2 May 2014
Transition is a wonderful melange of conversations, projects, interactions, inspirations, hard work, failures, successes and entirely unexpected events which we are altogether unsure what to make of! Transition initiatives themselves are as unique as the people who make them up. Initially termed ‘Transition Towns’, they have twisted and squirmed out from under that label like squealing children from under a favourite uncle, becoming Transition Islands, Sustainable Villages, Cities in Transition and all the rest.
To use Rob’s favourite quote from Moominland:
“It was a funny little path, winding here and there, dashing off in different directions, and sometimes even tying a knot in itself from sheer joy. (You don’t get tired of a path like that, and I’m not sure that it doesn’t get you home quicker in the end).”
Yes, Transition: fun, exciting, inspirational, powerful, even maybe uncharacterisable!
But, remember, it is just one thing, this Transition.
Blergh.
Deadening isn’t it, this counting?
What does it even mean anyway: “one thing”? Surely Transition is a mess of thousands of different people, communities, activities, passions..? At best it’s one category. And who wants to be categorised?
And what’s a category anyway?
There is always a difference between any one thing and any other, so to say that there are two of something (let alone two hundred) is always an imperfect statement, in the same way that an analogy between two things is always imperfect. Analogies may highlight important similarities between two things, but they gloss over important differences too, which is why they can be dangerously misleading when applied too widely. Numbers too are imperfect analogies for reality, and are dangerous in just the same way.
George Monbiot wrote an excellent piece last month on the very real dangers of quantifying nature by in which he pointed out that pricing is only one of the ways in which numbering can be problematic. “For every tree we cut down, we’ll plant two new ones!” Which sounds great until you realise that in reality one tree is not the same as one tree (perhaps one is a thousand year old cornerstone of its local ecosystem, and the other is a sapling planted where it will never thrive).
Numbers separate us from that which is described, sucking it out of all context or relationship. As Charles Eisenstein put it, “I don’t think the cruelty of today’s world could exist without the distancing effects of language and measure. Few people can bring themselves to harm a baby, but, distanced by the statistics and data of national policy-making, our leaders do just that, on a mass scale, with hardly a thought.”
But for all this, there is undoubtedly something tempting about growing numbers, whether we are numbering event attendees, Twitter followers, or pounds sterling. In a world where it is so hard to know whether we are doing the right thing, making a difference, making a positive difference, it is so tempting to have a concrete number to grow. A way to keep score! Finally!!
And of course many funders tend to encourage it. They want to see the impact their £s are having, and they want it quantified. There’s no money in poetry.
But then, as Robert Graves reminded us, there’s no poetry in money either. For the sake of the soul of transition, let us be wary of converting quality into quantity. Let us welcome unique people, not uniform numbers, into our embrace:
51 people attended.
Fifty people were there to listen to Bill McKibben.
Fifty people were there, and Jane from the bakery on Rose Street arrived late.
Well, there was Jane, from the bakery on Rose Street, Josh, of course, me and my family, Roger, Jamal, Biggles and Margaret, Jenny and the twins…
Which of these more accurately reflects the reality of the event? And which audiences are more likely to be given which report?
Of course we are all excited when two hundred people come along to help with a Transition project when we were only expecting thirty (but maybe we’re more excited that Pritesh and Sarah came, of all people!). And of course we want to tell people about this, in a brief and comprehensible way. I’m only highlighting that numbers can be pernicious, and we should be a little wary of their habit of seductively coming to dominate everything that we do. While numbers may be the easiest way of explaining our impact, and even the expected way, they may not always be the best.
Numbers are only an abbreviation of what we’re up to. The reality of Transition lies in the inspiration of stories, in losing track of time while tending a garden, in passions that might never add up to anything much, in countless cups of tea, in unmeasurable love – in all those things that the cold abstraction of numbers will never touch.
I have long found it fascinating that there are cultures do not have words for numbers other than “one”, “two” and “many”. I fondly imagine that if Transition had its own language it might add one more: “one”, “two”, “many” and “enough”. The dominant culture has enough numbers. But perhaps we can help it remember another way to count?
