21 Feb 2014
While getting my Master’s degree I studied our planet’s rising greenhouse gas levels, including their implications to the health of our natural resources and climate. After graduating I worked for a nonprofit for a while, gave birth to twins, and then suffered a major health setback. For years I was up to my eyes in diapers, wooden blocks, and restaurant take-away boxes. After a while I began to feel better. I began to do some of the things I used to do, like ride my bike and walk. I read books and journal articles. And then I pretty much freaked out.
It was now several years after getting my Master’s, and I realized that with respect to our greenhouse gas levels, AGW, and everything those problems entailed, we – my city, my country, my planet – weren’t much better off than we had been at the turn of the century. In many ways, in fact, we were much worse off. And as much as we tried to find an equivalent substitute, nothing we had yet found was as energy dense and easily portable as oil.
We needed to prepare for upcoming changes to our natural resources and agricultural systems. We needed resilient built environments and smart transportation infrastructure. For the sake of the health of our bodies, communities, and economies, we needed to make changes at every level. But what was taking so long?
Smart People (whoever and wherever they are) were working on our problems but there just was so much to do. I wondered what kind of future my children would inherit. Whatever it was going to be, I wanted to work to make it better. But what would I – a homeschooling parent of twins, with a wonky brain, who regularly burns dinner – realistically be able to do?
I consulted our modern-day Oracle: Google.
Google pointed me toward the Transition Network. From there, I found something called Transition US. And from there, I found something called Transition Houston. Houston? That’s where I live! I checked out the group’s web page. Local food? Reskilling? Alternative energy? I’d found my people!
I began going to meetings and with the core team’s encouragement helped launch the Transportation Action Group (TAG). Our local transportation infrastructure was a major interest for my family and I. In our neighborhood we could observe first hand the advantages of denser neighborhoods and all the disadvantages of heavy auto traffic through those same spaces. We could experience the pleasures of walking and cycling to errands, and the difficulties of doing so in a city designed primarily for the automobile.
We decided to start the TAG off with a series of activities focused on the bicycle. Bikes are an appropriate technology for transportation here. Much of Houston is too spread out for walking, and public transportation doesn’t reach everywhere we need to go. A lot of people here own bicycles (even if they never really use them), so the TAG held events so we learned how to fix our bikes up, and how to ride them safely. Two representatives from the bus system came and showed us how to use the on-bus bike carriers so we could use buses with our bikes for long journeys. We learned a lot, and had a good time.
But we needed to do more. Children, like my twins, remind us to live in the present moment. But they also remind us to heed the future. What do they need to thrive in the world they’re going to inherit? We want them to feel the embrace of community and friends. And we want them to feel capable and flexible and unafraid of change – even when it comes to transportation. We decided that Houston’s children needed to learn how to ride bikes, too, and see them as normative.
Unfortunately few adults cycle in this city, though many have bikes hanging in their garages. Our marshy soil and rainy climate ensure that streets and sidewalks often buckle, crack, and pit, making them difficult to travel upon. Traffic can be intimidating, especially for those who haven’t learned how to navigate their bikes from within the traffic lanes. Cars whiz by – residential neighborhood speeds default at 30mph (48 km/h) and on many residential streets, like mine, cars travel even faster.
It’s no wonder that many families are afraid to go out on bikes – or even on foot – with their children. But the problem is this: If families don’t feel safe going out on foot or by bike, then how would the children learn to confidently travel to school, the grocery, or the post office in anything other than a car? If families don’t go out, would they ever demand safe cycling facilities? And if they didn’t demand those facilities, would the city and state ever build them? We as a city cannot learn to be resilient with our transportation options if we can’t even fathom the possibilities.
So we decided to step up with two citywide bike events for families in two years. The events included dozens of volunteers, with dozens more participants from across the city. The second event was much larger than the first – we noted the enthusiasm of entire families at the first event, and wanted to offer further support and opportunities to learn. “Let her do it!” my daughter, then eight years old, wrote to my husband on a chalkboard after he doubted the wisdom of the second event. “IT IS GOOD.”
