Transition Culture

27 Jan 2014

How to discuss Transition with … No.5: Church groups

Who  

Professor Tim Gorringe is St Luke’s Professor of Theological Studies at the University of Exeter.  In 1995 he became Reader in Contextual Theology at St Andrew’s and in 1998 took up his present post as St Luke’s Professor of Theological Studies.  He is at present working on a two year AHRC funded research project on the values which underpin constructive social change, focussing on the Transition Town Movement.  He is co-author, with Rosie Beckham, of Transition Movement for Churches: A Prophetic Imperative for Today published by Canterbury Press.

“The first consideration in starting a discussion with a church group is who to talk to.  If it’s an Anglican or a Catholic church you’d be best to meet with the minister, if it’s a Methodist or United Reform Church you’d be best meeting the congregation elders. For me, the place to begin is with a discussion about community.  All churches try to understand themselves as communities, an idea that is also central to Transition. 

In The Power of Just Doing Stuff, the account of communities and what they can achieve is more positive than in many churches, so that concept of how we might go about building more vibrant, inclusive communities will really resonate.  In terms of finding common ground, most churches have as their “mission” the promotion of “peace and justice”.  So peak oil may struggle to resonate, but climate change is very much on many churches’ agenda”. 

What, I asked Tim, might be turnoffs for church groups in how Transition is presented?  “If they come across as New Age weirdoes”, he replied.  He used the example of his local group, Transition Exeter: “As a group, their approach is very mainstream, and they actually contain some Methodists which means many of those overlaps/links are already there.  The questions that some Transition groups are asking in terms of “how to move beyond the middle class usual suspects” is also one that churches are wrestling with”.

Food can be a good way in, as in the story of the church in Pasadena that has worked with Transition Pasadena to create a food garden around the church.  Also, if a Transition group is looking for a very large south-facing roof on which to install community renewables, Tim suggests that it’s always worth talking to the local church, as Melbourne Area Transition did. He continued:

“Many of the discussions taking place within the church overlap with and resonate with Transition.  For example the discussions within the Church of England about payday lenders such as Wonga, discussions about ethical investment and so on.  Offer to give a talk, go along and say hello.  Asking the question of “what kind of community are we and what kind of community would we like to be?” opens immense room for working together”. 

The thing to remember, Tim, concluded, was that churches, and church communities, are part of the wider culture, they have the same questions and concerns as everyone else.  People are concerned for their community and for “the common good”, a notion deeply embedded in Christian discourse.  And what is Transition about at its heart?  Common good.  Perhaps it is in common good that the common ground can be found.  

Read more»

27 Jan 2014

Rosie Boycott on Capital Growth and scaling up urban agriculture

Rosie Boycott is the Chair of the London Food Board, working for the Mayor, Boris Johnson.  She was the force behind the Capital Growth initiative which has been a remarkable catalyst for urban agriculture across London.  We wanted to hear her thoughts on what she has learnt about scaling up, about how top-down initiatives can support (but not drive) bottom-up initiatives.  It’s a remarkable story.  We started by asking her to sum up what Capital Growth is and what it’s achieved since it began.

“Capital Growth was launched in 2008. It was to some degree a steal from what has happened in Vancouver, which had a project whose aim was to create 2010 new vegetable growing sites in the city by the time of the 2010 Winter Olympics. So we did 2012 sites by the time of the Olympics last summer.

We differed from Vancouver quite a lot in that they counted every single plot within one, say, communal garden, whereas we only counted a communal garden as one site. What I’m trying to say is we did much better!  It was one of those things that started in a very low-key way and seemed a very large task. Actually, looking back on it, it seems an extraordinary thing to set up, to try to do. But somehow City Hall got behind it. We had an initial amount of money so that we could give small grants. Sustain (the Alliance for Better Food and Farming) became the delivery partner, so they worked on the ground doing all the actual setting up of the gardens.

It was very slow to begin with because we kept encountering lots of problems, such as wanting to put gardens into building sites, odd bits of derelict land because there were always issues with ownership of said building sites or derelict pieces of land. A worry on behalf of the owners of those places was that once they’d let a group of people in to start a vegetable garden they’d never get them out. So one of the key things very early on was the establishment of something called a ‘meanwhile lease’ which means that you are a temporary resident on that site, and it was a great persuader to the council.

We went about it in lots of different ways. There are 33 boroughs in London and we made all sorts of efforts to get them all to sign up. Efforts including writing directly to the Chief Executives, I would go to breakfasts held by the Mayor when the different leaders of the councils would come in, and talk to them. Sustain and I, we also talked to large land-owning institutions like the waterways, like the transport systems, the railways. We talked to the housing associations which are many, and there are a lot of in London.

