An Evolving Exploration into the Head, Heart and Hands of Energy Descent
Transition Culture has moved
I no longer blog on this site. You can now find me, my general blogs, and the work I am doing researching my forthcoming book on imagination, on my new blog.
What does it take to find the confidence to step over into actually starting a Community Supported Agriculture scheme? Where does the drive to step from thinking “someone should set up a really cool market garden” to thinking “I’m going to set up a really cool market garden” come from? On a beautiful summers day I headed up to the Dartington Estate to talk to Jenny Gellatly, one of the founders of School Farm CSA. I found her picking peas in a beautifully well-organised, abundant, thriving market garden, surrounded by a huge diversity of produce. I started by asking her how the garden came about:
“There was already a market garden here at School Farm and that had existed for 6 years, nearly 7 years now. We wanted to bring more of a community focus into what we were doing already, and form much more of a link with the local community, with people within the community. We also wanted to find a way that worked better for us in terms of actually selling the food that we grow, because despite the fact that we have lots of brilliant shops in Totnes, and independent stores that we can sell to, running, it’s very difficult for a small scale food growing project to make a living from that.
We thought that if we can make stronger links directly with the people buying the food then it would make the whole thing more viable economically. We’d have more of a social dimension to what we were doing and it would be reaching more people directly but also benefiting us as growers in terms of the social aspect and selling the produce as well.
How’s it been going so far?
It’s gone really well. The support we’ve received from the local community has been completely overwhelming at times. We couldn’t have anticipated so much support. People come here and they see what we’re doing and they really love it. They really want to be involved and they really want to support it.
By opening it out like that and making ourselves visible, it’s really brought a lot of support to us as growers, to the site, and to what we’re doing, and given us a lot of motivation to want to continue. I think it can get quite isolated as a grower at times if you’re not inviting the community in that way, so we’ve been really pleased with how it’s gone so far.
You were part of the Focal Entrepreneurs Forum in March. How was that?
It was amazing actually because we did it as a really last-minute thing. We heard about it the week beforehand. We weren’t quite sure because we still feel fairly new. We still feel new now, but it definitely felt new 4 or 5 months ago! But we decided we’d go for it anyway and Laura, who’s one of the people I’m working on the project with, did a fantastic presentation about the difficulties that growers are experiencing in the climate that we’re having at the moment, particularly last year with it being so wet.
She also explained what we wanted to do and the different model we wanted to work to that involved the community much more. It took four minutes to explain it all which isn’t very long, but it was incredible the response we got, the room was absolutely buzzing about the project. People just loved it and wanted it to happen, and were prepared to support it in whatever way they could. It was a real boost (here is the video about the event that includes an interview with Laura).
Where are you in terms of moving forward as a viable entity?
We did have some funding this year to help with getting equipment that we needed, with setting up the volunteer days and running a course. If we want to continue next year then we do need to find the time to find some more funding for the next few years before we become self-sustaining. This year we’re seeing very much as a pilot year.
We’re taking the leap into doing the project and testing out the water in a way. We’ve found that because there’s been such a positive response, we know it’s something that people want to happen. Now we just need to find the time to actually raise the funds to continue the project next year and beyond.
Our vision is that we’ll be able to take on more land and grow food for more people and involve more people, and that the project will become self-sustaining. We’ve visited a number of other CSA schemes across the country, and our research would suggest that we are looking at getting about 100 members, 100 households who are members of the project. That’s a really exciting prospect for us, to have that many people involved.
You started out here as a student I think, and then were volunteering and now one of the people that are running what’s hoping to become a big, viable project. What was the process of deciding “actually this needs to happen and I need to be one of the people who does it”, rather than “wouldn’t it be great if somebody did something like that”…
It’s really interesting actually, because when I was doing the horticulture course, one of the places we came every week to learn was here. It was learning with Nick Gooderham who set the market garden up. I just really wanted to work with him because I thought he was fantastic and I thought School Farm was fantastic. I could see lots of ways I could contribute because I had links to local people and local shops and local organisations. I also had experience doing environmental education so I could help Nick build that side of things.
I talked to him about that and potential involvement and probably talked quite a lot about it! Nick gave me an opportunity and I did some volunteering here and started working one day a week. Then it was a real leap in the deep end because I was looking after the market garden for about a year while Nick was off, and that was a really challenging time. I think in terms of the CSA project now, it’s partly about having a mix of the right people. The right people tend to come along, and Mel who I work with was one of them. She was really keen on the CSA idea and we decided that we’d just give it a go.
We didn’t really think about it too much. We knew a CSA scheme was wanted round here because Dartington Hall Trust had done community consultation and they found that that’s what people wanted. We knew no-one was doing it and so we thought we’d give it a go. I think by taking that step into trying it and making it happen, a lot has unfolded as a result. We’re still in Step A and still don’t know what step B or C are necessarily going to look like. We have an idea of what we’d like it to look like but we’ve taken that first step and we’re allowing things to unfold and stepping into them as they do.
I did a talk a while ago and somebody asked me “how do you get the confidence to do that?” I was thinking about it for ages afterwards and I don’t quite know. You said about just jumping in the deep end … how do you get the confidence to have a go at this? Have you always had that or has it come in later years…?
For me a lot of the time it’s about the other people around me. The right mix of people. I can’t really explain, just feeling a part of a team that have a similar vision of where things could go and all being on the same page and feeling inspired, then you’re not on your own with it. For me, I don’t feel on my own with this project at all, I feel part of a really strong team of 4 people. Then there’s the wider team that’s the volunteers and the members as well.