The second event was September 2013, a year after the first. Now, in February 2014, Houston hasn’t magically grown a network of greenways, bike boulevards, and protected bike lanes. Its streets and sidewalks are still often broken and difficult to use. Cars still go too fast. Sometimes they pass too close. Cyclists are injured too frequently, often with little punishment to the driver. Sometimes the cyclist dies.
But we remember the smiles at those bike events. We remember the families and volunteers eager to try something new, because they knew it was good. We remember the support, and the collective vision of a safer, healthier, more resilient way. We remember showing our city that Transition Houston was about positive change, and joy. “We’re doing this next year, right?” participants asked as we packed up to go home.
We were happy. And hopeful.
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20 Feb 2014
Today Transition Network launches the first version of our Funding Primer (“Tips, suggestions and advice for getting your Transition group’s projects funded”). We hope you find it useful. Originally developed for the Transition Thrive training, it offers an overview of approaches and options for Transition initiatives seeking funding for their work. On the date of its publication we thought it would be useful to catch up with Nicola Hillary, Transition Network’s Funding Manager and author of the Primer, to hear her advice on funding, how best to approach that all important funding application form and what it is that funders are REALLY looking for.
A good place to start is with this podcast of last week’s first ‘Transition Conversations’ webinar, “Getting Ready to Fundraise”, featuring Nicola alongside Tina Clarke, which gives a great grounding and foundation around funding.
Nicola, what’s your sense of what a Transition initiative should have in place before it should consider submitting funding applications?
If you want to apply to charitable trusts, lottery or any kind of “grant scheme” you will need to be a formally constituted organisation. For the majority of charitable trusts, you can’t apply unless you are a registered charity. However there are some which will accept applications from other types of non-profit organisation, as will the lottery, and other grant schemes such as the Co-operative Community Fund.
If you are going for community fundraising, the form of your constitution – if any – is much less important. Your track record is really important to a funder, both in achievements and in financial records. So if you don’t already, start getting annual sets of accounts. And have ready at your fingertips lists of your work and achievements, feedback and other evidence of the difference you have made.
There are some more subtle things your group should think about beforehand too – as soon as money comes into the equation there are interesting decisions about who gets paid, priorities for expenditure. It would be very helpful to talk these things through beforehand, be open and clear about how the group is going to make these decisions both fairly and effectively. A session where people can speak freely about their feelings, positive and negative, about the changes funding would bring, would be helpful.
In the Funding Primer you suggest a ‘Best Bet First’ approach when identifying who to apply to for funding. What do you mean by that?
You’ve got limited time and you need to tailor each application to the specific funder; so you have to make a choice who to apply to first, and therefore its got to be the “best bet”, the one most likely to give you the most funding. This is a combination of how well you meet the criteria, the level of competition, the amount of funding on offer… and it is a subjective judgement.
I would regard the level of competition as really important here – so Awards for All is going to give you reasonable chances of success, whereas Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, even though what you do is a closer fit with their criteria, is very highly competitive and therefore not the most likely to give you funding. A charitable trust or grant scheme that funds only your local area is going to be less competitive, it just won’t have so many people applying; so it is a good bet, even if it is only low amounts on offer.
Of course if you find the holy grail of a funder whose criteria feel like you wrote them yourself AND they fund large amounts of money AND they will be making so many grants that everyone has a reasonable chance – drop everything and apply at once!
The temptation may be to rush in to large funding bids, but you argue that there are advantages to the smaller fundraising approaches, promises auctions, parties, that kind of thing. Why?
I once tried to help a relatively new group with fundraising – they were convinced that there was almost no point in doing their project if they couldn’t set off with a £100,000 budget. It was very hard to persuade them to think about starting much, much smaller. But the work was urgent and the world needed changing quickly. Of course, with virtually no official track record as an organisation, there was no funder anywhere who was going to fund an application for tens of thousands of pounds.
Imagine if they had been open to making an application for £1,000? Despite their impatience, I think it would have been transformational. It would have been a real budget, not a pipe-dream. There would have been some worthwhile piece of work that this would have made happen. It would start to build their track record. It would “buy time” while they applied for the next £1,000 or £2,000. It could have acted as match-funding to help in the next application. It would give them a relationship with a funder who might have been open to a second application. The project may have actually got off the ground – slower and smaller-scale than they wished, but with a chance of future growth.