The housing associations were very instrumental in helping us establish gardens in high-rise estates. Quite often there would be an area that maybe at one point had been a playground and it had been abandoned. The estates saw very quickly that gardens were incredibly valuable and created something that was way more than just a bunch of people growing vegetables, because they brought safety, access and a sense of community to places where that had been destroyed. We saw many occasions where areas between tower blocks had been in the ownership or dominion of gangs, people smoking and taking drugs, fierce dogs, all that stuff which was very inhibiting to elderly people, mums with kids, all the sorts of people that those spaces were actually designed to be for.

Put the garden in and everything changed overnight. One of the things that has been really fantastic is that the theft rate is so low, almost non-existent. I’ve had residents say to me that even though they don’t have anything to do with their gardens, they’d be looking over a balcony on the fifth floor and if they see something they don’t like they shout, and then other people join in and shout.  They become very quickly a community asset.

As it stands now, some time after we finished, which we did, opening up the 2012^th garden at the end of 2012, I think a few no longer exist. I’m not sure how many but it’s very few. We have over 100,000 volunteers signed up. We have been seen by the City and Guilds, who did a project on it, this kind of community gardening has been the best route back to work for the long term unemployed, which is brilliant. We’ve seen people with mental health problems improve, we’ve worked with doctors about using gardening for therapy. The police have commended the project as better than a bobby on the beat. They become self-policing and they become sources of pride.

It’s been an amazing project.  Whatt we’re seeing now is that quite a few of them are looking at ways to move on from just domestic consumption and start growing for sale to local restaurants, schools, or to turn things into chutneys or food. Small scale social enterprises are springing up on the back of it. How many more there are I don’t know. We get letters and emails every day from people saying they’re starting this, they’re starting that. These are way outside the remit of the 2012 and we think and Sustain think that it’s probably OK now to say that London, apart from Havana, the city now has more urban farming than any other city in the world. That seems pretty cool.

The driver for it was the people themselves getting on and doing stuff. What insights and lessons have you gained in terms of how best to support bottom-up action and activism in that way?

The network that Sustain put together was terrific. The money helps, but the money was small. The money was things like grants of £200 maybe up to £500, maybe up to £700, which got people going maybe in terms of being able to buy wood to build a raised bed or buy soil. We did a lot of deals with different companies, Bulldog Tools, B&Q etc. who gave good discounts. We ran a lot of training days which were really successful and people really liked. The one for beekeeping went particularly well. People like to learn something new. Certainly in an urban environment, being part of Capital Growth gives you something that is outside of the urban environment and it makes life in the city better to stitch that into it. 

I think the network itself has been important. I think people liked being part of growing these 2012 sites. We do a lot of site visits and take people like Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall who would come along especially in schools, and talk about the gardening and about the cool things that you could have happen like Big Dig days when people would volunteer. We still have all these things, it’s not in the past. We have open days when people can come and see the gardens. We have a very good network on the web whereby you can type in your own postcode and it will flash up where your nearest Capital Growth sites are that you could go and join. And the website has a lot of terrific info and good stories.

So you can enter it at all sorts of levels. I think that’s important. From a City point of view, one of the things that was attractive was obviously most boroughs, not all but most boroughs have no allotments left so you can’t get one. For busy people, an allotment is too big. I know a lot of Councils are looking at their allotments and when they become free, are cutting them up into smaller sizes, but actually they’re whopping.

In terms of the larger crisis and climate crisis and so on, some might argue that you can’t expect leadership or support for resilience building to come from government. Either local or national. But you’ve been one of those few people whose role has been working in government but specifically aiming to try and link and support the two. Is it possible…it is clearly possible,  and what are the limitations of it? How far can something like the Mayor’s office go in terms of driving resilience? What are the blocks you’ve come up against?

It isn’t a top down event. You can only do so much. But at the same time, you can do a lot. The fact of having the encouragement there from the top meant a lot. I certainly know that this was something that appealed to Boris, and Boris and I went and launched the project together on November day in 2008 and it seemed like a long way away. But he was very enthusiastic about it. He likes the idea of trying to create a village life within an enormous metropolis, to localise and make things smaller within the vastness. It suits him and he has backed it all the way.

The fact that we had that initial funding was incredibly important, because without the finding we would not have had Sustain. I think it’s fair to say that the presence of Sarah and Ben and Seb and Paola going around, seeing people, geeing them on, holding the whole thing together was probably as important as people getting hold of £500. The fact that you had them coming in and telling people how to forge relationships with local building firms so they could get the old scaffolding planks, all that stuff was invaluable. So the money, at the end of the day, was really important.

 You put that up against what Pam does up at Incredible Edible – maybe in a place that’s small enough a group of committed volunteers can make that happen and once you get to critical mass the whole system just sustains itself. But I think that in a city like London, when you’re coming up with something relatively new, you really need feet on the ground. A voice on the telephone. What we had, I think it was crucial, and I don’t think it would have worked otherwise. So the mayor’s involvement as such was really important because we were able to stump up the cash.

