Author Archives: Rob Hopkins

Today we launch our new theme of ‘Fairness’ with an editorial from Sophy Banks: We picked a big topic for this month’s theme – to run alongside the build up and aftermath of the 2015 Transition Conference. Fairness. Exploring this leads pretty quickly to some other major themes – inclusion, justice, power to name a […]

Academic work on Transition can often be infuriating rather than illuminating.  I was once asked to peer review a paper on Transition, a movement I was central in kickstarting and shaping, but I had to decline on the grounds that the paper was utterly incomprehensible.  While some research is excellent, and offers useful insights and […]

From July to September we will be highlighting content and key themes for this year’s Transition Network International Conference. This first piece looks at the growth of community energy in the UK with our own Naresh Giangrande and Chris Rowland of OVESCO who will be presenting at the Conference. There’s a Quiet Energy Revolution going […]

Food is an issue that galvanizes so many Transition communities, but many of the classic Transition activities around food, like Landshare and Abundance projects, are to some extent ways of making the best of the ever-shrinking space available for ecological growing.  Nothing wrong with that, but it meant I was rather excited when – via […]

We’ve had a fascinating couple of months going into our REconomy theme.  Welcome to our traditional theme Digest, where we condense those 8 weeks into a few paragraphs so you can more easily find the bits that interest you.  We started with our editorial, 8 Paradigm Shifts at the Heart of REconomy, which put REconomy […]

Stéphanie Jacometti of Transition Cobham tells the story of their recent successful crowdfunding appeal:    Transition Cobham started in January 2013 after Stéphanie went to the Transition conference in 2012 and wondered why no one had set up an initiative in Cobham. After spending time with Transition Town Kingston, she convened the very first meeting […]

This is one of the last blog posts I will be writing in my role as coordinator of the REconomy Project for the Transition Network. After 5 years of deep involvement in shaping and delivering this work, from the autumn I will be shifting my attention to a new Transition project. I’ll tell you more […]

In 2014 the United States was amongst those that joined forces as an international network focusing on REconomy which is now 11 countries strong. These hubs have been assessing the potential to initiate some REconomy-type activity in each place. They have been developing some top level strategies needed to progress this work.  Together these hubs […]

We are often asked “what would a Transition local government look like?”  It’s a complex question, but one Council taking a pioneering approach to its local economy is Preston in Lancashire.  Preston City Council, working with Centre for Local Economic Strategies (CLES) recently published ‘Creating a Good Local Economy: the role of anchor institutions‘, a remarkable […]

Here we gather in one place the four videos we recently produced about the REconomy Project.  Fiona Ward, the originator of REconomy, talked to Rob Hopkins about different aspects of REconomy, and how it came to be.  You can find out more about REconomy here.  The films were created by Emilio Mula, with support from […]

TransitionNetwork.org is being redeveloped and we would value your input and help in the process!  The current site is now just under 6 years old, and we are aware that it needs a little tweak or two to bring it up todate. We would really appreciate it if you could take 5 minutes and take […]

As we explore our theme of REconomy, we are trying to do so in a variety of media, film, blogs etc.  To that, today, we add poetry.  Drew Dellinger speaker, writer, poet, teacher, and author of Love Letter to the Milky Way, has kindly sent us a poem, entitled ‘re:vision’.  Here’s how he introduces it: “To me, […]

One of the three REconomy Guides published recently was Jo Taylor‘s Transition Core Resourcing.  It explores 6 different approaches by which Transition groups might look to bring in finance in order to support the core of their work.  Here we present some extracts from that Guide, presenting the 6 approaches, and a selection of examples […]

Last month’s Local Entrepreneur Forum in Totnes was the fourth, and it’s been an amazing incubator for new enterprises while also building a community around the idea of a more resilient, local economy, and generating over £70,000 of investment into new enterprises.  But until now, it has never happened outside Totnes.  Transition Town Brixton’s Lambeth […]

Creating livelihood is more than earning a living. It is about quality of life, about being in relationship with the local community one is a part of. What does it take for a community to support its inhabitants to find their place and co-create a healthy, resilient local ecology that attracts others to do the […]

