28 Feb 2014
I was born in 1933 so my upbringing involved all those things associated with a wartime economy, food, clothes and petrol rationing all these things seemed natural and worth doing to achieve a result. Also I don’t remember feeling deprived! In 1944 I went to a Quaker school to study for School Certificate (the last one I think) and then on to another Quaker school for A Levels. Although I never absorbed the religion bit I think this education gave me a strong moral background and a habit of questioning rather than accepting (government policies for instance).
My mother was active in CND and I went with her on part of the Aldermaston march. She was also very active in Oxfam and helped set up and run one of their shops. I have supported them and similar charities ever since.
After National Service I worked as an Ordnance Surveyor for a couple of years before joining the LCC as a trainee Structural Engineer. I met my wife in London and after qualifying we decided to move to Bristol where I spent my career working for a Consulting Engineer and living in Long Ashton where we are still. I recall that during my career I was always much happier designing schools, hospitals and other building which I could see were ‘worthwhile’ rather than the office blocks and multi-storey car parks of which we did quite a few.
It was not until I retired in 2003 that I really got interested in renewable energy though I remember being pleased that my father had some shares in ‘The Wind Fund’ well before that (I have since added to those shares in what is now the Triodos Bank ‘Renewable Energy Fund’. Shortly after retiring I built my own solar water heating system on the thermo-syphon principle (no electricity needed!). I later installed a PV system as well as upgrading all the home insulation.
Why have I not yet mentioned Transition you may be wondering? The reason is that now I am involved in it I have come to realize that it has in a sense ‘brought me full circle’ as so many of the things we did when I was a child which were done to help defeat Hitler we are now doing under the Transition banner to combat climate change, environmental degradation and excessive use of fossil fuel. In the long term I think the problems we have brought on ourselves since the end of the war by over-consumption may be even more serious than that war.
I had heard and approved of what you were doing at Totnes and as a result of a number of casual conversations with friends and neighbours of like mind we decided to launch Transition Long Ashton. Since then I have been Hon. Treasurer on the Core Group and active in the Energy Group, Community Agriculture Group, Village Market etc, although now I am 80 I am stepping back a bit. As a result of Transition my wife and I have got to know a whole lot of interesting people that we had no contact with before and I think helped make our village a better place to live.
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27 Feb 2014
I had been hanging around the periphery of Transition Town Tooting for a while, attending the occasional meeting and event, but without really absorbing what it was about. There was (to my uneducated mind) a sense of community, and of being responsible for your surroundings.
There were of course some really genuine and lovely people having fun doing what they were doing. And there was usually food.
I had dropped into the last hours of the Trashcatchers Carnival set-up of 2010 to have a look and lend a hand. My friend Hilary Jennings had asked me along and had been banging on about this event and TTT since she co-founded it with Lucy Neal in 2008, so I thought I’d show my face. The next thing I knew, I had been recruited as a steward for the Carnival the next day, which is how I found myself joining a few hundred people parading down a sunny Tooting High Street on a Saturday, tasked with keeping a group of children (dressed and dancing fantastically in Indian garb) a safe distance from the giant mechanical turtle in front of them.
Having been born and bred in south-west London and having spent most of my life here, I’d never experienced this oddity before – a real sense of community, an event to which so many people had come together to highlight the growing problem of climate change, and to have a great time celebrating their community whilst doing so. Plus, they had all donated their free time towards organising it. This was something I definitely wanted to be a part of. And even now, over three years later, I can’t help but smile like a loon thinking about that wonderful day.
The Trashcatchers Carnival propelled me to attend more meetings and events and take over the running of the Tooting Foodival last year (after Giles Read had done such an amazing job). If the Trashcatchers sparked my interest, then the Foodival cemented it – we receive donated food grown in people’s gardens, allotments and window boxes and get it cooked by local restaurants. This is served, for free, to the community, with music, games and competitions, and the event spans a whole weekend. In this way we promote and celebrate locally-grown and cooked food, whilst highlighting the diversity of Tooting and, once again, have a brilliant time doing it. We’re already gearing up for Foodival 2014 in September!
I’ve also branched out as a volunteer in the TTT Community Garden with local school kids, plus I take an active role in FoodCycle Wandsworth. I’ve changed my career from graphic design to community events management, an occupation which I absolutely love, as it allows me to engage with the community (yes, there’s that word yet again) and spend my time (hopefully) effecting positive environmental and social change on a local level.