Shaun Chamberlin is author of The Transition Timeline and blogs at DarkOptimism.org
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30 Apr 2014
One of the most in-depth pieces of research on Transition published recently was Failure and Success of Transition initiatives: a study of the international replication of the Transition movement by Giuseppe Feola and Richard Nunes at the University of Reading. Giuseppe is a lecturer in Environmental Development whose research focuses on issues around how sustainable development is pursued by local communities. Richard lectures on real estate and planning at the School of Real Estate and Planning and has a background in architecture and subsequently then trained as a planner. He is interested in human and environment interactions, looking at aspects of policy and governance specifically. I caught up with them via Skype to find out more about the paper, how it came about, and what they concluded.
I wonder if one of you might just start us off with how the study came about and what you did?
Giuseppe: We’re both interested in this type of movement, like the Transition movement and grassroots innovations. We came to realise that in the literature there are many studies that contribute to what can be called the success of this type of grassroots initiative or to their failure, but these studies usually address or take one or two case studies. They go in depth into analysing the experience of one particular community or one particular initiative, but there’s no overview of more general patterns.
We were unsure whether the results of the studies could be generalised through other communities and other initiatives. That was the spark of the study. What we tried to do was a different approach, a complementary approach to this in-depth research. We tried to research whether there were general patterns as well as across countries and different geographical contexts, urban and rural contexts, different countries. Not because there’s anything wrong with looking at single case studies in depth, but just because we might learn different things and we might confirm and challenge some of those results if we look at it in a more comparative way across different contexts.
We carried out an online survey asking a lot of questions about characteristics of the Transition initiatives and different factors that the literature suggests might play a role in the success of the initiatives. Also, critically of course, on how the initiatives themselves would define their success. We analysed this in a quantitative way, using statistics. This is mostly a quantitative study, and we came up with some patterns of factors that are associated with different levels of success of local Transition initiatives.
You developed a typology of Transition initiatives. Could you explain what that is to the layperson?
Giuseppe: You’ve got this long list of factors which might be external factors like the context, what type of local authority it is or if the media are more friendly or less friendly in a particular location, whether there are more or less resources available, whether the founding group of the Transition initiative was large or small, the age of the members involved in the Transition initiative and so on.
One might think you put all of these things together and come up with a formula of what you need to have to put together a successful initiative. This is not what we did. We tried to identify when some of these factors like the examples I just made came together more frequently. How frequently they were associated with high levels of success defined by the Transition initiatives.
For example, we found out the rural initiatives are more often successful than urban Transition initiatives, that co-operation with other actors like local authorities, media or also local businesses favours success more often than not and so on. This created four different levels of combination of these different factors, associated with four different levels of success of the initiative, if that makes sense.
What were the things that you felt constituted the key elements behind the success of the Transition initiatives? Were there two or three that really stood out to you as being the key things that made a big difference?
Richard: You can probably work back from where some initiatives identified weaknesses. I would say group governance within the initiatives itself where communication was good and membership or engagement of members was strong, that would have been a successful factor. We also identified, building on what Giuseppe just pointed out, in our concluding discussion, the role of place. The connection to places may encourage that success.
We also identified historically the background where members are coming from, so the extent to which they’ve been engaged in other initiatives before or even the extent to which places have a history of campaigning or active engagement on environmental issues and so on. These are some of my overall impressions that I brought to the discussion with Giuseppe.
When you say ‘place’, do you mean places that people feel a very strong affinity to or places that have that sense of being a very vibrant place rather than a satellite town or a dormitory community?
Richard: Yes, an extension of place identity, whether that’s through social networks, the amount of time that an individual has been in that place. One of the concluding discussion points that we had was the difference between urban and rural Transition initiatives, the fact that the rural initiatives have been more successful than the urban ones is possibly due to a lot of the mobility that happens in larger cities, hence possibly the attachment to a place is less than the attachment to a place in a more rural environment perhaps.
But these are all areas that we would have to research more extensively because this survey is clearly just a cross-sectional study so longitudinal states would be necessary to really scientifically establish these conclusions.
Having conducted one of the most in-depth studies of Transition, did you get a sense that you were looking at something that was vibrant and growing or something that was stagnant or something that was contracting? What was your take on that?