This time last year it was just Mel and I, and we didn’t have that team, but the fact that there were two of us was much stronger than one. We gave each other the confidence. That for me is a big thing. There is a part of me that likes having something to get stuck into. I like having a project to get stuck into. If that’s not the case then I’ll try and look for that to happen.
It is a frightening thing I guess, because we want to know what it looks like before we’ve started. That’s always a worry, that you never know what shape it’s going to take and so it is a scary thing, leaping into it. And that’s part of it.
Do you find that deciding you’re going to have a go at something has a knock on effect in other aspects of your life? Do you feel more connected to the place, or that change is possible more than you did beforehand, or feel that there’s more chance of changing things because you’ve had a go at changing things?
Definitely. It definitely shows that things are possible, for sure. In taking that step to set up this project and the fact that it’s still happening and has received a lot of support, it does give a massive amount of confidence that actually doing things like this is completely possible and you can create something like this from very little actually. Something didn’t exist, and now it does!
It would be so great if we all could create all sorts of different projects from nothing and we’d all inspire each other. I’m really inspired by a lot of the other projects that are happening round here in Totnes as well, and seeing people making things happen. I think it inspires others when you see someone else doing something, and its working then it gives you the confidence that maybe you could too.
I bet there are other people listening who are thinking – I’ve always wanted to do that! What would your advice be to them?
My advice would be:
Find some really great people you can share your dream with
Talk to local people or local organisations as well and see if there’s the support out there for what you want to do. By talking about it initially probably you’ll find that people will come forward who want to help
Find a really great piece of land, because that makes all the difference, finding the right spot and it being not too far from the local community. Somewhere that people can walk to or cycle to, somewhere really accessible
Look at other projects as well. That definitely helped us massively, to visit other projects across the country to get ideas of where we might be headed and what the potential was. That was a massive support for us, even if it was projects abroad, it doesn’t have to be in this country. But just to take inspiration and learn lessons from what others have done before was massively helpful for us
Go step-by-step. It is a gradual thing. Just take the first step and the next step will become more apparent.
Mel and I really tried to make this a manageable process. We’re not trying to get to step Z before we’ve done step A because we’ll just wear ourselves out. We’re just doing it step by step.
You can find out more about School Farm CSA on their Facebook page. Finally, here is a short film about wonderful local social enterprise The Kitchen Table, and one of their trips to School Farm to stock up on produce:
So, three down and three to go. Iwrote a report and made a short filmof the first Transition Thursday (even though it was actually on a Tuesday), which took place in Crystal Palace in London. I’m going give you an update on the next two, which have taken me first to Sheffield, and then to Downham and Swaffham in East Anglia. They’ve been a blast so far.
The Sheffield event, on June 27th, was great fun. I’m going to let Transition Sheffield tell you about this one, from their website:
“Thursday 27 June was a packed day for Transition Sheffield with workshop, sustainability delegation, and evening talk. We held an afternoon workshop on Sustainable Cities. We set the scene with a presentation to share some information about the motivation for the Transition network, and about local Transition initiatives. Participants chose to discuss five key topics – Food, Transport, Money, People, and Technology. When asked how they felt, there was general agreement from participants that they’re capable of supporting a change to create a more sustainable Sheffield, and most people wrote down a specific action that they intended to take, even if only to find some further information, or to connect with others. See below for more discussion notes. Many thanks to Colette Cameron for the loan of her amazing decorations – see information about her classes and workshops.
Then we set off to the steps of the Town Hall to meet with Cllr Jack Scott (Cabinet member for Sustainability, Recycling and Streetscene). A bunch of people gathered with music from SolarActive‘s solar powered soundsystem and the Transition Banner (see below). Jack sped into town to meet us in the council’s electric car, and we handed to Jack a copy of the latest Transition book – the Power of Just Doing Stuff. It’s well argued, very readable, and has great examples of inspiring projects.
After a stopping off to refuel in the very excellent Blue Moon Cafe, we gathered in the Quaker Meeting House to hear a talk by Rob Hopkins, one of the founders of the Transition movement. He’s won various awards and plaudits as a leading grassroots campaigner, ‘green community hero’, and ‘new radical’, and is a very engaging speaker. A recording of his talk is available (thanks to Chris from indymedia)”.
While I was in Sheffield, I also asked Transition folk I met there what, for them, is Transition?
… and also, why do they do it?
The next day I travelled home, not before discovering a craft brewery on Sheffield station and having to write a rather excitable blog about how great it would be if every station had a brewery on it.
The following Thursday took me to Downham Market in East Anglia. Here is a short film I made about the day I spent there:
I think it kind of captures everything I would want to say about the day there. It was great fun, really beautifully organised and held, thanks to everyone who made it happen. While I was there, I did an interview with Gabbie Joyce for The Breckland View, which you can hearhere. My thanks also to photographer Suzanne Fossey who took some great photos of the evening, which you can see here.
One additional fun thing is that Bob Flowerdew, he of organic gardening guru fame, was there, and here are his thoughts on the evening:
I also took the opportunity to ask people in East Anglia what Transition meant for them, how they would describe it?
Also, why do they do it? What do they get out of it?
I should also mention a couple of other things that haven’t, strictly speaking, been Transition Thursdays, but have been talks that have taken place during this time. There was the Totnes launch of the book, the day before the Sheffield event, which also featured music from Charlie Mgee’s Formidable Vegetable Sound System all the way from Australia and en route to Glastonbury Festival, pictured below with Rob and the Mayor of Totnes and her consort, Lionel. The other star of the show was the launch of ‘The Power of Just Brewing Stuff’, the first beer from the forthcoming New Lion Brewery (seen clutched firmly in Lionel’s hand below).
