Inequality in the Transition Network purpose statement discussion: Explaining what it’s all about
By Catrina Pickering 22nd September 2011
Where does equality fit in Transition? Should Transition be responding to climate change, the rising cost of energy and inequality?
This is a question that the staff team at Transition Network have been mulling over for some time. Our discussions have journeyed from responses to inequality need to be somewhere in Transition towards responses to inequality need to be everywhere in Transition, and perhaps at the centre. We’ve come up with a possible new purpose statement to reflect this. It says:
“Transition Network supports community-led responses to climate change, inequality and shrinking supplies of cheap energy, building resilience and happiness.”
Of course this statement is fairly familiar except for the addition of the word “inequality”. If we are to change Transition Network’s purpose statement in this way, it will be because people involved in Transition want this to happen.
We asked a few people to write about their thoughts on inequality in Transition. We realised that very few of these people were against the idea and yet we didn’t seem to know people in Transition who would be against it. So we put a note on the Transition website to invite anyone and everyone to submit their thoughts. We received 21 responses of which the overwhelming majority were for the idea.
We’ve laid out all the submissions in the following blogs and would love to hear your comments on this discussion.
What next? Will Transition Network be adopting a purpose statement that includes inequality as a central driver? Well that all depends on you…
- Responses from 21 people involved with or linked to Transition who responded to our question about this posted on the Transition Network website in August 2011
- Peter Lipman, the Chair of Transition Network
- Louis Alemayehu who’s a community elder involved in Transition US and Transition Minneapolis
- Sophy Banks, co-founder of Transition Training and very involved in inner Transition
- Peter Ruczynski from Transition Reading who we knew had some interesting ideas against changing the purpose statement to include inequality
- Thoughts from Sao Paulo, Brazil
- Bill Kerry the Co-Director of the Equality Trust