Transition Culture

5 Feb 2014

Tina Clarke on resourcing your Transition initiative

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5 Feb 2014

Your ‘Step Up’ moments: No.2: Isabela Menezes of Transition Granja Viana

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3 Feb 2014

Your ‘Step Up’ moments: No.1: David Pitcher of Transition Finsbury Park

During February we’ll be hearing people’s ‘Step Up’ moments, the moment they decided to step across into helping make Transition happen rather than just listening or talking about it.  Our first comes from David Pitcher:

“In London, very few families cycle with their children, despite their being lots of cyclists and lots of children!  I really like my local area and want it to be better for everyone.  I joined Transition Finsbury Park and met people who were all making a positive difference locally – which inspired me to have a go!

My moment of actually stepping up involved presenting to a noisy, crowded room with the added pressure of being responsible for my 2 year old son who just wanted to sit on my lap. The neighbourhood community voted for projects they wanted funding. Whilst presenting Wheely Tots my son came running up on to the stage, smiled at everyone and I picked him up and carried on talking  – we think that was the moment that won the hearts and minds. We set up Wheely Tots, got some funding to buy some cargo bikes (specially adapted to carry children) and made them free to use for everyone.  Mums and Dads use the bikes for recreation and doing the shopping with their children as well as and moving bulky things about.

Wheely Tots now provides cycle training and bike maintenance for families, adults and children.  Our cycle training for parents, especially mums, is great family experience as their toddlers can come along in the cargo bike! wheelytots.com has more information and we’re sharing our learning to inspire similar projects in other local communities. 

My life with Wheely Tots is a bit like having another child to look after or someone you really want to help.  I’m now qualified in bike mechanics and cycle training which are totally new skills for me.  Teaching people cycling and getting things working again has reinforced my optimism and positive mood towards other people and the future in general.     

If you’d like to share your story of the moment you decided to step across into making Transition happen, we’d love to hear it.  Please get in touch.  Contact me at robhopkins (at) transitionnetwork.org.  Thanks. 

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3 Feb 2014

Introducing a month on Resourcing your Initiative

This month we will be exploring the theme of resourcing your group.  Although we will be touching on issues of funding and finance, our explorations will be about much more than just that.  The resources available to a group, and how it harnesses those resources, will be a greater factor in whether the group is successful than whether it is able to attract funding or not.  Funding without other resources being in place first may well, ultimately, be self-defeating.  But what are those resources, and how to make best use of them?

During February we’ll be speaking to comedian and writer Rob Newman about his new show ‘A New Theory of Evolution’, and what it tells us about the most basic resources we are working with, the people around us.  We’ll hear from Transition Network’s funding manager Nicola Hillary on her tips for approaching funders.  We’ll hear from people doing Transition in very varied locations about the resource of leadership, and what inspired them to step across into actually being part of making Transition happen.  Janelle Orsi, a Californian attorney, will tell us what the legal and organisational resources that will maximise the likelihood of the kind of shift we need to see will look like in practice.  And that’s just a taste of what we’ve got lined up.

This will also be the month when Transition Network unveils the first draft of its organisational Strategy document. It’s been something needed for a while, but following a lot of work internally, we are ready to put it out for your feedback, criticism and input.  We really look forward to your thoughts on how Transition Network can best support and inspire the work you are doing in your community.  We’re also pleased to launch our new support page, a kind of index which will help you find your way around the many resources that Transition Network has to offer, and will be hosting a series of free webinars to which you are very much invited. 

We will also be offering our Transition Town Totnes (TTT) Reunion.  There’s a fascinating programme on BBC Radio 4 called The Reunion, which brings together some of the leading players in a key event in recent history, whether it be people on both sides of the Greenham Common protests, the Miners’ Strike, or the first episode of The Fast Show.  

With TTT often being viewed as one of the ‘flagship’ Transition initiatives, we thought it would be useful to look back at those early days, and what resources there were, what was done, and what needed to be done before any funding could meaningfully be sought. It seemed like a good moment to pause and reflect on that experience, something we’ve never really done before, both as an opportunity to celebrate what’s been achieved and to appreciate the different contributions that laid the foundations for the initiative.  We also felt, given this month’s theme, we felt it would also be a useful opportunity to gather and share learning from that experience.  It’s important to state that this is the story of just one Transition initiative, rather than any kind of “here’s how it should be done” piece.  It will look different everywhere.  