What would you see now as being the next step up in terms of urban agriculture in London? Does in require land reform?

One is what I alluded to – we will have lots of small businesses that are already happening. That’s great and we’ve got lots of projects afoot to encourage that and to increase the take-up of stuff.

The other big side of that is we’re now going to look at the outer boroughs where you’ve got much more land, and really start to see what we can do with more land in the sense of can we really start really serious urban peri-farming, which I absolutely think we can do – to get people on to 20 acres, 30 acres, that sort of size or more.

Walthamstow and Enfield are themselves very serious about this, especially Walthamstow with the Lea Valley within it, so they’ve already got a really long – hundreds and hundreds of years – tradition of supplying the city. That over the years has changed, diluted, and is now today specialising in cucumbers, tomatoes and peppers. They are grown in vast glasshouses or plastic houses with very small numbers in employment, but they’re knocking out 80 million cucumbers a year. It’s just extraordinary, about 90% of British cucumbers are all grown in the Lea Valley now.

There’s quite a sense of let’s keep agriculture going in whatever way we can. We’re working with them to look at small farm creation. Obviously more sustainable farming, but also the whole issue of food security coming in here.

Part of Capital Growth’s success has been its messaging and the sense it seems to be that it’s something for everybody. How have you messaged it beyond the usual suspects and what are the wider learnings for the wider movement around this stuff?

The messages were really straightforward actually. We were responding to a growing interest in where food comes from and an increasing worry about processed food and what you buy. We did quite frequently do messages to do with what money you can save if you start growing your own. You’re not going to replace your entire shopping basket but through the summer you won’t have to buy another lettuce and you probably won’t have to buy another vegetable.

So we’ve come at it from every point of view. Plus the fact that this is community engagement and without a doubt the ones that were strongest seemed to be the ones that were really rooted in their communities and really involved old people, young people, middle aged people and kids, a bit of everything in the mix. There was a sense that the garden was a place to go as well as a project. The garden could answer a lot of needs.

Actually, what’s amazing about vegetable growing is it does answer a lot of needs. An enormous amount of benefits do flow from a community garden. If we were talking to people in high-rise estate owners from the housing associations you might stress the community engagement, the ability the garden has to transform an unloved bit of land, to cut down the crime, increase security, that sort of thing. Talking to the waterways, it would be more what’s the point of having a derelict space, don’t you actually want these spaces looked after? We got lots of them neatly tidied up after being abandoned, that were going to cost whoever money to put back together again, and here was a free army of volunteers along to do something.

There’s usually a particular good reason why a place would want to do it. The places we failed were in the Royal parks. I’ve had conversations with people in the Royal parks over the past four years over having established gardens that could be used by local schools. Oddly you always seem to get much further when you’re using a bit of land that isn’t already in use.  I guess that’s blindingly obvious on one level but it always pissed me off that we never properly got anything in there!

One of your early career high points was setting up and editing Spare Rib for quite a long time. Have you noticed that urban agriculture has a well-balanced gender profile and what role can urban agriculture play in the empowerment of women, do you think?

Good question, nobody’s ever asked me that before!  I think that the gender balance is actually not too bad. In terms of more traditional farming, it’s still quite a male preserve, but in terms of what we’ve been doing I’d say that there were just as many women, if not more. I don’t really know the answer.

I think that anything like that is always very empowering to women because it’s physical. It’s doing, growing, it’s nurturing, and so it fits in pretty naturally.

The last question I had was that this month we’ve been looking at scaling up Transition; from your experience running Capital Growth, what advice might you have?

We did something that I suppose was uniquely around London and this city. We said this is about the capital, this is Capital Growth. That said, it has been adopted and through The Big Dig is now in other cities, in the same way that we have had a food policy in London now for quite a long time and now we have an organisation called Sustainable Food Cities and we have a lot of members and we’re working with a lot of cities now to get them to write food policies.

 So it’s about trying to explain the benefits that you can get. For instance, in the London Plan now there are things like no new building can happen without there being food growth spaces from the word go, which is kind of small but also huge in a way. It’s a big shift that they would look at that now.

What’s lovely about Transition is it’s people doing whatever seems right for their place. But at the same time, if you want people to take it up on a quasi-government level, you’ve got to be able to see why the benefits are there very, very fast.

We can always point to things like less litter, less police – all of which you can too, it’s exactly the same thing – but those tick boxes are really good.

So building an evidence base…

Definitely. All the time.

What would be your sense of how far this could go? Where could we get to? What’s your vision of London in 20 years’ time if this happened to the extent you would like it to?

We would have food growing on a tremendous amount of rooftops. I think we’re about to get the go-ahead to put the first huge growing space on top of a supermarket, which will be a Morrison’s in Camden Town. We’re trying to talk Tescos into it.