And to think, none of this would’ve happened without that giant turtle…
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26 Feb 2014
The most commonly asked question I’ve heard from Transition initiatives that have been going a while is
“How can we get people who come to our events, to start taking on responsibility, so our initiative can grow and those of us at the centre don’t get exhausted?”
A crucial part of the answer is managing the shift from the initial burst of energy that gets something going to a later wave of people who carry it forward. In the Transition model there’s an explicit moment for this – when the “initiating group” hands over to a new structure. But this shift is about much more than structure – it’s also about the founders letting go of the reins, and the organisation finding a way to change its culture and vision.
My first powerful learning about this was in my football team – where I was one of the founding group, who, after many years of keeping the club true to the original radical vision, were ousted by an informal “coup” of newer women who thought there was such a thing as “just playing football”. In Transition Network we managed the shift more elegantly – and it took a time and energy to do so.
Many recognise this shift as a make or break stage for projects in all sectors from personal growth movements to private businesses. One part of it – where the founders find it hard to let go – is called “Founder syndrome” and I found a lot of writing on it (mainly in theUSA) when I googled this term. Transition is no different – so this post shares some of my experience of rough and smooth journeys, and offers further writing and a one day tailored workshop to support groups going through this phase.
Moving beyond the first wave – the hard way…
In 1986 while swimming in the local pool I was invited to join a local women’s football team – a new club playing 5 a side for the summer. A year later a small group of us decided to keep the team going as an 11-a-side team in the Greater London Women’s league. In the late heyday of equal opportunites (the inclusive Greater London Council under Ken Livingstone had just been axed by Margaret Thatcher) we were committed to being a welcoming space for women who were lesbian, black, working class and as far as possible, with disabilities. We had the most pro-equalities constitution I’ve ever seen, a positive celebratory culture – criticising each other on the pitch was not part of our game – and a collective way of working, electing officials each year and holding meetings where all had a say.
We were soon well known as the first “out” football club, and our upbeat style attracted many women who loved the buzz, or were fed up of homophobic attitudes in other clubs. We got promoted, won a cup, and grew to form a second team. Several years on everything looked great. But there were rumblings in the team about “the powerful ones” – those of us whose voices seemed to carry a lot of weight in meetings, who knew all the history – and who made sure stuff happened, and were the back up for new women stepping up to take on management roles within the club.
In 1994 we ran racism awareness training for club members, following complaints by black women about the behaviour of some other members of the team. Some of the newer women didn’t want to take part, weren’t interested in exploring their attitudes. We had some very charged meetings. A number of black women left. The team started to polarise into those who wanted to water down the original vision and those who didn’t. A year later a whole group of us, many of the founders and others who agreed with us, left. We set up another team – which was really picky about who joined, and so was often short of players! And I’m happy to say we played into our retirement due to old age, or until work or home commitments made it impossible to keep the weekly commitment going.
The original club is still going strong, and looking back I can see that we founders needed to leave and let the team find its own way, though it was painful at the time. In 2007 several of the founders were invited to speak (and sing) at their 21st birthday party. It was a joyful event, and a great way of healing any left over feelings about what had happened. I feel proud that the club is still thriving, with some of its original qualities – and that it had the energy and confidence to find its way in spite of the resistance of the old guard!
Moving beyond the first wave in Transition Network
I joined Transition Network six months after it was started, when Naresh and I created the first two day workshop on Transition – now called Transition: Launch. It had many of the classic characteristics of a successful start up. It was dynamic, informal, responsive – a lot got done with very little time spent in meetings.
At some point – quite early on – we realised there was a bit of a hole at the centre. Everyone was focused on tasks and there was no paid post with a role coordinating what we were doing, managing staff, developing a strategy or ensuring that we were reflecting on and evaluating our work. Some board members stepped in and generously gave their time to help plug the gap, but had jobs and other commitments.
In 2009 we created the first “Awaydays” – two days where the staff and board came together and stepped back from the speedy pace of work to reflect on where we were, on roles and structure, major questions for the organisation or movement, and how we worked together.
As the organisation grew this regular time to review and reflect together became invaluable for the bigger conversations. We created six “strategic objectives” and thought about how much time we spent on them relative to our priorities. We looked at our styles as a team and noticed that we had lots of creative innovators and very few people interested in monitoring or evaluating! We addressed the gender imbalance within the board by finding and actively inviting three new women to join. We explored the shift from Founders to the next generation, and what that might look and feel like.