Pitching the amount you ask for is always tricky. But bear in mind that it is much much easier for funders to say yes to lower amounts. Community fundraising approaches are really useful because they usually combine well with an awareness-raising or community-engagement activity, and your chances of gaining some money are good odds! And you won’t have any restrictions on how you spend the money and won’t have to write a report once you’ve spent it.
What are the dangers of bringing funding into a Transition group? Is there a risk that it will change the relationships of what had been a volunteer-based group in unexpected ways?
If the funding is to pay someone, then there are some negative feelings that could arise. For example some people might think “is there any point me volunteering any more if someone is being paid” or “will my voluntary effort be respected any more” or “I’ve put blood sweat and tears into setting this up and now someone else is going to get money out of it” many many interesting feelings…
Of course the whole point is the positive angle, that someone paid will have the time and energy to potentially increase the number of volunteers helping out, and an “original” volunteer may be freed from some of the work they were carrying and therefore avoid burn-out, and be able to concentrate on enjoyable aspects… Most important here is to find a session, process or discussion that will help people work through their feelings about the change; and work through the key aspects of how to make agreements, fair decisions and expectations.
It’s also worth thinking through what would happen if something goes wrong in spending the funding – for example what will happen if a paid person doesn’t do what they are meant to be doing? A group needs to think through who is going to provide direction and checks, or a light system to follow.
It’s also worth thinking about “exit strategy”. The funding will come to an end. Then there will be another period of change. Will people need to step up their volunteer input again? Will there be disempowering feelings of disappointment that the time of paid energy going into the Transition initiative is over? Is there an expectation of continuing fundraising effort for the work or not?
What are the ingredients of a successful funding application?
Think back to your school exam days, I’m afraid the principle is the same. Answer the question that the funder has asked, not the question that you want to answer!
Focus your needs: You should be clear about the needs you are meeting, and the real effect this is going to have in the world. Try at all times to see it from the funder’s eyes, rather than from your own. So you may think “we need a minibus!”. That’s the internal organisation way to see it. From the outside, funder view, you actually need a way to ensure that disadvantaged people can make it to your work-site, where they will be increasing the biodiversity of the site.
- Consistency and clarity: make sure you haven’t contradicted yourself in the application, it’s surprisingly easy to do, especially if your arguments aren’t as clear and logical as you can make them.
- Always be positive: it is easy to be too frank about shortcomings or weaknesses of your group, or some aspect of the work you’ve done. Try your utmost not to focus on negative aspects, and if you have to mention them, frame it in the most positive way possible. These things may loom large for you, but be virtually irrelevant to the “outside” viewer. If you do make any negative statements you can be sure they will leap out at a funder, and not in a good way.
- Get your numbers right: adding the budget up properly is handy too, and a potentially costly mistake – last minute changes don’t always filter through to the bottom line. (I’ve been there – ouch!) Get someone who isn’t cross-eyed with re-editing the application to do a final check with a calculator just before you send it!
Some may imagine that a funder is sat there with a pile of money, reluctant to part with it, and that our role is to somehow coax some cash from them. Can you give readers a sense of how it actually looks from the perspective of the funder? What are they looking for?
Funders are always “oversubscribed” with applications. If a funder receives 10 applications and funds 1 – that is actually good odds. Most of your chances will be worse than 1 in 10. Most funders are looking for:
- Something that REALLY 100% fits with the criteria about what they want to fund.
- Something innovative and a new approach (find a way to package what you are doing so that it IS innovative or new)
- Confidence in your competence as an organisation (track record is very important)
- Often, work that helps disadvantaged groups
- Often, something that will be transferable or replicable if it works
For larger funding bids, partnerships are often essential. Do you have any advice as to how to ensure that partnerships are successful?