The other event was giving the Sir Patrick Geddes Memorial Lecture in Edinburgh, which you can hear below, illustrated with slides:
The next Transition Thursday will be in Worthing, hosted by the local Transition group there, this Thursday. There are still some tickets available, do come along. Then to Slaithwaite in Yorkshire, then Louth and Horncastle in Lincolnshire.
One of the things we’re going to be doing now Transition Culture has migrated to its new home is to have a theme for each month, something that will bring a degree of focus to what we post during that time. This month’s theme is ‘The Power of Just Doing Stuff’, which doesn’t mean that we are going to spend four weeks trying to sell you books, but rather going into it what that actually means in a bit more detail. We’ll be speaking to people doing great Transition projects around the world about why they do it and what they see as being the power that arises from what they do. I’ll be exploring five of my own ‘doing stuff moments’, formative experiences that convinced me of the need to do rather than cogitate. We’ll also be hearing from Transition Network’s Sophy Banks about The Power of Not Doing Stuff, the importance of designing in time to be, to reflect, to re-energise. And lots of other great stuff besides, you’re going to love it.
A good place to start when discussing doing stuff is the famous quote attributed to Goethe, but not actually, it turns out, said by him:
“Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it.
Boldness has genius, power and magic in it!”
I gave a talk at the West Country Storytelling Festival last year, and at the end of it, a woman in the audience asked “how do you get the confidence to do all that stuff?” It was an interesting question. I’d like to explore it by telling the story of my front garden. Here is how it looked until recently. Turns out I never took any pictures of it, so here it is according to Google Street View. It may be their copyright, but I figure they didn’t ask my permission to take the picture, and it’s my garden anyway, so here it is …
It featured a horrible pointless ‘ornamental” conifer, of the type so beloved in suburbia, a Buddleia that had got a bit carried away with itself, some overgrown thing that brought down my phone line in the last big wind we had here, lots of ‘ornamental’ grasses and ferns (yawn) and brambles, lots of brambles.
Ever since we had moved in, we had said that one day, we would clear the garden and replace it with a forest garden. One day, that conifer would fall, to be replaced by fruit, nuts, herbs, perennial vegetables. It would happen. Just not quite yet. One day. As the time passed, we got more and more used to it, and that ‘one day’ stayed some time off in the future, rather like the day when cold fusion becomes and economically and technically feasible energy source.
Then, one Saturday morning about 3 weeks ago, something switched. It was a sunny morning, we had a day when the kids were all occupied for the day, and we decided, on the spur of the moment, that today was the day. Seizing the moment, I rushed out with my saw and got stuck into the conifer, taking it down in pieces. The pile of foliage grew and grew, the conifer shrank and shrank. It’s amazing how much stuff comes out of a tree like that once you start to take it to pieces (three full trailer-loads). The buddleia was next. By this stage neighbours started coming out to see what on earth I was doing.
After initial concerns that I was having some kind of stress-related episode, and once I had sold them on my vision of nut trees and fruit bushes and herbs, then something rather special happened, the community came together to help us in our task. One neighbour came round and offered to take down the big tree and to chop up what I had already cut down with his chainsaw. Another lent me his car and trailer to take all the stuff to the garden waste bin at the recycling centre.
Elderly women who pass by every day looked initially rather shocked, and I had to answer a few “what have you done?” type questions. I explained to them all the vision of what we were going to put there instead, and the next day my clearing up was interrupted by different elderly women saying, rather excitedly, “I hear this is all going to be fruits and nuts. I’m sure it will be lovely“.
A few days later, we hired a digger for a couple of hours. I have written before about my love for diggers, but this was a wonderful reminder of what amazing tools they are in the right hands. In about an hour and a half, he had pulled out all the tree stumps and roots, the deeply rooted perennials, and basically cleared the whole site back to a blank slate. Once again my neighbours turned out, cheering when a tree root was finally prised clear of the ground, and providing a running commentary on his labours.
We are now in the process of starting to plant it up with soft fruits and herbs, mulching the ground and creating paths through it. It’s a fair bit of work, and it’s happening in small bursts (what with, y’know, life) but it’s underway and it’s looking great. But what might be some reflections as to how this little project tipped from being on the long finger to becoming action? Edward Snowden, currently hiding out in Moscow airport, and hopefully a candidate for the next Nobel Peace Prize put it, “I had been looking for leaders, but I realised that leadership is about being the first to act”. Indeed. Some thoughts:
People love to see someone who has decided to do something. It’s kind of infectious. If you get started, if you start demonstrating boldness, people will join in, put their shoulder to the wheel. Katryna Barber, a member of the Woodstock in Transition’s Initiating Group in the US, put it like this in a recent article about the group:
Transition is like when you’re a kid with your friends and you decide to make a circus. The energy level is so exciting and inviting that more kids want to join you!
Deciding to “do stuff” arises from what is often a complex mix of circumstances. A key one is to create a bit of breathing space in your life. An evening a week. A day. A few hours. You need to feel in a position where the basics of life (childcare, work etc) are under control, and there is a bit of time and space to focus on what it is you want to do. Breathing space gives rise to possibility. I had an unexpected day off on the Monday, it felt like Spring had begun, so it felt like there was an unplanned-for bit of space. Often in our busy lives we need to really design for that space, intentionally create it.