All of this was helpful – but limited by the fact that it was no one’s role to develop or hold anything at the centre. We could make a decision about changing our way of working at the Awaydays but no one had the formal job of following it up. As Board members had become busier they had less time available to help out with staff management, and the gap at the centre became more obvious and problematic.
At the Awaydays in May 2012 the staff team and Trustees took a unanimous decision to restructure Transition Network to enable the Delivery Director role to be created and funded, even if that meant reducing other paid roles. It was a weighty decision to take, meaning that all our livelihoods could be affected.
The restructure took over a year, and resulted in the appointment of Sarah as Delivery Director, and Mike as Project Support coordinator. As well as paying attention to including people in the design and implementation of the new structure we spent time supporting the personal impacts of the process for staff. I believe this was essential in creating a process which not only avoided conflict, but actually brought the staff team closer together despite the fact that some lost paid hours, others gained, and new posts were created.
We are still feeling the impact of the changes put in place by the restructuring with both Sarah and Mike in post as Delivery Director and coordinating Project Support. We are working towards a strategy which helps us all to take good decisions about our work priorities, as well as (some of us) feeling the loss of freedom that comes with that – we can’t just follow our impulses! Both the what and the how of our work is changing, and I feel both excited and curious about where we’re going!
Reflection and Balance
There are two lessons which stand out for me as I reflect on these two journeys.
The first is the absolute necessity for time to pause and reflect together. In Transition Network this started with Awaydays, and we have now created space within staff and board meetings for this. It means prising away some time from the need to Do Stuff and making space to share experiences, enquires and learning about the structure, culture and activities of the organisation itself. I’m realising increasingly that this ability for self reflection and self awareness is the foundation of health – the ability of any human system to feel into its current state, and take action to change things when necessary.
The second learning is about the need for balance between contrasting qualities. It’s a learning which came back again and again during my first years of involvement with Transition Town Totnes, to avoid “either / or” thinking and find a way to “both / and”. Not Creativity or Structure, but a good balance of both. NotIndependenceor Collaboration but both in good measure. Founders are often dynamic, active, fast, independent – almost by definition because that’s the energy that gets things started – and they may not even see the need for people who are different. Smart ones will – and the truly wise will be actively seeking and inviting those with the steadier energy which creates enduring projects and really making them feel welcomed and valued when they turn up!
So there are my thoughts about one aspect of the shift from energetic start up to a stable enduring presence. Below, and in the linked documents, are some more specific suggestions for Transition initiatives based on the experience of many other groups. I wish you balance, space for reflection, and smooth transitions of all kinds!
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Moving from Initiating phase to Established Transition Initiative
Here are the headlines from the piece on making the shift to a Transition Initiative with a sustainable future!
- How to seed theme groups and practical projects – and what to do if they don’t start.
- Evolving the Core. the original version of Transition in “12 steps” asked the Initiating Group to plan its demise! Can life go on when the first phase is over…?
- Designing the new Structure
- Managing the culture Shift to the second generation
- Bringing in New People
- The “Donut” shaped initiative – all projects and no centre!
So if any of these themes appeal to you, download it here.
Revitalise your Transition Initiative!
One day of support from Transition Network…
If your Transition Initiative has been going for a while, feels a bit stuck or in difficulty this might be for you! Would you like a day facilitated by someone from outside to help you create a space for reflection, refocusing and re-invigoration?
We can offer a limited number of these to run after April 2014.
For more information please contact Sophy at innertransition@transitionnetwork.org
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25 Feb 2014
In 2012, an article in Troy Media entitled How Transition is starting to rebuild Ontario looked at the 30 Transition initiatives underway in the province. The author, Bruce Stewart, wrote:
“For Ontario, the Transition movement has the potential to do what it’s done in the UK: be the engine to rally a new, relocalised, vibrant and sustainable economy, and communities with staying power in tough times”.
Today we visit one of those initiatives, Transition Town Peterborough, and discuss with Cheryl Lyon (see above right, standing), a volunteer with the group, how the group resources its work, and how it thinks about resources in different ways. I started by asking here to give a potted history of Peterborough Transition?
“Our founder was Fred Irwin. He took the Transition Training in Totnes around 2006. He was, for a while, a kind of single champion of the concept of Transition before it got any kind of traction here. He’s a very exuberant and personable person with perhaps an odd combination to be working in Transition Town. He came from a very high level business background in Fortune 500 Companies, Canadian, American and international and also worked in the oil industry.