You would have a really mixed food economy. At the moment we have a mono food economy. I would hope that in 20 years’ time we have a really mixed one. We’ve got people starting to grow mushrooms under railway arches, it’s popping up all over now. What’s really nice is that 6 years into this job, we can get money for them all, well not all, but an awful lot. We can find pots and funds, and we have a pretty good grant system for food businesses.

We’ve done street food, we’ve done sustainable packaging, we’ve done all sorts of small things that have low start up prices, and a lot of people are now coming to us and saying well fund you to do it. We’ve got our first social supermarket open just before Christmas in Barnsley. Hopefully we’ll have the first one open in London within the next two months. There’s a real sense, if we can keep doing more and knitting them together so that one thing leads to another, that we’ll have a much healthier food economy.

Nothing will ever be perfect but a lot healthier and a lot more resilient, and there will be a great deal more grown around the city with really good access routes in. We’ve sort of got all that stuff primed and ready to go, we just have to change supply routes. All that we do is beginning to tie together and that’s fantastically great really. 

Read more»

24 Jan 2014

Film review: ‘Local Food Roots’

The growth of the local food sector over the last 20 years has been remarkable.  As we, this month, reflect on how Transition might scale up, what lessons and insights can we draw from the local food movement?  A new film Local Food Roots, by f3 local food consultants cooperative and Sprout Films, with Joy Carey as co-producer and scriptwriter, is “both as a celebration of what has been achieved by an extraordinarily committed group of people, and also part of creating a more resilient future for our communities”.  Here’s the trailer:

This beautifully-produced film brings together some of the leading figures in the local food world.  Guy Watson of Riverford Organic Farm, who today regularly wins every sustainable food award going, recalls how his first organic vegetable box delivery was 30 boxes from the back of his car, and now Riverford distribute 40,000 a week.  Nationally, 150 such schemes now deliver over 100,000 boxes every week. 

For Pam Warhurst of Incredible Edible Todmorden, the route to promoting the concept of local food is not necessarily through talk of sustainability and the environment.  It’s through obesity, diabetes and coronary heart disease.  She says:

“Good food saves the country a lot of money.  The local food movement has to be one of the major focal points of public health in the future.  We spend £6 billion a year in health-related costs.  We need a reality check!”

We hear from farmers selling direct, from local food distributors, farmers’ market stallholders.  We hear from John Hughes, the inspirational catering manager at Nottingham University Hospital, who took the decision to shift their sourcing so that 90% of food is now sourced locally, from the East Midlands, a £20 million injection of cash into the local food economy.  “There’s nothing new about what we do, it’s just that it is in the minority right now”, he says.  With the public sector spending £8 billion every year on food procurement, the Nottingham story offers a taste (as it were) of the potential. 

“Most people would cheer us on for trying to invest their public money and their taxes back into the local community and the local economy”, Hughes says. 

We meet Julie Brown from Growing Communities in Hackney who source from 30 peri-urban farms as well as running a series of market gardens throughout Hackney and a farm in Dagenham in order to supply 900 households with vegetable boxes each week and 1,500 people through their Farmers’ Market.  “Small farmers are the basis for the kind of food system we need”, Julie says, adding:

“It’s not frivolous or niche, it’s actually fundamental to our achieving a sustainable food system in the future”.

George Ferguson (that Mayor of Bristol who takes his full salary in Bristol Pounds) argues that it really matters for people to understand where their food comes from.  “We’re not going to feed the whole city in the way that an old city would.  There are so many people now that that’s very difficult” he continues.  He argues for support and encouragement for food growing across the city, looking for free land and making it available, opening up the idea of growing food in parks (“what a wonderful opportunity for people to learn about food growing”): 

“I’m very serious about the importance of food for the local economy as much as for health.  Local food is part of local culture”. 

The film is an inspirational immersion in local food culture, with stories that cover the urban, rural, large and small scales.  It brings together very skilfully the story so far of local food while also celebrating what has been achieved.  But it is also clear that there’s a lot farther to go.  As George Ferguson puts it, “This has got to get right into some of the poorest areas for people to recognise that the most economical thing to do is to cook well”. 

But what does Local Food Roots have to tell us about scaling up?  Guy Watson’s only thought on that is as succinct as it is insightful, “People need to get better at cooking cabbage”.  But the film is better at posing a “what next?” than really exploring it in depth.  As a film to show at a Transition meeting which can stimulate “what can we do here?” or “how best to scale this up?” questions, it’s the best I’ve seen.  And at 35 minutes it’s short enough to be part of a larger event.  But if you’re looking for a “where next?” manifesto, or a series of suggestions for how to mainstream local food you’ll be disappointed. 