So, four of the founders of TTT, Naresh Giangrande, Sophy Banks, Fiona Ward and myself, along with other people active in TTT both at its outset and later on, spent a couple of hours last week reflecting on those early days, and what we put in place. We’ll be presenting the video and audio of that during this month so I don’t want to give you the entire story now, but for this post, I thought it might be useful to reflect on what were the resources that we had then that meant that we were able to create the foundations for what became TTT.  

That’s not to say that you can’t do Transition if you don’t have every one of these, but they are offered in that they worked for us, so you might find them insightful:

• Time: the four of us were able to give a day or two a week unpaid to the project, to be able to commit to projects that we knew would demand time, some with the support of family or partner.  Anyone who has set up an organisation – voluntary sector or a business – knows how much work is needed to get it going before there is any money coming in. It was a commitment we were all happy to make, with a recognition that that was not sustainable over the long term, that we were just laying foundations. 
• An openness about needs and wants: at our second Core group meeting we checked how sustainable it was for each of us to continue working at the pace we were going at that point. No one felt they could continue for a further 6-12 months – and we realised we needed to do less, or pay someone to do a central adminstration role.  Once this role had been designed, we found a local philanthropist who was willing to fund it (see job ad, right).
  
• A diverse mix of experience to draw on: We all came from very different backgrounds.  Between us we had experience in permaculture, organisational systems, running a business, accounting, counselling, computer systems, fundraising, mediation, blogging, teaching, running a football team, natural building, group facilitation and media and communications.  A pretty eclectic assortment of skills, but many of them came into their own when doing this work. It meant that we found ourselves drawing on our eclectic experience when designing particular things.  For example the early forerunner of Transition Streets, which we called ‘Home Groups’, was based on one member’s experience of consciousness-raising groups which were a key feature of the feminist movement of the 1970s and which one of our members had been part of.   
• The community itself: we were operating in a community with a rich history of activism and openness to new ideas.  They responded with huge openness and creativity to the suggestion of Transition.  That then gave the wider process access to a whole range of new resources. 
• Trust: through working together, we established a good degree of trust between ourselves. We were happy to let other people run with different aspects of the work.  

• A willingness to try things and ask “what if?”: from the start, TTT created a space to have a go at things.  “Let’s reprint the 1810 Totnes Pound!” Why not? “Let’s declare Totnes the Nut Capital of Britain!”  Why not? Being able to do that is a great resource in these risk-averse times.  
• Serendipity: I’ve heard many other people doing Transition say much the same thing, that you often find yourself thinking “what we need now is….” or “we could really do with someone who knew how to….” and then that person or resource walks through the door.  I’ve no idea how it works, but it happens time and time again and is a great resource to have.
• A shared understanding that we needed inner as well as outer skills in the project: it was clear from the the start that this was not a process that was solely about solar panels and growing carrots, it had an inner dimension too.  It wasn’t just about building community resilience, but looking at personal resilience and the resilience of everyone trying to make it happen.  One example was a time quite early on when we had to encourage one person to step out of the project when it became clear their role couldn’t be sustained.  Doing this with respect and tact was an early challenge, which we managed with care and good communication.
• A willingness to learn together: there was, from the start, an acknowledgement that we needed to bring in new skills too.  We held two essential training days early on, one on how to run good meetings, and one on project management and organisational structures.
• Designing events to be good stories for the media: for example the morning we got the council’s Tree Officer and the Mayor out planting walnuts in her bright pink coat, photographed balancing walnuts on her spade.  We sent out a press release announcing ‘Totnes the Nut Capital of Britain’ (which led to lots of beyond-Totnes sniggering).  We launched our first Local Food Directory with people dressed as vegetables.  Then there was the time we presented Prince Charles with a Totnes Pound…