Richard: The project started with the intent of trying to understand both diffusion and scale-up, and this study is focused on the diffusion aspect, how it’s spreading out and so on. That’s where the factors of success and failure come in. In terms of the actual scale-up, we’re not addressing that so there may be healthy movement in terms of the existing initiatives now scaling up. It might not be expanding, but because it’s not expanding doesn’t mean it’s unhealthy or it’s still not a vibrant movement. It’s just that taking some of these initiatives are just maturing and going a step further in terms of scale-up, but the study’s not necessarily looking at that.
In terms of the actual expansion, I think we would need further studies to really determine the geography, let’s say, of Transition. Though some initiatives clearly are formalising, others are not. When I was talking to a colleague of mine just earlier today in Brazil, she was noting that oftentimes many individuals who are involved in Transition are also involved in other movements or other campaigns or other initiatives out of Transition, and so you might find that a lot of these individuals drive different movements, different initiatives at different points in time and there can be a slow down of this vibrancy around Transition but it can pick up with new engagement, new members and so on.
I think it really is quite variable. It would be very difficult to say where the movement stands on an international level in terms of its vibrancy or its health.
You place Transition in the wider context of what Gill Seyfang and Noel Longhurst call ‘Grassroots Innovations’. What’s your sense of the potential that grassroots innovations have to scale up, and what are the challenges that they face in doing that?
Richard: Actually there’s a lot of potential at the moment. I’m currently investigating community food enterprises, looking at the scale-up of alternative food networks and there are many initiatives around food within the Transition movement. Clearly funding is one. Issues of group governance is another, so a lot of this comes up through the survey in terms of success and failure, so I think a lot of the points I would raise in the paper would be issues to be addressed in the scale-up as well.
Giuseppe: I think from the study, it’s quite clear that there is this potential and there’s an interesting exchange between the local level which is very diverse and the international or global level and they’re all played by Transition Network for example in the case of the Transition movement as a centre of exchange, learning, an engine of collecting experiences, collaborating, favouring learning basically, learning processes.
This process of learning is where I think the potential for innovation lies because this fertilisation of different contexts and experiences that in their unique contexts take their unique form. But then there’s the global level and the network elaborates this. It was quite clear that those Transition initiatives that had stronger links with Transition Network and had gone through trainings and had followed certain principles more closely, they were actually doing more stuff, more things on the ground.
In that sense, going to your question of the potential for innovation, I fully agree with Richard that there’s a lot of potential and this process of learning and fertilisation I think is really what makes me think that the potential is there and probably not fully exploited yet.
In the paper you write “Transition initiative members tend to focus on internal and overlook external factors of Transition initiative success.” What did you mean by that?
Giuseppe: We found that there’s a lot of focus on the number of members. On leadership, on group governance which are of course important factors, and they are internal factors. They concern how the group and the members interact amongst themselves and how they organise themselves and so on.
But our analysis also took into consideration contextual factors and external factors so the role for example played by the local authority, local business, the fact of being rural or urban and so on. They were mentioned by the Transition initiatives and we found out that actually they do play a role, they might constrain or enable the Transition initiative.
Our conclusion was that perhaps many Transition initiatives tend to focus on their internal governance, because of course it’s the first thing you want to do to reinforce the group and make it work internally. But actually thinking about the medium or long term success of that initiative, we shouldn’t forget about the context and interaction with other actors and the constraints of being in an urban or rural context.
One of the things from reading it and being very involved in Transition that was a bit frustrating was the degree to which you focused on the 12 steps of Transition, which is a model that we haven’t really used since 2010, which seemed a little bit out of date somehow. Why was the decision taken to focus on that?
Giuseppe: There are two reasons, both very practical. It’s fully clear to us that of course Transition is not all about following a sequence of steps. We wanted to compare the subjective, so how Transition initiatives themselves define their success with something more objective that we could measure just observing the Transition initiatives, not asking them directly. The 12 steps together with the size and the duration of the initiative served this purpose, so this was one of the reasons.
The second reason is that more recent elaboration of those 12 steps, like for example the ingredients, were a lot more recent, so we couldn’t ask about the ingredients to initiatives that had a longer history. We had to ask the initiative about something they were more familiar with, and they were more familiar with the 12 steps, which have a longer history. They are not the most up to date thing, but since we are asking about the history of the Transition initiative itself, the 12 steps also serve that purpose.