The vision of what’s waiting for you at the end of the task needs to be sustaining, enticing, and possible. Had we decided that morning that we wanted to, I don’t know, reforest Devon or save the world, we probably would have decided to go our for ice cream instead. One of the key things about our vision for the garden was that we could communicate it in one sentence to passers by, and the local elderly women network became our key communicators, telling each other all about it.
Once that boldness is exercised, life kind of swings in behind you to support what you are doing. I hear this time and again when I visit Transition projects. When I was in Crystal Palace, talking to the people in the Transition group who had created the Local Food Market, that was very much their experience, that it developed its own momentum. As Pete Yeo of the Funding Network says in the video I made about the Totnes Local Entrepreneurs Forum, this is what it looks like “when a community gathers around its positive changemakers”. Something magic happens, there’s a power there. Serendipity kicks in. Making opportunities for the community to gather around positive change is a powerful force. As in the garden, so in the community.
It was a tough call deciding which story to lead with in this month’s Round-up. In the end we decided to start with this story from the Amazon in Brazil. May East, Transition trainer extraordinaire, travelled there to give a Transition training. The host was Mapiá Village, an intentional community created by traditional forest people with about 600 inhabitants which is the main village in the Purus National Forest (PNF). She writes:
Recently Mapiá Village hosted a Gaia Education Design for Sustainability programme – AmaGaia- with approximately 90 participants who are now trained in the social, ecologic, cultural and economic dimensions of ecovillages and Transition town processes. Participants ranging from 14 to 79 year old came from several river settlements, including Amazon indigenous communities and reps of government institutions working in the region.
As part of the action learning process 8 working groups were created: Culture and Celebration; Education; Health; Governance and Infrastructure; Income Generation; Food Production; São Sebastião Farm Community; and the Purus Nation Forest. Each group created a collective dream and designed a strategy to be carried out during the next cycle, seeking to put in practice and locally adapt the contents learnt in the design for sustainability programme.
The group learnt the participatory methods of Transition Towns and engaged in the process of visioning the future of the region. While back-casting they answered key questions on how a resilient local infrastructure might become a reality and how we may get there year-on-year through a jointly designed and meaningful map of concrete actions.
Our other favourite story comes from Portugal. Between the 14th and 16th of June, the Ajudada Festival was run in Portalegre. The event, organised by members of Portalegre em Transição and others, modelled a Gift Economy in practice, and Michael Plesse, one of the attendees, described the event as “a tapestry, a dynamic, that was really amazing to watch, to be part of, and see unfold!” Here is the event’s beautifil artwork, designed by Kim Geiser.
Here are a couple of videos about it:
Writing about the event in more detail, Michael wrote:
“The town was literally filled with people from different countries, all working and exploring the aspects of a community- economy, “where everyone can play a part”, celebrating the wealth of experiences, models, prototypes, and concrete actions in parks, meeting halls, schools, cinema-rooms, art-exhibitions, and more places that were involving people, the public places in town touching common townsfolk in the city, through the heart, the joy, the sense of connecting, the invitations.
It was personally very moving to see, that all this was happening without the use of money – no entrance fees, no money required to eat in the beautiful cafeteria, with food prepared with care and love! No workshop-fees, no presenter having to deal with money, possibilities for free accommodation, couch-surfing… and the like”.
Transition Streets, the street-by-street behaviour change model, continues to pop up around the world. One of the most fascinating recent manifestations of the idea is in Newcastle in Australia. Here is a great powerpoint about their work. One of my favourite stories is this, told by Jo from the Laman Street group:
“Neighbours who previously complained about noise from the populated student house were now talking more constructively and even offered the students free tickets to the theatre as they recognised their artistic talents. An overall sense of safety was created, particularly as Laman street is an inner city street that had a history of a number of late night assaults. People started recognising that the late night student house was actually a safety net for the street as they were generally awake all hours and could keep watch. And in one instance the students ran out of the house to protect a neighbour who was about to be assaulted. This was particularly positive for the students for they identified their need to be part of the project as a way to demystify the student household and build better positive relationships on the street”.
Transition Ireland and Northern Ireland are running a crowd funding campaign to raise money for a national Recognising Resilience award. Please support the appeal here.
“In April, Village Vancouver partnered with UBC on the New Economy Summit, a three-day event to contribute to a socially just and ecologically responsible economy. As part of the city’s Car Free Day in June, the group will set up a demonstration Transition Town with everything they would like to see in their neighbourhoods: seed libraries, solar panels, backyard chicken coops, collaborative gardening, composting and more”.
It also included one of the best summaries of “what is Transition?” from one of the group’s founder members:
“If we had a mantra, it would be ‘Talk to your neighbours, see what happens”.
Gerd Wessling of Transition Germany, Austria, Switzerland (D/A/CH) got in touch to let us know about the Open Transition Netzwerk D/A/CH gathering 2013 will be September 27th – 29th in the South of Germany in an intentional community near Heilbronn/Crailsheim called “Schloß Tempelhof”. More details & registration will come up any day at this link.
It is an open invitation to gather to all those who are active in any Transition Initiative in the Transition D/A/CH region from all over Germany, Austria and Switzerland; and who have an interest to help strengthen & define our DACH network, as well share their local TT experiences, work on various themes and methods around group forming/decision making/group facilitation and celebrate together out growing Transition family.
In the US, T-Culver City in LA (CA) teamed up with Culver City Bike Coalition for a field trip to Downtown LA using bike and train travel combined.