• Great speakers: we were very fortunate to have Schumacher College on the doorstep, which meant that we were able to make an arrangement with them whereby we put on some of their visiting teachers in town, giving them better profile, more people heard them, and we got great speakers, and some early income.  Making contact with a range of local institutions can also help to generate some inspiring speakers who understand both the local and the global context.   
• A shared analysis of the drivers for change/worldview: we came together with a strong shared sense that something was very wrong in the world, and an analysis that peak oil and climate change were key issues that we needed to address.  Having a shared analysis to refer back to meant that the work we did together was very focused.  
• Physical resources: we each had access to a computer, had a kitchen table on which to put it, at least one of us had a printer, we had access to a projector.  
• A commitment to the idea that getting structure right was fundamentally important: in spite of our natural inclination to rush out and start doing things, we felt very clear that we were designing and creating an organisation that we wanted to still be in place, and thriving, many years into the future.  We gave careful thought to the organisation’s structure, the thinking around which evolved and changed several times in the first two years.  We were also aware that lots of other groups were watching to see how we did this, so it was worth getting this right from the outset.  
• A willingness to see where it wanted to go: It felt like we all were happy to go along with the process developing its own path, rather than having rigid and fixed ideas as to what we wanted it to become and where we wanted it to go.  For example, when, after a few months of Naresh and I giving talks and running film screenings, Hilary and Sophy turned up at my house and suggested the need for a Heart and Soul group, it felt like there was space for that. It is one of the properties of emergence that strange and wonderful things happen when you open the space for them. Using tools like Open Space really helped with this. [There’s an important point to make at this point, which is an acknowledgement of the tension between this and the above resource, between freedom and structure.  Our sense was that creativity and sponteneity are encouraged by having strong boundaries, as in Open Space.  Making things really rigid or opting for a completely open “anything goes” approach are both approaches that stifle creativity].       

• Allies: we very deliberately set out to create allies, by running events in association with them, going to meet them to see how we might help, laying groundwork for ongoing relationships.  This really proved its value as time went past.   

And money?  We didn’t have any. That came later. For the first year, TTT’s bank account was a sock in a drawer in my house, in which the proceeds of all our events were kept (probably never amounted to more than a few hundred pounds).  The first bits of grant funding came not to support TTT as such, or any kind of central resource, rather to fund specific projects, such as Transition Tales (working in local schools) or for planting nut trees.  It was only when the other resources were in place that funding began to come in, such as that for the Co-ordinator role.  

So that’s going to be our lens during February, looking at the idea of ‘Resourcing your initiative’ in its widest sense.  We hope that you’ll enjoy it, and that you’ll get involved with your comments, thoughts and suggestions.  We’d love you to share your experiences of how your Transition initiative got access to the resources they needed.  You could either post a comment below or contact us about writing a longer piece to share your learnings with the wider Network. 

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31 Jan 2014

Andy Lipkis, the man taking on LA’s water system

We published a taster of this piece earlier in the week, introducing Andy Lipkis, founder and President of Tree People. It’s a fitting way to draw to a close our month on ‘Scaling up’.  Andy was raised in Los Angeles in the mid-1950s, at a time when the smog was so bad that he had to come home from school and breathe steam in order to give his lungs relief from the pollution.  During summer holidays, in order to get him away from the smog, his parents sent him to summer camp in the mountains 100 miles from LA, 8,000 feet up in the mountains.  It was there that he had his first environmental epiphany:

“When I turned 15, the rangers from the US Forest Service said that they had been noticing for many years the trees were dying, and they were dying at an ever faster rate. They’d done some research and figured out it was air pollution from Los Angeles that was killing the trees and if nothing was done the forest as we know it would be gone by the year 2000. They basically said – it’s up to you kids if anyone’s going to save this thing. The government’s not doing it. You’re the ones who love it. It’s up to you”.

They were words which, as he put it, “fell on the ears of a kid who’d been raised in an activist family and the other kids in my summer camp came from similar backgrounds”. They found that some species of tree weren’t affected by smog to the same degree, and set about planting those.  On one summer camp, they spent 3 weeks turning an old baseball field truck parking lot into a forest:

We just went, “woah, what can we do?” and they said there are smog-tolerant trees that naturally occur. Some of the native species aren’t affected by the smog to the same degree, and you can start planting those.  We peeled back the tar, dug in truckloads of cow manure that we’d shovelled from a dairy an hour away on very hot land. Broke everything up, built walls, built a little park and planted smog-resistant trees.

They were Sugar Pines, Coulter Pines, Giant Sequoias instead of the dominant species, the Ponderosa Pine, the Jeffrey Pine that were dying. In these three weeks, if someone looked at us they would say, “my God those are kids in prison camp!  They’re swinging picks, breaking rocks, doing really hard work”. And yet for us, for me at least, probably the whole group, it was some of the most fun we’ve ever had at camp. We were taking on a task, we were using our muscles, we were using our intelligence and we were doing something to fix a really bad situation”.

It’s a story he also tells in this video:

It was a turning point, because for the first time he saw how he and some friends could achieve what appeared to them to be great things in the face of impossible odds.  “It was so powerful” he told me, “that I wanted to keep doing it, and the last day of camp we were all crying about having to leave each other and having to go back to the mean old city, and our camp director said if this felt good, take it back to the city and make it real for you. And don’t stop”.