It’s Pam Warhurst who has the most to say on that subject:

“The local food movement has shown the way forward, a clear sign of where we’re going.  Now the challenge is how we scale that up and how more people can have access to good healthy food.  We are nowhere near where we need to be.  We need to accept it’s still a minority market.  And then we’ve got to try to persuade the powers-that-be, through our own actions, that you can live differently”. 

For her, one key element of this is building bridges between schools and their surrounding communities.  She also recognises the need to think more commercially, and to bring in appropriately-skilled people:

“We still need people who know how to grow on a larger scale, we need more alternative food outlets.  But what we have ignored is the role that local food businesses can play in that larger picture”. 

Sheila Dillon, presenter of Radio 4’s The Food Programme, says of local food, “it’s not marginal anymore”, and she’s right.  The dazzling array of what this film presents doesn’t even touch on some of the really exciting larger scale projects, such as Capital Growth in London which has done a huge amount to mainstream urban food production with the support of the Mayor’s office, Joy Carey’s own excellent ‘Who Feeds Bristol?’ study and the Local Economic Evaluations produced by Transition groups in Totnes, Brixton and Herefordshire.  The incredible work of the Soil Association’s Food for Life programme also doesn’t get a mention, nor their work improving hospital food.  Clearly you can’t fit everything in a short film, but I’d have liked to be left with a sense not just that this needs to scale, but that there are places where you can see that process underway. It might also have been interesting to hear from young people coming in to local food growing or training to become growers.  What are their hopes and aspirations?  What do they see as its future and why are they doing it?

As Pam Warhurst says at the end of the film, “food is the focal point for changing the world”, and it would be a pretty hard-hearted soul who could watch Local Food Roots and not be left with a sense that something profound is happening to our food system, something which, we can only hope, has only just begun.

You can order the film here and book a screening here.  Also, check out their Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/LocalFoodRoots) and you can follow them on Twitter at @localfoodroots.

 

Read more»

23 Jan 2014

Josué Dusoulier asks "why not use a regional support team as a strategy for scaling up?"

What Transition initiatives do is just fantastic. We see “little buds” of ways of living that are more resilient and happy arising everywhere. The question is: how do we go from “little buds”, that are indeed fantastic projects developing outside of the current system, to mature and extensive “forests”, formed by projects which have the right scale to respond to the current challenges we face? It is this question that has informed the decision to create a regional hub and a professionalised support team in French-speaking Belgium. But how did we get there? And how can this team help Transition initiatives to grow? 

Why a regional hub ?

While the first initiatives emerged here in 2009 and 2010, the regional Hub for Wallonia and Brussels was created in 2011, after Rob’s visit to Brussels and Nils Aguilar’s tour of 7 cities to present his film “Voices of transition”. These events got initiatives to know each other and start to collaborate. It also became clear why having an organization which is able to speak on behalf of Transition initiatives in the region was becoming increasingly important.

The focus on regional level, which includes initiatives from Wallonia and Brussels, seemed natural in the Belgian context. This level has several advantages, including: a common language, the opportunity to meet quite easily (in only 1 or 2 hours, we can all be in Brussels), closer links to regional political authorities … And of course the idea that localised action, at the heart of the Transition approach, would still be the good one for support structures as well. 

But quickly, we faced a fundamental question: How to create and mobilize a support network without absorbing all the energy of the people active in local Transition initiatives? And how to support initiatives in accordance with a bottom-up approach? 

Making our involvement in Transition our job

From a personal point of view, in 2010 Transition had become so important in my worldview that I could neither imagine having a job that would not contribute to it, nor confine it to a volunteer activity in my spare time.

I’m a trainer, group facilitator, psychologist, I facilitate change, and I had a few contracts linked with Transition here and there, but not enough to live on. Would I need to create a bakery, shop or become an organic farmer to create a livelihood related to Transition? These activities are eminently useful and important, but do not correspond to what excites me personally for my everyday life. Should I have to do something that did not attract me particularly to create a Transition livelihood? And why couldn’t supporting local initiatives be partly remunerated in a network? Could the solution come from partnerships? 

A Partnership with established local NGOs

A particularity in Belgium is that in 2008, a time when there weren’t yet any initiatives in our region, the NGO Friends of the Earth Belgium, decided to promote the Transition concept. They  hired somebody to inform people on the subject and organised a trip to Totnes. That’s how from 2010 on, I started collaborating on introduction trainings. 

Later in 2012 , I had the opportunity to be hired a few months for a part-time position, which was an opportunity to begin a collaboration between Friends of the Earth and our young informal network. It was an opportunity to do a needs analysis with local Transition initiatives, to see what they felt would help them. A training program has been successfully implemented to meet these needs. Partnerships have also been initiated with other organisations such as ASPO – Belgium (The Association for the Study of Peak oil) and other associations in our region, including Exposant d. I also had the chance to experience and participate in the “National hubs meeting” in London in 2012. However, I had not paid enough attention to the financial resilience of the programme I had been hired on, and when funding was not renewed, my contract and the program were interrupted.