To the UK now, and T- Berkhamsted (Herts) teamed up with Positive Money for this great-looking event:
T-Crouch End in London put on a Fruit and Fable trail, an opportunity to celebrate in tall tales and edible treasure in their community. TT-Brixton have welcomed Yuki, a research student from Japan. Speaking of Japan, it’s wonderful how people self-organise and translate Transition materials. Within days of the promotional video for The Power of Just Doing Stuff being posted on YouTube (it has now been watched nearly 6,000 times, it had been reposted with Japanese subtitles:
Returning to Brixton, Brixton Energy Solar 3, Brixton Energy’s latest share launch is now open to investors. Here’s how Brixton Energy themselves describe it:
“The solar panels for Brixton Energy Solar 3 will be installed on four buildings within the Roupell Park Estate: Hyperion House, Fairview House, Warnham House and the Community Office. The income from the project will be derived principally from the government’s Feed-in Tariff scheme, which is guaranteed for 20 years. Some of the energy generated by the project will be used on site with the remainder energy sold directly back to the grid. After operating costs are deducted, profits resulting from the sale of energy will be used to support local energy efficiency initiatives and provide Co-operative members with an annual return on their investment”.
You can download the share prospectus here. The TT-Honiton in Devon’s planting group caught up recently to agree on their aims. They have compiled this great ‘all about our herbs’ page on relation to all the herbs they have planted on the New Street herb wall.
The ongoing success of the Bristol Pound has inspired at least one other city to consider giving it a go. Recently, Oxford announced that it was considering the idea. Adam O’Boyle, who is leading the Oxford project, said: “Although we think Oxford is a great city, it could always be better. We were really impressed by what they’re doing in Bristol in terms of increasing trade to local businesses, increasing the profile of the city.”
Transition Evesham Vale (Worcs) held a food festival as part of their local Mega Weekend. We felt we had to include this photo because if ever a woman in a photo seemed to be thinking “help, get me out of here”, it was our friend in this picture.
Billinge & Orrell Transition Group’s Community Good Life Fair took place on Saturday 15th June at St James Social Club, Orrell. Here’s how they described it:
“There was something for everyone including stalls showcasing local community activities (Greenslate Community Farm, local clubs and community groups ), local crafts (artisan breadmaking, woodcraft skills, simple herbal remedies), backyard self-sufficiency (chickens, bees, veg growing and animal raising), a cycle workshop, money saving tips to reduce your household bills (buying co-ops, energy saving measures)”.
“This is more than a recycling directory and, although it was created for Marlborough (Wiltshire, England), the “reduce and reuse” tips and online links can be used anywhere. … In keeping with the Transition ethos, we wanted to highlight Reduce and Re-use, to include Repair as well as Recycleand, wherever possible, keep everything local. Rethinking our rubbish is an important part of creating a sustainable future. There are ideas and tips for using less in the first place (minimising the use of diminishing resources) and ways to reuse items ourselves or pass them on for other people to use. Finally, if they cannot be repaired, there is information about recycling facilities, to avoid sending them to landfill”.
This month saw the launch of the latest book about Transition, The Power of Just Doing Stuff. The first launch was a kind of pre-launch thing, in which author Rob Hopkins and Pruw Boswell, Mayor of Totnes attempted to ‘launch’ the book down the River Dart in a pumpkin. The resultant video has been watched over 1,000 times on YouTube and has been reported to nearly bring on early labour and near- hysteria through giggling.
It was first formally presented in Bristol at Bristol Green Week’s Schumacher Lectures. Earlier that morning, Rob appeared on BBC Radio Bristol, where he spoke with presenter Jemma Cooper, and chose ‘Be My Baby’ by The Ronettes, and ‘Town Called Malice’ by the Jam as the records he would play at an imaginary dinner party. There was also a great piece about the book in the Bristol Evening Post. The real formal launch event took place a couple of days later in Crystal Place, London. You can read Rob’s blog post about it, and here is his video about the day:
On 27 June Rob went to Sheffield (South Yorkshire). Part of the day included presenting a copy of the book to Jack Scott, a leading member of the City Council, on the steps of the Town Hall with members of local Transition groups.
You can read more and listen to audio from the evening event at the Quakers Meeting House on Sheffield IndyMedia. The following dates for Rob’s ‘Transition Thursday’ events throughout July are as follows:
04 July Swaffham, Downham Market & Kings Lynn (Norfolk) (this Round-up is being edited on route to this….)
11 July Worthing (West Sussex) – see their poster here
The publication of the book has also led to a flurry of media attention on Transition. The best two, in our opinion, were John Paul Flintoff’s piece in the Guardian, called Local, self sufficient, optimistic: are Transition Towns the way forward? which was one of the most popular articles on the Guardian’s site for a few days, and which led to a big spike in visitors to the Transition Network’s website. The other appeared at 2Degrees, and was called ‘What can business learn from the Transition movement?’
Finally, we close with some recently-found rare footage of what Rob Hopkins looked like before he cut his hair, had a shave and got involved with Transition:
Please send us any stories you would like to see included in the next Round-up.
The Herefordshire Economic Evaluation was published recently, the second such study, following the Totnes & District Local Economic Blueprint. Brixton’s is expected during the next few weeks. They set out, for the first time, a powerful economic case for community resilience as a form of economic development. I spoke to Nick Sherwood, who co-ordinated the Herefordshire study. You can either listen to the somewhat shaky Skype recording here, or read the transcript below. I started by asking him to introduce himself:
My name is Nick Sherwood, – I’m a long-term resident of Herefordshire which is on the Welsh border in the UK. I’ve lived here for over 30 years and for the last 20 or so I’ve been working in the environmental field, initially in sustainable waste management, then in carbon management. I’ve been involved with the Transition movement since 2008, helping to set up firstly Transition Hereford which was the 83rd official Transition initiative and more recently the Herefordshire in Transition Alliance which brings together a number of environmental groups around Herefordshire.