Nearly half a century later, and Tree People now is a non-profit organisation whose mission is to inspire, engage and support the people of Los Angeles in taking personal responsibility and participating in making LA a healthy, fun, safe and resilient urban ecosystem. Its objective is to catalyse an unstoppable shift in LA to resilience within the next 10 years by scaling its massive effort of bottom-up action.

Their approach combines top down and bottom up action.  The bottom up work is about supporting people to transform their homes, neighbourhoods and schools.  The top down is facilitating integration and partnership amongst agencies who are working in separate silos.  As Andy puts it:  “They manage infrastructure that was designed over 100 years ago, that we can’t fix until they actually come together to integrate their budgets to create the savings and resources to help people do the work retro-fitting their homes”.

The situation LA faces in relation to water is both stark and as clear an example of un-joined up thinking as you could hope to see.  I’ll let Andy explain it:

“Los Angeles imports 89% of its water. The city spends anything from $750 million to $1.2 billion a year to import that water and distribute it. Meanwhile, it rains and we throw away most of the rain. We only get 11% of our water locally. The rest of that water comes from Northern California, the Western United States. Pumping the water to Los Angeles is the single largest use of electricity in the entire state of California, which is the eighth largest economy on the planet. So there’s a lot of energy from around the world that’s used to pump the electricity to pump the water over the mountains and bring it to LA.

The water that does fall here naturally is estimated at today’s usage to potentially provide 30-33% of the water we need in Los Angeles, the way we use water today. But if we were to capture it and use it really efficiently, let’s say we were to double our efficiency, that would be 60% of the water we need. Every year, this city throws away $400 million worth of water”.

The county flood control system which removes the water from the city and the county, have a annual budget of around $700 million. So in a nutshell, LA spends close to a billion dollars to remove around $400-800 million worth of water every year, and spends nearly a billion dollars to bring in other water from other areas for its drinking water.

On top of that, it gets even more absurd.  The city uses half of its water to irrigate landscapes, mostly lawns.  All the mowing are taking to landfill rather than being used as mulch or composted, and the cost of taking away all the city’s green waste and lawn mowing?  Another $100 million. Here’s Andy explaining all this in a short video:

Part of the reason for this is the disconnected nature of the agencies who make these decisions, usually in isolation from each other:

“The whole idea is to connect the agencies that all spend this money, who don’t ever meet. They don’t talk, they don’t plan together.  First they thought I was crazy, but then they caught on and we built some pretty amazing partnerships”.

So how do we move forward from this stalemate I wondered? 

“We have to offer them some really viable solutions. We can say, well we’ll do grey water and various other good applications, but if they can’t count on it, if they can’t quantify it, they don’t want to be held accountable for it. To bring them to the table we have to say that we realise we’re putting them at risk, they can’t take that risk, they can’t risk the public’s health and safety, so let’s build a system that ensures that for them”.

“Essentially”, he continued, the model we’re intending to overlay onto the city is a model of how a forest ecosystem works, within which all energy, all water, all nutrients are recycled. The rainfall is caught by the trees and treated in the soil under the tree in that mulch zone and slowed down and sent to the aquifer and slowed down so it doesn’t create floods and makes its way to the rivers. The solar energy is harvested, turned into nutrients, the leaves fall from the trees and break down and feed the animals and feed the soil. You have a closed loop”.

Lipkis is clear that the entrenched forces that often block these change aren’t evil, rather they’ve been built on a certain model and suggesting changing that can generate a lot of fear.  For example, recent efforts to get waterless urinals approved for Los Angeles was a major battle with the plumbers union locally and nationally because they were afraid of losing jobs.  But rather than getting drawn into conflicts, as Andy puts it:

“We’ve taken the path of trying to inspire and demonstrate what can work and then help people work it out”.

So, given the scales of the challenges that LA faces, what’s the best approach to engage people? 

“Look back throughout history, and especially now, and the political process rarely produces viable solutions, and practically never does in a timely fashion.  In the meantime, humans and the life forms and ecosystem on which we rely for health, safety, and the economy, suffer damage and pain or death, while we battle, and the human creativity/caring/healing/synergistic community energy that is available for building the solution, is lost in the eddy, all the while our passion, resources, hope are consumed and the destructive system is fed and re-enforced.