One of the findings that struck me was when you said that the more Transition initiatives there are in a place, then the better they tend to do. There seems to be a positive reinforcing thing. It reminded me of research about how the more solar panels go up on roofs, the more people put up solar panels. There’ this cycle. Is that me misreading it or was that an observation that you made?
Richard: I think it’s a fair observation that we deduced from the concentration of initiatives in a place or a locality, and how they might explain some of the crossover of that learning and exchanging information. We fully realise that there is also the internet and other channels for disseminating information but the element of proximity of initiatives we still hold to be an explaining factor for this diffusion, and that’s why we have it as one of the discussion points.
Giuseppe: All initiatives are in theory networked, but some have more contact and exchange with other networks than others, and this was associated with success, so that’s where this conclusion came from.
One of the surprising findings for me was that diversity and inclusion was lowest among urban groups. I would have thought it would be the other way round, because urban communities tend to be more diverse to start with. Did you have an explanation for why that might be?
Both: No, we didn’t.
Richard: I think you have to remember that this is one cross-sectional study. There’s still potential for exploring a lot of these aspects in more depth. If you think about large cities, there are areas that are more and less diverse. Many of the initiatives did claim that they reached out and they were inclusive.
But being able to explain why a community fully representative of its cultural diversity is not engaging in this initiative, we couldn’t explain that. The initiative can only remain open and make claims that it’s open and it’s inclusive. If the wider community, the wider populace in that area is not engaging with the initiative, we couldn’t explain that through the study. That would have to be a different study altogether.
Having immersed yourselves in what’s already been published about Transition in the last 7 years or so, what’s your sense of how good the existing research base around Transition is? How thorough and comprehensive it is?
Giuseppe: There’s a growing body of research on Transition and it’s good. The short answer would be that there’s a lot of good work done on the Transition movement in particular and the area of grassroots innovation in general.
We tried to complement other approaches. There tends to be a few, even one initiative in these studies, so there could be a little bit more diversity of approaches to look at Transition from different angles. This is what we tried to do, to look at it from this more international angle.
One thing perhaps, in the literature that we also tried to do is to look at cases of failure and not only at cases of success. One tends to focus on those case studies that are particularly interesting because they succeed in having an impact on the community or bringing their initiative forward. Perhaps it also helps to look at those cases where Transition initiatives stop, for example. To look at why they stopped and look at the other side of the coin in a sense. This can also help to confirm theories that we’ve got on why the Transition movement and grassroots innovation successfully spread and diffuse or not.
Is your intention to follow this up with subsequent research?
Richard: Yes – we have discussed this and we have continuing discussions on what might be our Transition research programme or masterplan as we’ve referred to it a couple of times already. The point that we noted in the paper about the need for longitudinal studies, I think that’s important. If we’re going to talk about what the lasting impact of Transition is, we certainly do need these longitudinal studies.
They need to be cross-sectional as the way that this survey has been carried out, but in terms of looking in some depth, case-study based research which there is a lot of at the moment, I think it would also be important to begin to think about where Transition happens even within organisations, so a Transition from within. Not within in terms of individuals but actual organisations.
My colleagues in Brazil are currently taking some of those principles, some of that Transition ethos to big global organisations and are they’re starting to carry out a lot of the same processes that Transitioners are carrying out in communities, but within the workplace. I think research at that level – I think activity of that nature should also be looked at in terms of lasting impact.
Our theme this month is around impact, the impact of Transition. From your perspective of having reviewed the research and the wider context of grassroots innovation and the wider field around that, what’s your sense of the impact that Transition as a movement has had over the last 6 or 7 years?
Giuseppe: I think the impact was in two main areas. One is the social impact. This has to do really with building community. The fact that there’s an active group of people interacting, being together, building a sense of community, conviviality, organising itself based on democratic principles of decision making; these are the things that were mentioned very often in terms of impact in our study.
The other one is the external. Sometimes it’s technical, sometimes it’s economic. Through the projects that the initiative brings forward, which of course can be in different areas like energy, food housing and so on, this is the other type of impact.
I must say, at least from our study, the impression in this first area (building community and networks and social capital) is that it is predominating compared to the other one. Presumably because many Transition initiatives are just starting, and there tends to be a focus more on internal aspects rather than on the external. This might be explained by this sort of dynamic, but overall there are these two areas. Internal, social impact and external impact in the community through the projects that are carried out.