You’ve just completed the second of the economic blueprints as has happened in Totnes and is about to happen in Brixton. Your one wasn’t called a blueprint, it was called an Evaluation. Could you give us a bit of background as to how the process that you ran differed from the process that took place in Totnes and also why you chose to call it an Evaluation rather than a Blueprint?
I think it’s no secret that while Totnes is perhaps not unique it has a very particular profile in terms of development, so it’s hardly a surprise that things would look a bit different in Herefordshire from in Totnes. In fact, the two economies are of different kinds of scale. The Herefordshire economy is roughly twice the size of the South Hams District economy. And it’s a unitary authority which means we’ve only a county council, no district councils, whereas South Devon is a tertiary authority. So there are quite a few differences, which means that our starting points would be different, and the way a project evolves has a lot to do with where you start.
I’m not aware that anybody other than in Totnes has used the word ‘blueprint’. Certainly when Fiona Ward and I started on this journey in 2011 I was aware that she was using the term blueprint. I made a conscious decision then – one I still stand by – to not use that term.
This was because we did not already have the involvement of a stakeholder group and I was concerned that if I announced I was working on a blueprint – bearing in mind that I’m not an economist, and of course this is economic work – that I might quickly run into instinctive resistance from people who would say “well who are you to present us with a blueprint?”
So instead of using ‘blueprint’, as we were already running a REconomy project here, I decided to call the work in Herefordshire the TEEconomy project – which stands for Transition Enterprise Economy. I hoped this would create more interest. If you look at the reports you’ll find that they are also titled Herefordshire Economic Evaluation.
I believe that is a title that will be generic to all the projects: the Economic Evaluation projects. I don’t think the fact that in Totnes it was called a blueprint and we called it something different is particularly important.
The Totnes one, as you said, started out with a stakeholder group and then developed. You’ve taken a different approach, creating a report and then trying to build a stakeholder group around the evaluation. Could you give us a bit more of a sense of that?
That was not the intention, but it was the way things worked out. As I said, we already had a REconomy programme going in Herefordshire. Where does this story start? With the formation of Transition Hereford perhaps, or with the formation of the Herefordshire in Transition Alliance.
To cut out the gestational period, we can probably best start with the birth of Herefordshire REconomy in early 2011, which by the time TEEconomy began had already attracted a decent amount of support but not, it has to be said, a stakeholder group. However, we had an interesting cross-section of people involved, including elected council officials, council officers, private sector, public sector, Green Party activists, environmental activists and so forth. There were, therefore, the beginnings of a stakeholder group.
We also have a particular characteristic in Herefordshire which I don’t believe is paralleled in Totnes, in the form of a long-established environmental charity – or social enterprise as it’s become – called the Bulmer Foundation, whose remit is to foster the growth of sustainability in Herefordshire. So the expectation was that we would in time be able to draw together from this group of people already in the REconomy project a core group who might well become stakeholders.
The Bulmer Foundation for example was involved with the Herefordshire Food Partnership, which had been developing county food strategy for some years, so it looked entirely possible that we would be able to build on these beginnings and run the project in a similar way to Totnes, using a stakeholder group. That is not the way it turned out and I would point to one or two reasons why this evolved in the way that it did.
First of all, having announced the launch of the TEEconomy research – or Economic Evaluation project – at the REconomy launch event in June 2011, I set about establishing good one-to-one relationships with all the key people who would be feeding information into the process: officers from the local authority who have a lot of research strengths, also people in the aforementioned Bulmer Foundation and other key people around the area. From these I started to build what I thought would grow into a stakeholder group.
What happened early on in that process was that the Department for Energy and Climate Change (DECC) roughly speaking threw a lot of pound notes in the air and presumably watched with interest (or possibly glee) as people who are normally sensible started running around the place picking up the money, so to speak. Everyone was united in feeling that this was not a satisfactory process. What it did in relation to TEEconomy was to take away the attention of the people I had begun to engage, whose focus was now on bidding for and then fulfilling in a very short time scale the DECC LEAF projects.
That left me with few options other than to try to work in a parallel fashion and in a complementary way to this other work going on, which was what I then set out to do. However it had the effect of pulling the rug out from under the intention to put together a stakeholder group, because there were so many other demands on people’s time.
That was at the very beginning of 2012, and the meeting which launched the final Herefordshire reports was in May 2013, so you can see that was quite a long period of time and there’s a story behind that too. We held a very successful meeting in July 2012 when Fiona came to Hereford as part of her road trip around the UK – she was handling the work down in Totnes and was overall in charge of the Economic Evaluation projects.
This was at a point when I had done a lot of work on the food report but for the reason above had not made headway with either of the other reports. We succeeded in bringing together a cross-section of movers and shakers from the whole of the Herefordshire to hear Fiona present where she had got to in Totnes with the Economic Evaluation work, and I presented where we had got to in Herefordshire.
At this meeting we had, for example, senior people from the Chamber of Commerce, the Chair of the Business Board, people from large housing associations, the council’s Cabinet member for Planning and Environment, senior local authority officers in economic development, alongside others from the environmental activist community, Green Party councillors and so forth. The audience was a genuine social cross-section and they were all very interested and stuck around for the entire duration.