Our experience is that when we are simply bringing neighbours together to help each other and people to meet and work together without their labels there is joy, there is fun, there is love, there is attraction. That’s what we humans are designed for.  When we fall into the camps of war and fighting it doesn’t sustain.  Our volunteers, after a hard weekend of work planting trees in the city or the mountains or watering or whatever, they all report that they have more energy than they did after their long week of work”.

For Andy, arguing the economic case is a key part of this:

“If we take all that money that we spend on importing water and reinvest it in this economy, we believe there’s as many as 50,000 new jobs in Los Angeles alone. Not even having to bring in new money but just bringing the different agencies together to combine their budgets and invest locally.  We’re not looking at an agrarian society necessarily. It’s an integrated new-tech, high-tech green infrastructure where you’ve got food local, you’re got security.”

This post is the final in a month of reflecting on the theme of scaling up.  What I wondered, were Andy’s thoughts, based on his experience with Tree People, for how we might scale up our collective impact?

“Progress begins by making government comfortable, making people excited, producing better and better models. Holding ourselves accountable, modelling this stuff in practice.  But the big scale point comes when we consciously deploy in all our neighbourhoods and share compelling, attractive results. I believe California may be hitting it right now because everything in the Transition vision of what would happen in the world is starting to happen.  The pain is being felt, so the question is, are we ready to have the most viable solution there for people to grab when the crisis hits? We’re at a window on that and there may be a window on that in California.

 Less than a week ago, our governor declared a State of Emergency for drought. The global climate scientists, the IPCC, the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change, said California is going to be one of the first places to run out of water. The United States being in denial, the official state of denial has not responded to that call. But here we are. We haven’t had much rain for three years. There’s no snow. On all the mountains in California, the whole state should be green right now because of rainfall but the entire state is brown. We’ve just come through the driest year in recorded history. And the governor has declared a State of Emergency.

So Transition has, and Permaculture has a massive host of solutions that a lot of us have been deploying on our homes. People are starting to get scared and wake up. Policy makers are ready to start changing laws. We’re hearing from our state capital, give us the laws that we need to allow grey water and other things. What do you want to put in the packages so we can make the changes happen now, so people can take action now, and we’re doing it.

 Because of the level of work done for the last 20 years teaching, facilitating this government stuff, we’re actually right at the core of bringing them together to connect and plan in a new way”.

California stands at a crossroads.  Companies who made desalination plants, and who have half a billion dollar budgets for marketing and political lobbying are arguing that they can make the state drought-free.  Each plant would cost about $4 billion and use vast amounts of energy, but they are an easy solution that offers the illusion of business-as-usual.  They also move away from the far cheaper, and more resilient model of conservation and a diversity of smaller bottom up solutions. 

Fortunately Tree People are able to point to recent developments in Australia, who are experiencing extreme droughts about 10-15 years ahead of California.  Their devastating 12 year drought ended (for now) 2 years ago.  Australia went for decentralised permaculture-style responses, a huge scaling up of rainwater harvesting.  It subsidised millions of cisterns, which meant that, for example, consumption fell from an average of 82 gallons per day in Brisbane to 33.  This was backed up by legislation, penalties for excessive water use, and giving people access to information about their water use. 

Inspired by this, Tree People have been proposing a “smart water grid” for LA, replacing garden fences with long linear tanks that can hold between 5 and 20,000 gallons per household which are connected up, enabling the authorities to send you water, or release water for other uses.  It would be highly efficient at only a fraction of the cost of desalination plants. 

Andy recently convened a meeting of experts and government officials from Australia with the heads of the water agencies in the LA region:

“The first question I asked when I assembled all these key leaders was, “when in your 12 year drought did Australia realise it was in the middle of a 12 year drought?”  I asked that obviously because we have this problem with denial. You don’t want to flip the switch and make this change because it might rain at any moment.  He said the place where he marked that wake-up call was 18 months before the drought ended, when the government decided to invest big time in desalinisation plants in all the big cities.

The problem is, they barely were started with construction by the time the drought was over. When it was raining, people had so profoundly dropped their water use by the time the plants were finished – they’re not even all finished yet – but those that were, no-one bought the water and they couldn’t afford to run them, so they’re been shut down. The one in Sydney’s been sold. It’s being held in reserve in case there’s another massive drought, but people’s water bills have more than doubled, the governments in all the states have been thrown out by angry taxpayers and that is a very important cautionary tale”. 

If you would like to hear the entirety of our conversation, here is the podcast: 

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