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.
Come find me at robhopkins.net
Many Transition initiatives struggle to fund their work, and in their early stages, to fund members of the group undertaking Transition Training. Ben Metz of Ashoka is involved with Transition Town Hackney in London, and here he writes of an innovative approach he developed for raising funds so that members of the group could do the training. This approach could be used in many different ways….
The film is in the final stages of the edit. A rough cut is complete and now it’s a case of fine cutting it so that it flows well and hits all the right notes. We need to make hard decisions about what works best and what goes into the extras. The Transition Network trustees will be the first to see the rough cut this week, to make sure it doesn’t misrepresent Transition and that it covers all it needs to cover. They will be able to see whether it does what they hoped it would, hopefully inspire and move people. It will first be previewed publicly at the Transition Network conference, and we are hoping to arrange a simultaneous live online preview as well (more info on that to follow).
As part of this years Convergence Sustainable Living Festival, and to mark the 1st anniversary of the formation of the Transition Towns Ireland Network, the Transition national gathering will be held at Cultivate in Dublin. The aim of this gathering is to build the capacity of the Irish network, formally launch and build the content of the new web resource for the Irish Network and to meet and inform each other about where we are at in our own communities.
I travelled to London yesterday for an event which was part of the Big Energy Shift (BES). BES was commissioned and supported by the Department of Energy and Climate Change, the Northern Ireland Executive and the Welsh Assembly Government and was facilitated by Ipsos Mori. Over the last few months, members of 9 communities in England, Wales and Northern Ireland have met for a series of facilitated “deliberative discussions”, looking at the bases on which the public would be prepared to take up renewable energy generation and energy conservation. Yesterday’s meeting was the last in the series, and brought representatives of all the communities involved to London. It was a fascinating day.
While most of the papers this weekend were obsessing about Susan Boyle, there were also three of the most in-depth and high profile pieces about Transition yet to appear in the media. The first was a 5,000 word piece in the New York Times’ Green Issue called The End is Nigh (yay!) by Jon Mooallem. Although parts of it make my toes curl, it is, overall, a fascinating piece, focusing mostly on Transition Sandpoint, and how the process is going there. Amazing to get such in depth coverage in such a publication, and a huge boost to the work of Transition US (check out their new website, and a short ‘welcome’ film I did for them recently).
