23 Sep 2013
In the final winning entry in our Transition Training competition, Viv Chamberlin-Kidd shares her story of the impact a Permaculture Design Course had on her life:
The impact that attending the Hoffman Process (HP) in November 2009 had is difficult to beat. It was 8 days cut off from my family which I found emotionally, mentally and physically exhausting and spiritually enlightening. The journey of self-discovery that started during those days changed my beliefs to the core. I am still integrating all I learnt and experienced at the HP and I wonder whether that assimilation will ever actually end.
The ripple effects from HP led me down a path to (amongst other things) the Permaculture Design Course (PDC). These two courses are probably as diametrically opposed as any 2 courses could be yet I see them as two sides of the coin in terms of my life and where I am now. Where HP had me looking inward at the quadrinity of spiritual, mental, emotional and physical – the PDC asked me to use these four aspects to look outward at the world and acknowledge my place and potential power in it.
As a home-educator of two children a 12 day residential PDC was logistically impossible so finding a course in my home city which allowed children to attend if needed was an answer to my prayers. And so another life changing journey started only 8 miles from my home.
The PDC teaches us about sustainable food production and using the land in a way which increases production and complements the planet rather than mis-using it. However what I most needed at that time was to find a way to utilise the natural resources within me so as to fully appreciate where I ended and where my family (and more especially my children) started.
It was the fact that Permaculture principles could be applied to all aspects of life that seemed pertinent to how I felt following HP. At that time I had been out of the traditional workforce for six years and I felt my computing skills to be out-of-date. I was emotionally fulfilled by watching my children flourish.
So I started “Permaculturing” my life. I pledged to balance my quadrinity whilst concurrently moving outwards from myself to evaluate my relationships with my family, friends and community. This re-designing of my life-path involved using my mental skills to volunteer with some sustainably-motivated organisations. At the same time I began to nurture my spiritual side by training as a Shamanic Practitioner and to look at my physical health. Through these activities I have met some fascinating people and also feel that I am contributing positively to the welfare of my local community, friends and family. I have also gained valuable experience as well as confidence in my teaching, website design, computing, financial and organisational skills. This has led to a more natural rhythm to my eating habits and I have found physical activities that bring me joy whilst contributing positively to my state of health.
I suppose no-one ever knows how much of what follows from any event or course is actually derived from that one event. I cannot truthfully say how much of what has happened since attending HP or the PDC would not have occurred otherwise. I can say however that attending the HP gave me the courage to attend the PDC and the PDC led me to become a Trustee of the Permaculture Association and to start my blog as part of my Diploma.
Being a Trustee has allowed me to truly appreciate how others view my skills and the contribution I can make which is more than I ever thought was possible when I considered applying. Blogging has made me re-evaluate my meandering life journey regularly. It gives me perspective and clarity which I sometimes feel is lacking in my rather chaotic existence. As Bill Mollison (the father of Permaculture) says, “the only ethical decision is to take responsibility for our own existence and that of our children.” The path from HP to PDC with Shamanism as a spiritual keystone has given me the structure and ability to put that quote into practice in my everyday life and to share these with my children in a way that means they will be natural in their lives.
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16 Sep 2013
Here’s a wonderful story from the Bristol Pound blog, which its author, Haley Pearson, gave permission to reproduce here. It’s a great local currency story, and with the Bristol Pound on a roll, recently announcing that it can be used on the city’s buses, I thought this was a lovely story about the kind of magic a local currency can create.
Bristol Pound in the House!
Look at me! A first-time homeowner. I sure did try to pay for my new flat in Bristol Pounds, but the mortgage company was very firm with me. I had to settle for seeking out Bristol Pound traders with the skills I needed to help me out around the house. Everyone knows that they should have their locks changed in any new property, especially if it has previously been a rental, so I called up Bricktop Locks (aka Mark), a very keen Bristol Pound trader. We made an appointment and I went on my merry way.