This was not enough to discourage us, though. I write “we” because at that time, Vincent, who has a useful complementary background enters the scene. We have learned the lessons of this situation, and with the help of Friends of the Earth and Vincent from Exposant d, we started looking for other public funding in an expanding partnership. Our actions and what was sown in 2012 have allowed us to obtain new funding from the Walloon regional government for a year. And this time, we were going to be not 1, but 4 part-time staff , with the help of these two associations! 

But new questions arose …

How to articulate our medium and long term objectives and the need to meet our donors in the short term ? What if funding is discontinued after a year again? How to build a quality team with no job security in the medium term? And for this year, what skills would be sought? Who would be engaged? Which selection procedure? How to collaborate between these two associations and the network? How to sustain the project? 

The birth of a support team

Our objective was to develop things organically. From an analysis based on needs conducted in 2012, and observing changes in the Transition Network, several priority areas were identified for the project:

• training
• support to local initiatives
• inner transition
• resilient economy 
• communication. 

On top of this, to increase chances of continuing our support project, a part-time fundraiser was hired.  As Vincent and I had been developing the project, of course, we would be part of the team later in the project. Our work focuses mainly on inspiring people, training, inner transition and providing support to local groups. But there were still two vacancies for supporting resilient economy projects, and communications & fundraising. How should we proceed? How to find people who would complement us well ?

We wanted to really respect the principle of transparency with initiatives and to have male and female presence, balancing the team. A selection procedure has been implemented in collaboration with volunteer members of the network and the two partner NGOs. Job descriptions and job announcements have been drafted and published. We interviewed the candidate(s) and Ralph and Antonia were hired. 

From the day of the decision, we asked them to participate as part of the team in a four-day workshop of “The Work that Reconnects”, that would take place shortly after the start of their contract … Why participate in such a workshop? And how would we build this team to embody the  daily values we want to promote? 

Healthy and resilient bases

The participation in this workshop made it possible to lay strong relational bases and to anchor the collective consciousness that the transition is both an inner and an outer process. It also helps us continually because we know that we can give and receive the support necessary for each one of us in the group. This wish for consistency and resilience has also led us to ask the following question: Can we really bring about change by replicating mechanisms of the dominant culture that pushes us to do more and more, faster and faster?

The truth is that it is so difficult to take the time to slow down, while the challenges we face seem so huge … Balance is hard to attain and we really experience this difficulty every day while trying to reach it.

We wish to apply these rules in our work both within our group and in the relationship with the initiatives we support. We are careful not to overwhelm them with our questions and projects, which could just exhaust them. An appeal has been launched and we have identified some people that are available to give us feedback. All initiatives were also contacted in order to see where they are standing at the moment. Four subregional networking meetings between local initatives are planned for the end of January. This will be a great opportunity to raise awareness , build positive collaboration and improve the structure of the network in our region.

However, resilience is also built in other areas , with the following question: how to secure funding in order to develop a vision and actions in the medium and long term? 

What projects?

Our idea is to start small, to sow abundantly and see how every plant, every tree, will adapt to its context. To identify those who grow more easily and help initiatives to grow in good conditions.

For example, after the ” Inner Transition” training with Sophy in London, we started two pilot Inner Transition groups , inspired by the “Macy Mondays ” set up by Debbie Warrener in London. These groups are active in Ath and Liège, but are open to people working in other transition initiatives. In a second step, we will create work sheets and practical training will be set up for those wishing to start other groups.

Another of our actions in progress is the development of a training system, inspired by the model of the Transition Network. Several members of Transition initiatives in our region participated in the last Train the Trainers Training which took place in Belgium, end of last year.  We are modeling the trainings to adapt the content to our particular cultural context and the analysis of the needs we had carried out. Besides the “Launch” and “Thrive” trainings, we are developing trainings on group dynamics, inner Transition, permaculture and transition, the ability to speak in public, collective intelligence, and so on.

We also identified three projects that will be developed as pilot projects with the aim to make them replicable models for other initiatives:

• The first is an association with Ath in Transition who adapted the Transition Streets program, inspired by the programs developed in Totnes (Uk) and Newcastle ( Autralia ). The adaptation was done by a team of volunteers and starts with three pilot groups in early 2014. The willingness of this group was to create a tool that can then be used in other french speaking initiatives. But the task is beyond the capabilities of a group of volunteer and the support team is now working with the group to scale up the project.
• Another very ambitious pilot project, which is  currently making its first steps, is the creation of an Energy Descent Action Plan in collaboration between a Transition Initiative and local authorities, linking the approach of the Covenant of Mayors at EU level, the Regional Transition Hub, the regional Government and Transition Network. We’ll get back to you with this project when it is a little more advanced.
• We are also in the process of identifiying a location for a Economic Blueprint pilot, and to develop our website to showcase the beautiful projects of initiatives, translate and adapt the ingredients of the Transition Companion to French (translation of Rob’s last book The Power of Just Doing Stuff is already underway by a Franco-Belgian group), and also produce several videos in French on various topics (how to start an initiative, resilient economy … ). And all that with the creation of a resilient and healthy culture as the main focus… 

But is all this realistic? Are we being too or not enough ambitious? And would it really support the evolution of our transition initiatives ? 

