at various stages of development in Canada (this includes several that have gone ‘dormant’). TIs are spread throughout the country, with the greatest number initiatives in the province of Ontario (43). As illustrated in Figure 1, there was a steady increase in the number of new initiatives from 2008 to 2011, with a peak in 2011 and a decrease in the number of new initiatives in 2012.

Among the 47 TIs across Canada that participated in the Founder Survey, the average age of TIs was between 2.5-3 years. Most TIs had 6 or more organizers (67%), though one third of TIs had 5 or fewer organizers (33%). About half of initiatives met once a month (50%). TIs are responsible for organizing numerous events in their communities. Of all TIs surveyed, 19% held multiple events in a single month, 38% held events roughly once a month, and 21% held an event every 2-4 months.

Over a two year period, most TIs engaged in the following: meetings, booth or display at community events, speakers, skill development workshops, education or awareness building events, an email listserv, and celebrations. Many TIs also had newsletters and work bees. Other events included film screenings, training programs, and events and programs around food. 

Perceived Impact of Transition 

A question in the Founder Survey asked participants to describe the perceived impact of the TI on their community as either strong, moderate, weak, or no impact. One third of (co-)founders and steering committee members across Canada reported the perceived impact to be moderate (32%). More than half of TIs reported having a weak impact (53%), while a small number of TIs reported having no impact (8%). No TIs reported a strong impact. Regional variations are observed: for example, in Ontario most TIs reported having a moderate impact on the community (62% vs 32% for Canada as a whole) and one third of TIs reported a weak impact (31% vs 53% for the country). 

An open-ended question in the Founder Survey asked participants what event organized by their TI had the greatest impact in the community and why. These included film screenings, public forums or conferences, and potlucks or local food events. Indications of impact most frequently mentioned were attendance (including the addition of new people), new connections with other organizations or key contacts, the creation of new projects or working groups, learning a new skill, having fun, and feeling ‘moved’. A few participants attributed the high impact to successful awareness and promotion of the event.  

In all, TIs in Canada are still relatively young and (co-)founders and steering committee members have varied perspectives on the impact of Transition and Transition events on the community. Our data suggests that many TIs are using size (attendance) and growth (number of new participants, new connections, new projects) to assess the impact of Transition-related activities.

It is notable that visible, action-oriented measurements of impact such as size and growth are likely important metrics for initiatives trying to get established in a community. However, it appears that ‘soft’ measures related to the psychology of transition and ‘inner transition’—while perhaps more difficult to measure— (e.g. having fun, and inspiring others), also merits consideration in terms of assessing the ‘success’ or ‘impact’ of TI events and activities. 

Our analysis is preliminary at this point, and many questions remain unanswered. In the coming months we will be deepening our analysis of the data we have collected, and reaching out to the movement to share what we are learning and generate new insights through a collaborative learning process of regional dialogical workshops using a “Structured Story-Dialogue” method. 

Upcoming Results 

Join the TES Facebook page and check out our website for study updates, research results summary flyers, and more. Get in touch with us by leaving a comment on our website, Facebook page, or by emailing us at contact@transitionemergingstudy.ca. 

 

 

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