Coming to the recent launch meeting in May, we didn’t attract such a good cross-section, which was a disappointment. On the other hand, from those present there was a high degree of interest and congratulations and positive enthusiasm for the work that had been done. Fiona and I collaborated in presenting principally the work from Herefordshire, and Fiona referred to the work in Totnes as well. So what we’re waiting to see at this point is whether that degree of positive reception and enthusiasm is capable of translating itself into a group that will take on board the results of all this work and put it to good use.
How easy did you find it to find all the data that you needed – creating a blueprint like this is a very data-heavy process. How easy did you find it to track all that down?
There were three different aspects to the research: to look into the renewable energy potential of Herefordshire, to look into the food growing and distribution potential of Herefordshire, and to look into the housing retrofit potential for Herefordshire, assessing the benefit of each to the local economy.
There’s an enormous amount of data out there, but the problem is you can’t always get what you want and sometimes what you think you’ve got turns out to be deeply flawed. Just because an expensive consultancy has produced a data-rich report doesn’t mean you should rely on it, and in fact we found that out the hard way in a couple of respects. For example, we had what purported to be a good report on renewable energy commissioned by the local authority.
However we relied in part on one particular piece of information in that report which further down the road we discovered was completely wrong, meaning we had to go back and rework a lot of our figures. And again, there was a report which would have fed a lot of useful information into the housing retrofit part of the work but was just terribly flawed. It had some useful stuff but was really quite hopeless in other respects.
I got a lot of information from my contacts in the Research Unit at the local authority which was very helpful, and also from officers involved in sustainability and in delivering household energy efficiency work. One might say that the problem was almost too much information: literally if you had to read through all that I accumulated you would never have got anything else done. The challenge is to decide what is relevant and what is useful and to then extract from that answers to the questions that you’ve posed – which means you have to be clear about what questions you’re trying to answer.
An early indication of how interesting and useful this work could be was when I asked a question of a knowledgeable person at the Bulmer Foundation: “How much do we know about what is spent in the county on purchasing food and drink?” – I expected the answer to be that this was a well-developed area of work, as the food strategy group has been working on this for some years, connected to the local authority. But instead the answer was – nobody knew. So that told me, helpfully, that the work we were doing was needed, but also told me that I was starting from somewhere near the ground floor.
So you really do need to be pretty good with the old Excel spreadsheet if you want to do this work. You have to be pretty good with numbers and formulae and all that sort of thing, because really there is no substitute for looking into whatever reports you can find locally and also whatever you can get from the Office for National Statistics, at national or regional level as well as local. Then, you are going to have to do a lot of grinding with those numbers on your own to make them helpful for what you’re trying to come up with locally.
That is a considerable task. Fortunately I’ve done this kind of work when I was in waste management and am no stranger to Excel. It really does carry a lot of challenges and you need to be disciplined in the way you handle it or it becomes a quagmire in which you can sink.
What would you say are the key findings that came out of this and what was its usefulness? Was there anything that surprised you about what’s come out of it?
I’m in no doubt about the usefulness – I’ve already pointed to the fact that what we’re doing fills a missing gap. Lots of people talk about wanting to grow a sustainable local economy. People who are mainstream businesspeople would perhaps use very similar language. Everybody’s interested in sustainability but what we did was to begin to put pound signs to some of the statements that were commonplace. It’s all very well saying we know there’s a lot of potential to grow some kind of renewable energy in Herefordshire, but just how much would that be worth and how much would it cost to build it? We now have figures. They are ball park figures admittedly – they probably stand to be sharpened up and perhaps even challenged, but at least we have begun the process of putting figures onto what this could be worth.
Pound signs on the front of figures is a language that helps people to think in a language of economic decision making. Without those pound signs you might say it’s possibly fruitless and likely to go round in circles. So we’ve contributed to mainstream discussion and I think we’ve also contributed usefully to what you might call the New Economics approach. Here we’ve got a grounded piece of work in a real situation that is quite focused and local, and hopefully people will be able to use this as a stepping stone towards doing similar things in other local areas.
Once a few places have done this then we can get together and compare notes, and we’ll start to build up a picture of what a grass-roots view of the national economy looks like – what the potential is if you connect up places like Herefordshire, Totnes, Brixton and hopefully another dozen places to come on stream in the next couple of years. Then we’ll start to get a very different viewpoint from that which Chambers of Commerce and business boards tend to have.
It was pretty shocking, the thing about 71-83% of all household expenditure going through 5 supermarkets in Herefordshire…
Some of this, of course, people know instinctively. People instinctively know that they and their neighbours are in and out of supermarkets all the time. We’ve been able to come up with some information that’s really interesting, in that putting a number to this enables them to say – wow, did you realise just how much…?
Just to use your example, this is the sort of information that I hope will cut through to the professionals, to the officers in the council who are responsible for economic strategy, and also to ordinary people on the street. Hopefully all will be interested to know that we spend half a billion pounds a year on food and drink in Herefordshire – that is a staggering amount of money – and then to tell them that three-fifths of that money is leaving the local economy straight away bringing marginal benefit to people who are living here; and to then move on to saying – look at the difference between spending a pound in a supermarket and spending a pound in a locally-owned store on local produce; and to follow that through by introducing the language of ‘local multiplier’ or of ‘Plugging the Leaks’ as the New Economics Foundation might say it. Understand, that if you spend a pound on carrots in a supermarket or spend a pound on carrots in a local independent store, these have two dramatically different effects on the future of your children.
I hope that we’ve equipped an argument that will actually help change people’s behaviour: their buying habits and the way that they think about what they’re doing when they go into a supermarket, or how they think about the additional expense of buying locally produced organic carrots in a locally owned store.