Stay at our place

We remember regularly (and I am personally very attentive to this) that our role is rather to catalyse than to develop a lot of projects by ourselves. They must be able to be disseminated and replicated without being dependent on the support team. In this sense, we must design for our own obsolescence. Because if one day there was no more funding for a support team, or better, it would not really be necessary anymore, it will be important that initiatives can continue their way without us.

For this reason, we are not a “secretariat” of the initiatives or for the network, that would eventually become indispensable and could thus “capture” the initiative of volunteers. Our current position is rather beside the initiatives and network. We are not the Transition Network Wallonia-Brussels, which is currently being co-created together with the local initiatives. We are here to support, observe what is happening and act modestly and organically. Our role is not to force things to always go faster, but to provide appropriate support where they could get better.

Read more»

21 Jan 2014

Les Robinson on Changeology, scaling up, and solutions that "stick"

I realised that, when I adopted new behaviours in my own life, I was choosing behaviours that I thought bettered my life and which felt safe and controllable. Reasons didn’t seem to matter much, it was more about imagination, about being able to visualize myself living a dream. So this was the start of the journey of discovery that led to Changeology.

I currently have my own business training change makers in project design, and work with practically every kind of state agency, local government and NGOs.

Changeology is a good hard look at what the last 40 years of scholarship, activism and practice have taught us about influencing the human behaviour at the scale of groups and communities.

I wanted to make it really useful for practitioners, so it’s packed with ideas and inspiring examples.

I realised that five success factors tend to be built into successful change efforts, no matter what the scale:

First, the buzz was right. People were talking, in a positive, empowered way, about the new behaviour, idea or product.

Second, the new behaviour was about scratching people’s itches, letting them overcome frustrations in their lives, becoming healthier, closer, stronger, safer, increasing their autonomy and control of the details of their lives and also adding to their self-esteem.

Third, the new behaviour was easy to understand and do. Design for convenience is vital if you want to move beyond the totally committed. The new behaviour should be an easy fit for people’s complicated lives.

Fourth, successful change projects paid great attention to helping people manage the perceived risks of change. Change is scary. People who ride bikes, for example, tend to discount the fears of those who don’t. We always need to focus on expanding people’s comfort zones so they feel safe, especially from the possibility of humiliation if they don’t get it right the first time. Fortunately there are lots of ways to do this, which I cover in the book.

Fifthly, change is like a dinner party. Even if you are all dressed to go, someone has to invite you along. Finding the right inviter – someone who is passionate, similar, respected, connected, and powerless – matters greatly.

Changeology is about how we, as practitioners, go about activating these five ingredients in our projects.

Typically, early adopters are 20% or so of a social system. If you have a good idea, getting them involved is often pretty easy because they are already looking for advantages in their lives, businesses, farms etc and they have the resources and confidence to put new ideas into practice. “Crossing the chasm” to involve the rest of a social system is much trickier.

What seems to make the difference is having the courage to put aside your Version 1.0 that worked well with the first 20% and take the risk of redesigning a Version 2.0 that’s specifically suited to people with fewer resources, less time and less interest in the reasons you think are important. Instead of, for example, focusing on the reason (climate change), you would aim to get people adopting energy efficient products simply because they work really well and fit people’s lives (and look cool too). This calls on us to think like designers, becoming immersed in people’s lives, imaginatively inventing solutions to their problems, and getting used to “rapid prototyping” our ideas, whether the idea is a garden party or a solar cell. And then discard our Version 2.0 for an equally risky and experimental Version 3.0. 

Well, yes, “compromise”, unfortunately, is probably the right term. Grass roots movements like Transition often carry a big burden of ideology and missionary purism. We can be so focused on the big picture, and so desperately want others to see the world as we do, that we unintentionally create the resistance we so despise. No one wants to be told how to live their lives and the human capacity for resistance is infinite. The more we pressure people, inadvertently or not, the more they push back.

For example, if we want someone to use an alternative to the car, “messaging” the disadvantages of driving will only create resistance. Instead we need to promote solutions that get people to where they want to go faster than driving. That’s because people hate spending time in transit. If we want a transport solution to spread, it has to be rapid. Without a solution that actually works, no form of communication will make any difference.