Richard: I would probably build on that by saying that some of the work we’re currently looking at in terms of community food enterprise, that enterprise element is being enabled through building up the community capacity to raise awareness about particular issues, bringing about a greater critical mass behind such entrepreneurial projects, facilitating that scale-up in a way that ensures that scale-up is sustainable and can be resilient in the interests of the local community and so on.
That’s essentially where there is some scope for exploring where this social innovation also blends in with technological innovation even. The incorporation of new technologies into projects that are community supported. That’s where I get quite excited because I came at this project from that and from looking at regional development and innovation policy.
Having had a background in community planning and economic development, I extended that into this idea of eco-entrepreneurship and social innovation. That’s how I came into this project and met Giuseppe and then we started talking about Transition. So I get excited by projects like REconomy and discussions about scale-up. I think that’s where a lot of the future of the grassroots impact is going to be.
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29 Apr 2014
The question “what’s our impact?” went with me to Israel and the West Bank, where Naresh and I were invited to run the first Transition:Launch training. As part of our trip we ran a one day Transition workshop in Bethlehem in the West Bank. Although it’s just a few miles from Jerusalem, the bus drives through a checkpoint (passports and permits are checked on the way back into the city, not out) and along the huge wall that Israel has built, including overhangs to prevent anything being dropped onto the traffic.
From Bethlehem we could look across to the Israeli settlement built on the site of the last forest in the West Bank – the protest to prevent its construction bringing together Palestinian activists with Israelis wanting to defend the trees. Our host, from the Holy Land Trust, warned us that of those who said they would come any number between 1 and 20 might make it – plans change at the last minute, travel becomes impossible.
In the end we had 8 people who stayed for different lengths of time. People from Hebron explained that an Israeli settlement has been constructed in the town centre, causing huge disruption to those who live there. One night a street of shopkeepers woke up to find their shop doors had been welded shut in the night by the Israeli army, so some had to get out through their neighbour’s back gates. Children find it difficult to get to school. Permission has to be granted from Israelis for any kind of building work, even repairs – so if they fixed the leaking school roof without permission the whole building might be bulldozed.
Naresh and I wondered what we could possibly have to offer to people living in such extreme circumstances. The piece which seemed to be most relevant and of use was about visioning. Firstly, understanding that there are four stories of the future around. Of these the one which is most useful is the one which is least seen – of “Energy Descent”, or how we make a successful, inclusive transition to a low carbon way of living.
We have written elsewhere of the “aha” moment for us – that although we appear to be free in the UK we are still constrained by those with power. We can travel freely (in Bethlehem, two participants arrived two hours late, held up at a checkpoint), and are unlikely to wake up to find our doorways blocked, or armed soldiers outside. But we are also limited in what we can build, who has access to land, what we can do to take care of the future for our children. (And of course, the rules are also there to protect us all from the wishes of people who would build things that I might hate, so there’s a process we all have to follow.. it just hasn’t caught up with the realities of our present situation).
The use of Visioning to support this – to understand realistic constraints on the future, and them imagine things being the best they possibly could – also seemed to create a shift in thinking for some. Some who came already had a powerful vision of building a peace community and ecovillage in Palestine, and are attempting to build it despite finding it very difficult to get permission from Israeli authorities. For others it was to vision a local street where the shops have largely closed down as a bustling busy thoroughfare again and imagine the partnerships and conversations that would be needed to help this move forward.
There’s something about the intensity of Israel and the West Bank, the feeling that situations of life and death, belonging to the land or exiled, peace and war, are ever present, that stayed with me throughout our visit. In Jerusalem we visited the Holocaust museum, and were reminded of the horrors of that time. It’s was striking and painful to see the documentation of the early days of the Nazis in Germany, the constriction of freedoms, intimidation, and disregard for a people’s lives, having just come from Bethlehem, and hearing echoes in the stories from people there. We reflected with Israeli friends later on how the unhealed scars of the past can recreate past situations in the present.
How can Transition have an impact in such circumstances? I realised how important the capacity for visioning is, that in a situation where there is very little freedom, the willingness to vision something different can be a radical and empowering act. Perhaps the circumstances are very constrained in terms of freedom, or resources, or people to work with. But still we can acknowledge reality of what is, and create a vision for something better, even if it’s only something small within my inner world – where I choose to put my attention, to see beauty, or remember something I love rather than focus on my fear or hatred. And the act of doing so frees me from a state of fear or hatred, giving me some control and choice within my life.