Moments later, what should happen but the entire lock mechanism of my main door failed. Absolutely failed. Couldn’t lock the house, couldn’t get back in, terrifying AND ridiculous! Feeling a wally, I rang Mark straightaway. He jetted right over, and I have to admit I was slightly surprised by his peroxide-blonde semi-faux-hawk Mohican hairstyle. He quickly proved himself to be relaxed and very kind, and despite not having the exact parts immediately to hand, he cobbled together a VERY secure solution and promised to order the rest ASAP. What a gem! I paid him with Bristol Pound TXT2PAY, which not only was easy, but instant. I got a thank-you text from Mark not 10 seconds after I pressed send!
On the off-chance, I emailed him later and asked if he knew any decorators. Could he recommend someone? Well, turns out he’s a locksmith AND a plasterer/decorator. Who is this mysterious jack-of-all-trades, I wondered. We agreed an ideal start date for the decorating and he got to work.
A couple of days later he was nearly done, and I asked if it would be possible to finish before the weekend. “Well,” he said. “I clean the bendy-busses on a Thursday, but I could come along around half-4?” This guy, if you can believe it, manages the cleaning all of the park-and-ride bendy-busses in Bristol!
Long story short, he finished in time for the weekend, was a lovely, friendly, funny professional right the way through and I would highly recommend his services. And here’s the best part! Mark offers a 5% discount to anyone paying in Bristol Pounds! I do believe that I made the largest single £B payment to date when I used my online account to transfer nearly £B600 to Mark’s Bristol Pound account held at Bristol Credit Union. The form even detected and filled out all of his account info for me once I started typing his business name into the box! It was ridiculously easy.
After basking in this claim-to-fame for a day or two, I began to wonder. What was the story behind this friendly bloke who bore so many feathers in his cap it might fly away? I dropped Mark an email and requested an interview. I reckoned it might make an awesome blog-post.
We met at the Clifton Lido (£B trader alert!) on one of the hottest days yet this year. It was a beautiful place to sit with the sun sparkling off the water and a breeze wafting through the wide-open windows.
Firstly, I asked him to list for me every service he offers. He recently changed his business name to Bricktop Services to reflect all those feathers. Deep breath? Plastering, decorating, locksmithing, commercial valet, domestic valet, bendy-bus cleaning, refurbishment and cleaning of pub gardens, jet wash cleaning of all kinds. And he is constantly working to add new skills to his roster.
“I don’t like to sit still, and I never turn down a job,” Mark tells me. “With all of these skills I can do something different every day, never be bored and with luck I’ll never be unemployed.”
Mark moved to Bristol after enduring a difficult corporate redundancy process and decided to retrain as a plasterer (he was already trained as a locksmith). “I heard about the launch of Bristol Pound and if I’m perfectly honest the main attraction for me was the free marketing. Anyone with Bristol Pounds to spend could potentially need a locksmith, and I wanted to be that locksmith and grow my business among a captive audience of like-minded people. It wasn’t until I started attending the first trader meetings that I began to understand how amazing Bristol Pound was. I thought it was bloody brilliant.”
On the eve of the Bristol Pound launch, Mark realised he hadn’t put together any of the promotional materials he had planned for the party in St Nick’s. “So I rushed out, put some flyers together and ordered a t-shirt. Having the t-shirt done at the last minute cost me a bit, but now I wear it everywhere and it really gets people interested, not only in my services but in Bristol Pound. I attend a lot of business seminars with the council and I always wear it.”
“Joining up with Bristol Pound helped me escape my corporate experience for a community experience. There is a kinship among Bristol Pound users that reflects the love all of us have for Bristol itself.”
I love Bristol Pound for the same reasons. How else could I have met this charming, funny guy, who I now count among my friends? Initiatives like Bristol Pound are providing the kind of community spirit that will keep Bristol great (and weird!).
Read more»
16 Sep 2013
Here’s a wonderful story from the Bristol Pound blog, which its author, Haley Pearson, gave permission to reproduce here. It’s a great local currency story, and with the Bristol Pound on a roll, recently announcing that it can be used on the city’s buses, I thought this was a lovely story about the kind of magic a local currency can create.
Bristol Pound in the House!
Look at me! A first-time homeowner. I sure did try to pay for my new flat in Bristol Pounds, but the mortgage company was very firm with me. I had to settle for seeking out Bristol Pound traders with the skills I needed to help me out around the house. Everyone knows that they should have their locks changed in any new property, especially if it has previously been a rental, so I called up Bricktop Locks (aka Mark), a very keen Bristol Pound trader. We made an appointment and I went on my merry way.