Yes, and not only for larger funding bids. If you are not a registered charity, and you want to apply to a trust or foundation which only funds charities, then one way is to partner with an existing charity. This is not always straightforward, as the charity may wish to apply to that funder for their own work instead. But, if you can work out a genuine partnership project, or there really is no conflict with the charity’s own fundraising, then this can work well.
We have heard of cases where partnerships have not worked so well, because basically, a funder always has a contract with one organisation only. It may be a partnership project but the application comes to the funder from one organisation. This is the lead partner and they do have the final say about what goes in the application and the budget, and how the project proceeds.
Partnerships is a large subject all of its own! But some things that help are:
- Good communications – easier said than done.
- A situation where the partners are roughly speaking, benefiting fairly equally, even if they are different sorts of benefits. If this is not the case then there will be differing levels of motivation to make the project work, which could result in one partner having to push the other one to take action all the time, or having no power over changes.
- Having an enthusiastic and influential “champion” for your work, within the partner organisation.
The Transition Network Funding Primer can be downloaded here.
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19 Feb 2014
We recently posted Part One of our Transition Town Totnes Reunion, looking at what the resources were needed to get TTT up and running with strong foundations, and at what actually were the resources that were needed alongside funding. Today we post Part Two, which picks up the story from the end of 2007. It is important to note that there are many others who should have been part of this conversation: Jacqi Hodgson, Jill Tomalin, Robert Vint, Noni McKenzie, Lou Brown, Noel Longhurst, Hilary Prentice, Carole Whitty, Chris Bird, Adrian Porter and many many more. This second part was a fairly spontaneous thing, and it would be great at some point in the future to redo this one with more people (and a larger table!).
So this second video features Naresh Giangrande, Sophy Banks, Rob Hopkins and Fiona Ward from the first part, with the addition of Hal Gilmore and Frances Northrop, and beautifully chaired by Peter Redstone. We hope you enjoyed it.
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18 Feb 2014
While introducing funding to a Transition initiative is generally a good thing, unlocking previously unrealisable opportunities, it can sometimes go wrong. Today we share a cautionary tale from a Transition initiative which has asked to remain anonymous, which has useful insights for groups attracted to go after large funding opportunities. Our group, let’s call them ‘Transition Town Anywhere’ (TTA) heard through the grapevine that the a large national funder had a new funding stream focused on community resilience, and got very excited, seeing it as the opportunity to make a number of their Transition dreams a reality.
The fund required this to be a partnership project from the outset. So they contacted a number of key local organisations, who were very keen, and together they submitted an expression of interest, which to their amazement, and to great celebration, was accepted.
In spite of the excitement, it was here that the problems began. The funder insisted that the co-ordinating organisation must have “due diligence” in place, and insisted that they partner with an existing charity with at least two years of audited accounts. There were only two local charities that were suitable, and one of those was already committed to supporting another nearby Transition initiative’s bid to the same fund, so they were in a position of having to work with the one remaining charity.
There was already a bit of odd history with this charity. In the early days of TTA, when they were networking and giving presentations to local groups, they were invited to address their local county council, at an event at which this charity was also present. They made it clear that they felt TTA were encroaching on their “paid” area of work, which made bridge-building difficult.
The first sign of difficulties came when the charity, whose involvement thus far had been to field two phone calls, issued a press release to say that they had got through the first round of the funding process but neglected to mention TTA anywhere. The work proceeded to prepare a full bid, supported by a grant of £10,000. The Transition group’s idea was to have 15 strands of work, which included energy, economic, social, biodiversity projects and more. “All our dreams of Transition”, as I was told.
As the process of creating the bid proceeded, it became clear that the charity viewed TTA as being all volunteers and that they refused to give the TTA volunteers access to the development funds. As I was told by a member of TTA, “we had to virtually mutiny to remain involved in the bid development process”.
Things ran well for the rest of the bid development phase and the group understood that it had an arrangement where the charity would run the project for the first two years and we would then incorporate and phase in to running the project towards the end of the funding period. When the charity wrote the bid in the last week before submission they effectively wrote TTA out of the running of the project, with their just being invited to be members of the partnership board, on the same level as any other partners.