And of course at the moment the whole push from central government for economic growth and then the push through the local enterprise partnerships and so on, really seems to be focusing predominantly on trying to grow that 83% of the economy, not the 16% that you identify as being the local spend and indeed sees that 16% local spend as being backward, out of date, uncompetitive, standing in the way of growth rather than supporting it. How do you think that this report can contribute to these discussions?
Yes, the local authority economic strategy has I think less than one quarter of one page about the growth of new local enterprises. It’s simply not developed. They acknowledge it but they don’t seem to want to develop that in any full way. Less than 200 metres away from where I’m sitting, there is a massive new construction going up which is supposed to be the economic salvation of Herefordshire – it includes a Waitrose, a Debenhams, a multiplex cinema.
This is the old model of economic growth going up right next to where I did a lot of the research for this project. And only a couple of miles away we’ve got an enterprise zone which again is supposed to be part of this economic salvation. The most public feature of that development is planned to be a Georgian aircraft manufacturer coming to build aircraft components in Herefordshire, while so little resource is going to pave the way for the growth of locally-owned businesses. We are here right on the front line of that unsustainable old-model growth versus new alternative visions of the economy.
Our reports are supposed to strengthen the hand of people in the mainstream, some of whom are very sympathetic to what we’re talking about and hopefully will pick up the tools that we’re offering. And also to equip those people who are perhaps outside the mainstream but knocking on the door, creating new local enterprises and arguing vociferously against the importation of yet more supermarkets into Herefordshire. There are active proposals for these : the Waitrose I’ve just mentioned, and also for a massive Sainsburys in a small market town. This is being actively fought over at present and hopefully our work will enable a sensible debate and common ground to be discovered between people who on the face of it are opposing factions.
How replicable do you get a sense, having done this evaluation process, does it feel? What would a Transition initiative need to be able to think about doing a good job of this in their place?
Would it be possible to do this work without funding, I wonder? We had funding which in my case was absolutely essential. There’s no way I could have done this scale of work unpaid, and actually in this kind of work the question of credibility is important. What you’re trying to do is come up with a report that will stand its ground alongside all the reports that have been commissioned by the local authority or other national agencies.
There needs to be a certain depth and quality to that work, which it’s hard to believe could be delivered on a voluntary basis. But then I don’t want to set the bar too high. Anybody could start the process of doing this simply by establishing a relationship with the relevant research officers in their local authority and beginning to ask – what can you tell me about food, or energy. A lot of the answers may be “sorry, don’t know”, but those answers give you confirmation that what you’re on the track of is worth doing. Then you could follow the path that I and Totnes have outlined.
I put quite a lot of time into developing extensive references to accompany these reports. there are separate stand-alone documents that give all the links anybody could want to the source material I used. Hopefully that will save people a lot of time, that you can drill straight through into the particular spreadsheets available from the Office for National Statistics that will give you, wherever you are in the UK, the sort of information you need. When you get there, you will need what I would consider to be pretty expert skills at handling data.
I think that there is a role here for one or more people – I think two heads are certainly better than one and a small group of people working on this would be even better than one or two heads – and you may need funding in there. You need a core group of people. You could call it a stakeholder group but that suggests something a bit bigger to me. I think you probably need a committed group of three or four people and one person who spends quite a lot of time and skills following the path that my and Fiona’s work have piloted.
I think it’s going to be very different in different areas, depending on what’s available and how much help you can get from the agencies that hold the data, and from people involved in the Transition movement.
Lastly, what happens next? Where are you hoping that this will lead to n how do you get there from here now that you’ve completed this incredible piece of work?
The key thing is, who’s going to pick it up? I’m willing to be a part of what happens next but my role in terms of pathfinding is now over – therefore what I’m going to do is work with local REconomy groups. For those who’ve already got some kind of REconomy group in their area, that is clearly a big part of the answer to ‘what next’.
Beyond that, this morning I replied to an interesting email sent to me by an agency that supported some of the work we did in this project. It explores the link between what happens locally and the LEPs, the Local Enterprise Partnerships. I think that is where we’re heading, to be part of a larger voluntary-sector initiative challenging mainstream economics. I count all environmental groups as belonging to what you might call either voluntary sector or civil society. Acting together, we need to really force our presence into the Local Enterprise Partnerships. This interesting document suggests that there are more levers than we realised on which we can pull to do that.
We want to be sitting at what has become the top table in terms of economic funding and strategy in most regions, which is the Local Enterprise Partnerships. The REconomy group that we’ve got here in Herefordshire is still several steps away from having that kind of status or credibility. We need to use the Economic Evaluation work which I believe has strength in its argument and strength in its data, and also has strength in that we’ve done something nobody else has really done.
We need to use this as a bargaining chip or leverage to say – look, REconomy is actually needed as part of the economic dialogue. It is needed as part of the solution to the problems that everybody knows we are facing in this country. That means it needs to be a part of the strategic policy-making structures in our region. That’s where I’m headed, together with the REconomy group locally.
I would suggest that people need to be pointing efforts into the strategic structures, but how you do that will vary widely depending on the resources you’ve already got. If you haven’t got something like a REconomy group, then I think you need to start to build that. Some REconomy groups are loaded towards the practical setting up of enterprises, which is also essential knowledge.
In Herefordshire it was always a characteristic that we were much stronger on the strategic side. Perhaps what I’m saying here simply reflects the historic development of the environmental movement in Herefordshire, and that I think we’re now ready to push forward into making those further steps. People in other places may view this quite differently.
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