In Israel we met people already creating community gardens, working with residents in city areas to create more connection, beauty, recycling. One local group inJerusalemhad saved a whole strip of land that used to border a railway line from development. Now it’s a series of parks, a community garden, and a cycle and walking path that – unusually – links and brings together people from the different neighbourhoods it passes through, who otherwise rarely mix. The Transition: Launch workshop in Haifa was a success at least in bringing together many people in Israel working for similar ends, and supporting them to network. And as often is the case I felt that Transition had some unifying vision to offer, to see how each is working for a piece in a larger, meaningful whole.
As ever with these trips I felt I learnt at least as much as I could offer to others. I am deeply grateful to all those who gave us their time and hospitality, and shared their journey and learning. I often say that running trainings is the best job in Transition, bringing the opportunity to meet and work at depth with people in different countries who share the same impulse to create a system that really works for everyone, now and in the future, for humans and for all life on earth. This visit left me feeling inspired by the courage and love I saw in action, whether in the West Bank or in Israel, and moved by the depth of difficulty and suffering people have experienced – in past generations or in the present. I felt connected to the resilience of the healthy part of us as humans, the part that longs to heal the past and create peace in the present – which is as strong among Israeli activists as it is in this country. An impact for which I am very grateful!
I want to end this piece with some writing of Victor Frankl, a prominent Austrian psychiatrist in the 1920s and 30s, who spent three years in concentration camps under the Nazis. It’s not directly relevant to this writing, but there’s something about the choice that we humans can make, even in extreme circumstances, that reflects something about the spirit of Transition. He describes walking through the freezing night as part of a forced labour group, and calling up the feeling of love through the memory of his wife. It starts when the man next to him whispers:
If our wives could see us now! I do hope they are better off in their camps and don’t know what is happening to us.”
That brought thoughts of my own wife to mind. And as we stumbled on for miles, slipping on icy spots, supporting each other time and again, dragging one another up and onward, nothing was said, but we both knew: each of us was thinking of his wife. Occasionally I looked at the sky, where the stars were fading and the pink light of the morning was beginning to spread behind a dark bank of clouds. But my mind clung to my wife’s image, imagining it with an uncanny acuteness. I heard her answering me, saw her smile, her frank and encouraging look. Real or not, her look was then more luminous than the sun which was beginning to rise.
A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth – that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which Man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of Man is through love and in love. I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved.
In a position of utter desolation, when Man cannot express himself in positive action, when his only achievement may consist in enduring his sufferings in the right way – an honorable way – in such a position Man can, through loving contemplation of the image he carries of his beloved, achieve fulfillment. For the first time in my life I was able to understand the meaning of the words, “The angels are lost in perpetual contemplation of an infinite glory.”
Man’s Search for Meaning, Part One, “Experiences in a Concentration Camp”, Viktor Frankl,
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29 Apr 2014
At Transition in Kitchener-Waterloo, we have recently achieved a lot of new things, and it’s been exciting. We have launched our Climate Change Adaptation Toolkit, and we have also become an official Transition initiative. We have a lot to be celebrating – and we’re definitely doing that – along with some of our new volunteers (the best part about success = people want to be with you!). But after that celebrating comes some reflection.
We’re getting attention and we’re getting new people in TransitionKW. But how are we doing at reaching the broader community? How are we doing at getting projects that are targeting the kind of change we need? Is our work contributing to the Great Turning? Does our community know that we’re part of the Great Turning?
One way we’re trying to measure the impact and reach of the toolkit is to look at the numbers – how many people are reading the toolkit? We have tracking on the website – we know how many people visit, from where, and how long they spend on the website. We track how many times the toolkit is downloaded. We can contact the libraries to find out how many people are checking them out. Therefore we know how many people in our community have been exposed to the toolkit.
But we don’t know how many people have made changes because of our work.
That brings us to another way we’re trying to measure our impact – finding stories. We want stories of what people are doing to make changes in their lives, and how they are sharing that experience with their community. Stories are hard to collect, they take time, and they’re personal. The main way we plan to collect stories is in person, at events, workshops, meetings, festivals, and just generally being out and about. We are also doing an online survey – but that’s more a requirement of our grant funding than a good idea.