As I was told, “this transition from our aspirations coupled with the fact as a group we had invested a year of our time into the process was fraught and painful”. In spite of their disappointment and anger over what had happened, the group decided to make the best of the situation and work with the process as it was.
It got to the point where the TTA group had agreed it would be more desirable for the bid to be refused, in the event it was successful and the Charity duly release another press release claiming all of the credit and failing to mention TTA again. The full time members of staff were appointed and directly employed by the charity, which led to a position described to me in this way:
“We remain totally committed to the project and try to guide things as best we can, but in effect we have created a well funded, full time staffed version of a Transition group that has the same objectives and all of our project ideas in it with us on the outside looking in”.
Their sense is that rather than accelerating the work of Transition, the influx of funding has slowed it right down. For example, a major food project which had been proceeding well, has been held up until the project was up and running. A year has been spent in setting up governance and structures, creating a new office and so on. To the wider community there is still, a year in, no evidence of anything actually happening on the project with the first public events only just beginning to happen. The relationship with the charity has been puzzling too. The person I spoke to has attended an event where he met the chair of the charity and introduced himself and the fact that he was from TTA, to be met with the response “right”, and his turning round and walking off.
So having been through such an exhausting and frustrating process, what, I wondered, might be the group’s advice for other Transition initiatives considering going for large funding pots such as this?
“Firstly, only work with partners you already know well and have a good understanding of. Jointly develop the bid with them from the start. Secondly, manage your expectations. There will be strings attached to large pots of funding, and it is unlikely that you will be able to do exactly what you want to do. There will be compromises as part of the process. Thirdly, consider strategies for how to keep your volunteers with you. Once a group gets involved in such a bid, a lot of time and energy goes into it, and many of those involved and giving their time to your group will find they don’t have the skills, patience or energy that it requires, and may drift off. Think through how best to manage this. Lastly, get advice on the legal aspects of this. It is best to enter such a process with a thorough understanding of your rights in the process as well as the limitations”.
So where are they now? Two years after we started this process things are now moving but there is still a strong sense that, as I was told, “we have been left on the outside looking in at our projects”.
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18 Feb 2014
Looking back now, it feels that I have been Transitioning since I know myself. As it happened with many people in Transition movement, for me it started with increasing a sense of objective investigation of the inner and outer world. I come from a background of Buddhist meditative practice, which itself at some moment started to seek for expression in the outer world, to balance the inner and the outer environment. Also this and an inner bias towards helping people, put together with a predisposition toward Nature as source and a solution.
For some years I did some volunteer work in a few ecological NGOs in Romania, but none felt like it was home. Time and books read passed and what I remember as a important moment, like entering on a new path in life, was reading Daniel Quinn’s Ishamel, followed by Derrick Jensen, Thoreau or Charles Eisenstein. And when I first learned about permaculture, that was like a Big Bang, from that moment things have started to connect fast and Transition Towns movement was just around the corner.
In a way, I saw a need of the moment which Transition seemed to fulfill both in my personal life as well of the people around me, like finding something that was so obvious and made so much sense, but never knew it existed so well defined. Thus perception determines action and I acted upon it, nothing more and since then a lot of my life has been revolving around growing Transition movement in Romania.
As I perceived them in my inner mechanics, Permaculture and its social friend Transition Towns, are the very potent tools for social change. It is the way I describe it to friends, a balanced blend between a logical reasoning of the material world in the topics such as energy, peak oil, natural, human or economic environment, and the Heart sense, due to its connection to Deep Ecology/Permaculture, as it goes towards the Inner Transition that each person needs in one way or another. A good mix of common sense.
As everything in nature, all is in constant change. I get inspiration and energy from the perfection of nature, from the people I meet, from the future that awaits us, in the clarity of the clarity and the sense of doing the right thing and many times from the silence of the moment found in meditation.
Now things are moving in a rapid pace with projects, events, connections, tasks and deadlines always awaiting to be done. Thus the biggest challenge is to balance inner and outer life, family vs Transition vs. day-to-day job. However, experimenting with life as it is a Transitioner is quite fun. What I do gives me a good sense in life and only rare I imagine doing something else.
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