I think his enthusiasm for the topic caught on with some people and we formed a nucleus of Transition Town volunteers here. Probably our highest profile initiative is around economic localisation. But we also do a very successful, now going into our fourth year, celebration of local culture called the Purple Onion Festival which is our most public event.
[Here is a short video about the Festival].
This brings together our farmers and townspeople, local artisans, entertainers, complementary health practitioners, and anyone that has a connection to the local economy.
In terms of resources, we got about a $3000 grant from the city. We’re hoping to find out before the end of this month whether we’ll get it again this year. Other than that, we don’t have a lot of money. The festival itself which attracted maybe 4-500 people and is really good for the town, made a profit of $10! There were in kind donations from many contributors: the local Downtown Business Association, Green Up, a local organisation, there’s a long list of them.
For the group, do you find you’ve reached a stage where you feel you need to bring in more financial resources for what you do, or is that something that’s not really a concern? Are you able to do everything you need to do just with good will and volunteer support?
So far that’s gone a long way, but we don’t have enough volunteers to do the things we want to do. The volunteers we have are working very hard. We could use what we would call “a backbone organisation”, funding for someone who would be on top of everything all day. Building relationships, writing the grants, making the necessary connections. So far all of that is being done voluntarily.
I should mention another one of our signature high profile things. It’s our ‘Greenzine’. That’s a free magazine. It’s published in a run of about 5,000 and our volunteers distribute it through places like libraries and businesses, and the volunteers take it around.
It’s funded through the advertising. Here’s a little coup from this last couple of weeks. We have a Mitsubishi car dealership in town and it agreed to take up to $5,000 dollars in our local currency towards the purchase of a car, and they have the back page of advertising in our Greenzine. So that was a real boost to the profile of the local currency.
With the exception of money, what do you feel have been the key resources in what you’ve been doing? What have been the resources you’ve been able to harness?
One of the key ones is our first banking agent for our local currency which is called the Kawartha Loon. Kawartha is the general name for this area. One of our credit unions, the Peterborough Community Credit Union handles our local currency. You can go in there and exchange it for a Canadian dollar and they will hold that Canadian dollar in reserve for us. So that’s been a local partnership of great importance to us. The goodwill and income contributions are huge and have gone a long way.
For the publishing of the Greenzine, the chair of our board publishes two other publications and we can use those resources for the publication of the Greenzine.
If you were thinking ahead to being able to really scale up the impact of the group, what resources do you think, financial or otherwise, you would need in order to make that happen?
Let me use an example of another one of our initiatives. Perhaps we can get an answer to that this way. Besides the local currency, one of the things that Transition Town Peterborough is trying to bring forward is establishing what we call a Public Trust. This is a vehicle for scaling up local investment in localisation. I’ll take a moment to describe that.
The Canadian Dollar reserve that will be built up as people exchange their money for the local currency will be the catalyst or seed for a much larger body dedicated to investing in local initiatives for instance in renewable energy. Sourcing the manufacture of those energies locally. Creating businesses, new jobs out of that, investing in local business support or start-ups through micro loans.
But the scale of that needs municipal investment. We have 2 levels of government here, city and county. We have put together a proposal for a feasibility study to be funded by the local municipalities to investigate their participation in it using local taxes invested in it. For instance, we need to investigate some of the legal implications of these municipalities.
We need to research what any restrictions are in the lease of municipal dollars in such an initiative and also what are the priorities for that kind of investment. We are trying to do that through the Transition Towns membership in what’s called the Community Sustainability Plan Co-Ordinating Committee.
In order to get our municipal share, we needed to come up as a community with a comprehensive sustainability plan. That was done at some considerable expense with both the local contribution, provincial and federal – we have a three tier government here. Groups in the community, businesses, volunteer groups, anybody can join that table of the sustainability plan. We joined as a very early member on the champion level which is the very highest level of membership and I sit as the representative of Transition Town at that table.
We brought forward the request for their support to take this feasibility study forward to our municipal council because this is a municipally sponsored committee. And it hasn’t gone anywhere yet. So two of our volunteers are working at speaking with their individual city councillors and getting some introduction of the idea so that if we reach the stage of bringing this forward as a staff report to our local municipality it will have some traction.
So that’s typical of the kind of work that volunteers have to do. It’s also representative of an example of scaling up to where we can get committed municipal involvement and investment in this.