Pretty much similar considerations apply to every new idea. If we want people to join a Transition group, for example, it has to be more fun, sociable, buzz-worthy and personally rewarding than the thing they would otherwise be doing with their discretionary time.

People really only listen to each other, so the experience of a new idea is what really sells it. That new behaviour has to be a credible, buzz-worthy pathway to WHAT PEOPLE WANT, not just to what we want. The question we need to ask is not “How do we convince people?” but “How can we hand people, on a platter, a credible answer to their real life frustrations (while also tackling our environmental problem)?” This kind of thinking calls for a lot of empathy, imagination and flexibility in change makers.

Well, the most important things are about how you set up your project BEFORE you start strategizing.

SECOND, don’t do any strategizing until you have got on Google for a week and prepared a briefing for your brains trust, that exposes it to unexpected solutions from around the world, as well as a good knowledge about the community you’re working with. Now is also a good time to do some interviews, focus groups or observational research to better understand your community.

THIRD, once you start strategizing together, make space for wacky ideas (they’ll end up being the best ones) by having fun, playing with toys, or Lego, or wearing party hats, and so on. It’s only by mucking around in this space that you can be really creative.

Then, of course, there’s other things good change managers do…listen for inspiring stories, keep your eyes peeled for great grass-roots advocates, figure out what you want to measure, collect results as you go, stay in touch with supporters, and so on.

In the book I argue that ideas like “tipping point” and “critical mass” are delusions because no one solution suits everyone in a social system. What suits the first 20% will have to be reinvented for the next 20%, and so on. It’s really about continuous reinvention, not just reaching a magic percentage with your existing iteration and then sitting back and waiting for your idea to conquer all.

People change because they’re not satisfied with their lives. Things feel wrong. A solution appears. They try it. It works or it doesn’t. Sometimes it’s a purely personal thing: taking more walks, quitting smoking. Sometimes it’s a chance to be the kind of person who makes a difference: donating time to a Transition project.

This is critical. Too many change projects proceed with no clear idea about why they might succeed. A Theory of Change is a simple, testable statement about why you think your project will work. It can be as simple as “IF parents observe good parenting techniques AND IF parents have a chance to discuss parenting together THEN parents will adopt better parenting techniques.” This statement is the theory of your project and your project is an experiment that tests and improves the theory. It explains what you believe you need to do to be successful in your unique situation. I suggest that change makers spend a lot more time getting clarity about their Theories of Change before they start their projects, using their brains trusts and Google searches to get ideas from around the world about what might work, then reducing it to a simple version to try in your particular situation. No Theory of Change can be perfect of course. It’s always a hunch based on the best information available to you and your brains trust, with a pinch of imagination thrown in.

Be visible. Develop a reputation for fun and sociability. Be the solution to needs your communities have that are unrelated to climate change. Be wacky and celebrate each time you break one of your own unspoken rules. Spend time feeling great about what you’ve done and don’t be afraid to share what inspires you about the work you do. Create delight. Seriously, it’s delight that carries stories and hopes along social networks. I think we ought to develop a Delight Index and only run projects that break 8/10.

Buzz or conversation is the carrier wave of change. In the book I explain how surprise and delight drive stories along social networks on a wave of peer-peer buzz. But buzz alone doesn’t make change. It’s just the carrier. You need to pay attention to the other four factors I mentioned above: make sure you’re scratching people’s itches, make it easy, make it safe, and find the right inviter. Get all four right and there’s a very good chance you’ll see new behaviours spread. And then to sustain the buzz, you’ll always need to find new ways to surprise people, which means continually upturning their stereotypes about, for instance, what Transition groups get up to. And that means surprising ourselves…a delightful challenge that, again, puts our own imaginations and flexibility to the fore!

You’ve been writing about playfulness lately, how does that help?

Beginners are often the most creative thinkers and the most successful change makers. It’s about seeing the world afresh, like children with “beginners minds”.  The simplest way to think like a child is to practice playfulness.

I’ve been experimenting with different methods in workshops lately. I discovered the most striking increase in group creativity simply by giving people party hats to wear. And kids games, like Who’s afraid of Mr Wolf? work well. I’ve made it a rule that every person has to come up with at least one ludicrous idea and I’ve offered prizes for the wackiest ideas. Even just using coloured paper makes a difference. I’ve also been giving each group a supply of Lego to play with while they’re thinking. My next experiment will be to supply each table with a pile of my 4-year old’s plastic toys and figures to play with while they’re strategizing. These methods are simple, but their effect on creativity is amazing. Of course it’s all a little unfamiliar and somewhat confronting for hard-headed activists, but if we can’t change ourselves, how can we expect others to change?

Les’s website has lots of ideas and resources for change makers.

Read more»