Moments later, what should happen but the entire lock mechanism of my main door failed. Absolutely failed. Couldn’t lock the house, couldn’t get back in, terrifying AND ridiculous! Feeling a wally, I rang Mark straightaway. He jetted right over, and I have to admit I was slightly surprised by his peroxide-blonde semi-faux-hawk Mohican hairstyle. He quickly proved himself to be relaxed and very kind, and despite not having the exact parts immediately to hand, he cobbled together a VERY secure solution and promised to order the rest ASAP. What a gem! I paid him with Bristol Pound TXT2PAY, which not only was easy, but instant. I got a thank-you text from Mark not 10 seconds after I pressed send!
On the off-chance, I emailed him later and asked if he knew any decorators. Could he recommend someone? Well, turns out he’s a locksmith AND a plasterer/decorator. Who is this mysterious jack-of-all-trades, I wondered. We agreed an ideal start date for the decorating and he got to work.
A couple of days later he was nearly done, and I asked if it would be possible to finish before the weekend. “Well,” he said. “I clean the bendy-busses on a Thursday, but I could come along around half-4?” This guy, if you can believe it, manages the cleaning all of the park-and-ride bendy-busses in Bristol!
Long story short, he finished in time for the weekend, was a lovely, friendly, funny professional right the way through and I would highly recommend his services. And here’s the best part! Mark offers a 5% discount to anyone paying in Bristol Pounds! I do believe that I made the largest single £B payment to date when I used my online account to transfer nearly £B600 to Mark’s Bristol Pound account held at Bristol Credit Union. The form even detected and filled out all of his account info for me once I started typing his business name into the box! It was ridiculously easy.
After basking in this claim-to-fame for a day or two, I began to wonder. What was the story behind this friendly bloke who bore so many feathers in his cap it might fly away? I dropped Mark an email and requested an interview. I reckoned it might make an awesome blog-post.
We met at the Clifton Lido (£B trader alert!) on one of the hottest days yet this year. It was a beautiful place to sit with the sun sparkling off the water and a breeze wafting through the wide-open windows.
Firstly, I asked him to list for me every service he offers. He recently changed his business name to Bricktop Services to reflect all those feathers. Deep breath? Plastering, decorating, locksmithing, commercial valet, domestic valet, bendy-bus cleaning, refurbishment and cleaning of pub gardens, jet wash cleaning of all kinds. And he is constantly working to add new skills to his roster.
“I don’t like to sit still, and I never turn down a job,” Mark tells me. “With all of these skills I can do something different every day, never be bored and with luck I’ll never be unemployed.”
Mark moved to Bristol after enduring a difficult corporate redundancy process and decided to retrain as a plasterer (he was already trained as a locksmith). “I heard about the launch of Bristol Pound and if I’m perfectly honest the main attraction for me was the free marketing. Anyone with Bristol Pounds to spend could potentially need a locksmith, and I wanted to be that locksmith and grow my business among a captive audience of like-minded people. It wasn’t until I started attending the first trader meetings that I began to understand how amazing Bristol Pound was. I thought it was bloody brilliant.”
On the eve of the Bristol Pound launch, Mark realised he hadn’t put together any of the promotional materials he had planned for the party in St Nick’s. “So I rushed out, put some flyers together and ordered a t-shirt. Having the t-shirt done at the last minute cost me a bit, but now I wear it everywhere and it really gets people interested, not only in my services but in Bristol Pound. I attend a lot of business seminars with the council and I always wear it.”
“Joining up with Bristol Pound helped me escape my corporate experience for a community experience. There is a kinship among Bristol Pound users that reflects the love all of us have for Bristol itself.”
I love Bristol Pound for the same reasons. How else could I have met this charming, funny guy, who I now count among my friends? Initiatives like Bristol Pound are providing the kind of community spirit that will keep Bristol great (and weird!).
Read more»
16 Sep 2013
In the second winning entry from our “The Course That Changed My Life” competition, Marie Lefebvre shares her experience of a course in Project Management that led her to look at achieving her goals in a very different way.