We also work at supporting local farmers and we are actually involved in initiating a food study through that Sustainable Peterborough Table, scaling up local production of food from 5% to 25%. Transition Town led that initiative and there is a volunteer involved with that.
Having been active doing Transition now for some time in your community, what do you regard as being the most important resources that the community now has as a result of what you’ve been doing that it maybe didn’t have before?
Our community has this core of volunteers who seem to be hanging in there and are taking the message of Transition wherever they go. We have this high profile Purple Onion Festival each September which seems to attract more and more people every year, and in a very joyful celebratory way shows why Transition is a good thing.
Gradually, through the persistent requests to the city for funding or for things like attention to the Public Trust idea, we are spreading the idea of the challenges of climate change, peak oil and economic contraction and what can be done about it in a very positive and constructive way.
The local currency is attracting more and more attention. We’re holding two events, one in March, ‘Buy Local, Live Local’, where we get local businesses to exhibit and help spread the word. Then our ‘Dandelion Day’ in May with local alternative health practitioners. For both of those events, any entrance fee or any spending will be done in the local currency.
We have a meet up once a month, we’re just doing this for the third time, in a local pub where anyone is welcome to come and we have a long list of maybe 3,000 emails where we spread this word.
We have the interest of the business community in the form of that local dealership which is probably the highest profile business which will accept the Kawartha Loon. There are other businesses and we know they talk to each other and they network. We were invited, a couple of weeks ago to a local business event sponsored by the Chamber of Commerce.
We didn’t have a lot of businesses coming up to us and saying “gee, tell us what Transition Town is all about” but at least we were there and we had profile. It was perhaps a little discouraging to see how wedded to the endless growth model business as usual style is in our local community. It’s a fairly conservative community and this different model of doing business based on a local currency and wealth sharing rather than simply wealth accumulation is a challenge.
[In case you wanted to listen to the podcast of this interview, here it is].
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24 Feb 2014
I was lucky to grow up during the much maligned 70s when we learnt so much about how to deal with what the future might bring. I heard and read Schumacher. I drew the peak oil curve for myself. Then I became an actor and director. In 1999 I did a permaculture course which was a homecoming for me. Climate change campaigning was occupying me more and more and in 2006 I went to the first Climate Camp at Drax Power Station and decided I had to make climate my front-line activity. I went straight on to the Permaculture Convergence where someone called Rob Hopkins was to be talking about peak oil.
I wanted to tell Permaculturists that while peak oil would be deeply awkward, climate change had the potential to alter the habitability of the planet. In a tent in a windy field in Dorset I was very excited by the seeds of Transition, but it took me 6 months of watching, reading, thinking before I was ready to go the Lambeth Climate Action Groups that I’d set up and suggest we should be Transition Town Brixton. It has been my life ever since.
The visionary starting point of Transition changes the chemistry and life becomes working towards something we agree we really want rather than fighting against nonsense. Once you have been part of a few visioning processes (and ideally a few projects that have brought a vision to fruition) the local landscape becomes loaded with beautiful, productive, cooperative, connecting possibilities.
Permaculture has been described as ‘revolution disguised as organic gardening’, which reveals its historically rather land-based orientation. I describe it as ‘designing and working with the powers that operate’. On land-based projects this was primarily nature. But in the ‘anthropocene’, the age of human influence, human nature, psychology, group dynamics, ‘people care’ become at least as important. And in trying to make a movement that could engage 9 billion people in developing a better new paradigm to supersede the old nonsense, Transition is revolutionary. We are changing the common sense. Governments will ultimately follow where we lead.
We Unleashed gloriously in 2008, with a dozen groups presenting for 2 minutes on their visions and plans. In 2009 the Brixton Pound was launched and we held a series of workshops and an open space day on the Future of Our Food which spawned several amazing offshoots. In 2010 we opened The Community Shop and Brixton Skill Share and TTB Community Draught Busters started. In 2011 the Remakery Brixton started preparing to convert an unused undercroft garage space to Brixton’s reuse centre and the first UK pay-by-text currency was launched by B£.
In 2012 Brixton Energy installed 2 large community-owned solar arrays on community housing. 2013 saw another array go live and the establishment of Repowering London to help other local energy projects get going. We produced to REconomy project reports for Lambeth on the benefits of localising the food and energy sectors of the economy and in 2014 we continue to work to make this reality.
I am privileged to have met and worked with amazing people through these seven years. It has been a privilege to be part of the early journey of Transition. It is the best place to work.
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