We needed to show our funders that we were doing something to collect data from users of our toolkit – and a solution they liked was an online survey. From my personal experience with online surveys, I find no one fills them out unless there is a prize incentive, or they tend to give you the answers you already know. But an online survey is more tangible than the vague idea of “collecting stories”. However, talking with real people in real time, and asking good questions, is what is going to get us the feedback we need to make our work better.
Instead of just intending to collect stories and hoping for the best, we should have some kind of strategy, and I think this is where our work will be as we work on getting our toolkit out into the public even more. I’m thinking the strategy will follow with one of the lessons from the Transition Launch Training about connecting with groups in your community. In the training, the exercise was to learn about other organizations in your community and rank them from 1-5, with 5 being “right on par with our mindset” to 1 being “arguing the opposite of our mindset”.
TransitionKW is already really well connected with lots of local groups (we could not have completed the toolkit without all the expertise and input of a broader network of community organizations), but we haven’t kept track of these relationships or what that has accomplished. Tracking our relationships could help us with knowing how they are changing over time, and means that we know who to go back to to ask good questions.
So what is the impact Transition is having in Kitchener-Waterloo? We don’t really know. We clearly have more reflecting to do before these strategies can be figured out and implemented. But if we can take 8 committed volunteers, a small grant, and lots of community connections and turn that into the successful Climate Change Adaptation Toolkit in a year, I’m confident we’ll get there.
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28 Apr 2014
Originally published last week at Co-operative News under the headline The ‘Silicon Valley’ of community resilience.
My town, Totnes, on the south Devon coast, is the UK’s first Transition town. Over the past eight years, it has catalysed over 40 projects, many of them co-operatives – such as a community energy company, and initiatives creating truly affordable housing for local people. People come from around the world to see what is, for some, a ‘Silicon Valley’ for community resilience.
Yet time spent walking around our local Co-operative Food store would yield absolutely no indication that any of that is happening. There is no local produce, no organic vegetables, no very local beers or wines, no local bread. Something is happening in the community around the store which resonates with many of the Co-operative Group’s values, yet they are disconnected, and may as well be happening entirely in parallel with each other.
My sense is that the time is right to change that. The Co-operative’s USP – the reason I shop there (and it certainly isn’t because of the extensive range of local, seasonal vegetables) – is its commitment to co-operative values. These values are the very thing that makes Co-operative stores stand out from the rest of the increasingly predatory, vampiric and community-trashing supermarkets taking over our high streets.
So, how might Co-operative stores re-imagine themselves? Give each branch the autonomy to decide how it wants to interact with initiatives in the local community that resonate with co-operative values. They might decide to invest some of their turnover every year into a community energy company or, even better, work with that community energy company to install renewables in the store, partly funded through community investment. Great examples of this already exist. Budgens supermarket in Crouch End, for example, has a market garden on its roof, which both creates a great community and training resource, and supplies fresh produce to the store itself.
In places such as Bristol, Brixton and Totnes, where communities have their own local currencies as powerful tools for supporting local economies, Co-operative Food stores could accept them, and use them as a tool for encouraging more local procurement. As we build up to relaunching the Totnes Pound here, these are conversations we are trying to have with our local store.
Stores could also be given the ability to take responsibility for procuring locally, where local produce is available. They could support the creation of new market gardens to supply the shops, train local young people to become growers, and sell beer produced in local craft breweries. In other words, play a key role in giving profile and support to local producers and look at how our communities feed themselves in a different, entrepreneurial way.
Such an approach needs to go beyond a token CSR gesture and really get into the heart of the how the Co-op functions. Local communities have a key role to play in the global push to stay below the 2°C increase of global warming, both as innovators and as pioneers – implementing change without waiting for permission or instruction.
The co-operative movement has a powerful story, a powerful vision, and it needs to start celebrating and telling that story more loudly. Communities are here to help and Co-operative stores need to get behind local initiatives that embody those shared values.
If is doesn’t, it is in danger of being overtaken by models such as hiSbe (How It Should Be), which, at the moment, embody co-operative values far better than the Co-operative Group itself. There is nothing to lose, and so much to gain.
Rob Hopkins
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