“Last June, I completed a course in Project Management. The course was in my diary since April. For some reasons as June came and my life was in a bit of a tumble, it was what I desperately needed. I can clearly say that the course changed my life. I have learnt two things from the course:
- First, when you have an issue, focus on finding a solution.
- Secondly, the solution is never far, most of the time it is inside you.
They gave me two pieces of paper with the Project Management process and a matrix to prioritise my goals. It was the best gift that I could receive. I came out refreshed with the world in front of me. That day, I made the personal commitment to become a master in Project Management. I made the commitment to design my life.
The goal entailed understanding better who I am, what I want to achieve and why I failed to achieve my goals so far. Using the tool, I laid out all the things that I wanted to achieve in the nearer time and in the longer term. I recognised that I was bombarded by social commitments but actually my real aspirations were to develop myself as an individual, learning new skills and abilities to lead a more self-sufficient and sustainable life and help people in return in this path.
I developed a plan for each of my goals and priced them out. It led to the development of a financial budget tool. My financial analysis confirmed that I was giving to others more that I had. Worse, it was not in line with my values and hopes for a more sustainable lifestyle. I knew that for real change to occur I needed to de-clutter my life and clean my soul. I developed a number of tools helping me going through with those endeavours. What stroked me after few weeks gathering my notes together is how much I have evolved and how it translated in tangible changes too. I am calmer, more in phase with what is happening in the now. I am more aware of what triggers my feelings. I also recognised that I am a visual and creative person.
I repainted my house and reorganised it throughout, whilst upcycling items and giving many away. Now I am working away to start sharing with others that change is possible. In this path, I am looking for a solution to do it full-time whilst remaining financially stable. Whilst I volunteer with Transition Leicester to help my community reduce their carbon footprint, and focus my attention on starting a group of interest on the local economy in Leicester, volunteering in my spare time is no more aligned with my inspiration. I know from my Project Management course that the solution is not far. Could a training with Transition Network unleash my full potential?
Marie wins a place on the Transition Training of her choice, so we hope that she will share with us the answer to her question once she has done the training!
Read more»
11 Sep 2013
Transition Network’s Transition Launch training, the training designed to support people getting started making Transition happen where they live is now up and running. Developed in partnership with Gaia University, it’s a fantastic new opportunity for people who, for one reason or another, struggle to find the time to do the training, but would still like to obtain the insights it offers. You can read more about it, and find out how to sign up and take part, here. To find out more about it, we spoke to Naresh Giangrande, one of its creators, and started by asking him to give us a potted history of Transition Training, and how it came to exist.
“I guess it evolved because so many people started arriving in Totnes as soon as we started doing this Totnes project, wanting to know what we did and how we did it. You were writing the book and we thought “wouldn’t it be great to give people an embodied experience of what Transition is like, or what it is, or what this process is?” So Sophy Banks and I set up the training in late 2007 I think.
Immediately there was huge demand. We just kept doing trainings and they kept selling out. We realised pretty early on, within about 4 or 5 months of delivering this training, that it was a really great event. It brought people together; it gave them a sense of what Transition is. It gave them a whole lot of content and material but it also helped bring groups together and also networked groups in different parts of the country. We gave people a sense of the depth of the vision that we were trying to communicate.
Fairly early on in the process we realised that the two of us couldn’t deliver all the training that was necessary, particularly because a lot of people were coming from overseas to do the training. We thought that doesn’t really fit in how we see ourselves and how we see what Transition is: that local thing but we just had to travel all the time. So what we decided to do was train other people to do this, which we did in mid-2008 when we did our first ‘Train the Trainers’ which enabled other people to deliver this training.
Then because we were getting such interest from abroad, in late 2008 – early 2009 we went on our world tour where we went to 7 different countries. We did Transition Training, and we trained different trainers in the US, Japan, Canada, New Zealand, Australia and Hong Kong. Since then we’ve had another 6 or 8 ‘Train the Trainers’. We now have trainers in 24 different countries, the training had been delivered in 28-30 different countries. It’s something that’s spread all around the world. It’s a compelling, interesting, fun and enjoyable 2 days and it’s 2 days that are jam-packed with content, maybe even a bit too full. We think that when people have done the training it gives them a reasonable chance of setting up a good Transition Initiative.
What different trainings have been developed?
The first thing we added was ‘Effective Groups’, which, although we don’t see it as a core training, it emerged fairly quickly as an important piece of what initiatives need to work well. We were getting a lot of messages from people that it was the group process that was difficult in their Transition Initiative. Nick Osbourne developed his ‘Effective Groups’ training which addresses all the issues that you need to be competent and to run good groups, and also addresses things such as what happens when there is conflict, and deal with it creatively. That was something we did to support Transition Initiatives. The overall mission of Transition Training is to support Transition Initiatives to do Transition well.
We did the Effective Groups, and that was followed on by what we call the Thrive Training, which arose because people started groups and then they’d either reached places where they didn’t know what to do next or they felt there were some difficulties – some people were expressing that it would be great to have a training. “We’ve set it up, we’ve got working groups going, we’ve doing all these projects, but what next, what else can we do? It would be great to have a training that helped us vision and empower us to move on, on this path of Transition”. So we set up Transition Thrive which is designed to do exactly that, to help groups either iron out some of the difficulties they have or move on to their next steps.
How did Launch Online come about?
It came about because the technology enables us to do high-quality trainings online now, and I guess there’s two reasons really for why we want to do the launch training online. The first is accessibility, to make it accessible to more people, and the second is to explore how to use the technology that’s out there that can enable us to create really high-quality trainings, and explore whether by doing a different format we can create something that is as, or maybe even more successful at enabling and supporting Transition initiatives and Transition groups around the world.
Let me just explore the two bits of it. At the moment, if you want to do the Transition Training, the only format it’s been developed in is over two days, mostly over a weekend. Most people just can’t afford to take that time out because they have children or businesses or whatever. It’s also quite expensive to travel and find somewhere to stay. So in order to make it more accessible we thought it would be better to be able to do the training wherever you are in the world; you just have to be able to log on online. You don’t have to leave your house.
We’ve cut it up into little bitesizse chunks, so the course is going to consist of 8 weekly webinars. Once a week there’s going to be a webinar on a Tuesday night in the UK, You can just log on to the webinar and you can listen live and be part of the training. The technology now enables you to ask questions.
The second bit is that this technology gives you the possibility of creating something that we can’t do face to face. Which is that first of all, we cut the material up in to bitesize chunks, so we’ll cover one topic in each of these eight weekly webinars. These webinars, the first one will be the introductions and cover the context issues and the second one will be the introduction to Transition. The third one will be awareness raising and so on. By cutting it up into bitesize chunks, people can get a real sense of what this particular piece is, and then over the next week will have a chance to mull it over.
The webinar will be put up online, they can listen to it again, and get any of the bits they didn’t get the first time. There’ll be also a private space for participants to share and ask questions, the content providers will be there to answer questions and to guide people to put up additional resources. There’s a whole week to chew over and mull over each piece of the training. Also ideally, especially if you’re already part of an Initiative, you could try it out and come back either later in the week or the next time and say “I tried this and this is what happened, what else could I have done or how could I have done that differently?”
It’s a great way to integrate learning into doing and to trying it out. For that reason I think using technology in this way could be a very powerful way of delivering this training.
What will people get out of it?
First of all, I guess it puts out a pretty complete vision of the starting out phase of Transition. It gives you a really complete sense of what Transition is. It also enables you to meet other people who are doing Transition, and for many people that’s a real bonus. Maybe they’re living somewhere or they don’t have anybody else who’s interested in this, they’ve thought about where the world’s going they’ve read things about climate change and they want to make a difference. So having this training enables them to come together with other people and have a couple of days to really explore these ideas in depth.
It gives people a sense of the depth of the vision of some of the inner work that we’re doing and how we weave that into the training. In a way, that’s been the most surprising thing for people. Constantly, the feedback we get is about what surprised people on the training, is the inner piece that we do on the second day. A lot of people never really realised that, oh yes, that inner peace is really an important piece if we’re going to transition this culture to something that’s healthy, with high wellbeing – we need to pay attention to that as well”.
Lastly, I asked him what, in his opinion, makes a good Trainer? I haven’t transcribed that one, you’ll just have to listen to that!
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