Today we’d like to introduce two more free guides from the REconomy Project.  We already heard from Jo Taylor about the Events Toolkit for Transition Initiatives, so we asked Anna Lodge from REconomy to tell us more about the other two… Can you tell us about these two new publications, and what led to those being chosen […]

Julian Dobson is a writer and researcher, as well as one of the co-founders of New Start magazine.  His area of special interest is community regeneration and how to create better places.  We loved his recent book ‘How to Save Town Centres’ so much that we gave it a glowing review, and thought we’d chat […]

Today’s guest blog on the theme of community engagement is by Tina Clarke, a community organiser and consultant in the US.  She is also a Certified Transition Trainer who is part of the international training team and a community resilience consultant, as well as being one of the trainers behind Transition Launch Online. She is also involved […]

‘The Art of Natural Building’ was one of my very favourite books when I first got my hands on a copy back in … .  Here was the distilled learning of the natural building movement thus far, a beautiful exploration of the wide range of natural building methods, from strawbale to cob, from hemp/lime to […]

The internet and social media have so changed our world and our brains in a relatively brief period of time.  Expressions like “I’ll check in my spam folder” would have led to puzzled, indeed slightly revolted looks even 10 years ago, but nowadays we’re all at it.  While I avoid Facebook like the plague, I […]

The REconomy Project’s ‘Events Toolkit for Transition Initiatives’ has just been launched. It is one of three new ‘how to’ guides that the REconomy Project is launching this month. The Events Toolkit, written by Jo Taylor, shares learning (about what works, and what doesn’t), outlines essential tasks, and provides a ‘pick and mix’ menu of […]

Alan Brown of Transition Linlithgow (TL) in Scotland participated in the REconomy Event in St Andrews in October. Here, he shares his experience of the group as a start-up, and incubator and a new phase looking at longer term REconomy activities and how this feeds into other activities on the ground and regional and global issues. […]

It’s not often that I’m won in a competition.  Transition Wilmslow entered some competition thing that REconomy ran a while back in which a talk by me was the prize, they were first out of the hat, so several months later I boarded the train to Wilmslow, 11 miles south of Manchester, in the north-west […]

Reposted from REconomy.org: The aspirational principles laid out below help define what is meant by a Transition-oriented Enterprise (TE). We think this definition is useful because: It helps us define and communicate the kind of trading enterprises we would most like to see, as they best support a local economy that’s based on improving wellbeing […]

For the next two months here we will be talking REconomy, looking in depth at this aspect of Transition which is about creating new enterprises, new economies, new livelihoods.  We’ll talk to entrepreneurs, to people in local authorities embracing this approach, to people about to launch local currencies, to people around the world working to […]

A couple of weeks I took the short train ride to Exeter to meet Ian, Melanie, Adam, Martin and Gill, the group working hard to make the Exeter Pound a reality. With their launch set for September 1st I wanted to find out how’s it going.  How did the idea come about? How did it step […]

To celebrate the launch of Lucy Neal‘s awesome book Playing for Time, we dedicated the last 2 months to our theme of Social Change and the Arts.  And what a packed month it’s been.  We started with an interview with Lucy herself, talking about the intention behind the book.  She told us: “It struck me […]

“My name’s Mandy Barnett. I’m a…now, what am I?! I used to be a designer in the cultural sector. I worked in museums for years. Then I became a manager and I’m a manager consultant now. My work is all about social impact in the cultural sector but my personal life is a lot about […]

It’s been a month since Lucy Neal’s Playing for Time was published.  Here she shares what it feels like to get a book you’ve published into your hand for the first time, how it’s being received, and what ‘Flip the Kipper’ is:   “A handwritten letter came through my door this week. It was from […]

Lynn van Leerzem shares some experiences from reaching out to new people in the ‘Celebrate Nature! A festival by and for Moerwijk’.  Basically, what we did was: we (people of The Hague Transition group) used an international celebration (Fête de la Nature) as an excuse to ‘enthousiasmize’ (there should be a word for that in English) neighbours […]

A while ago I attended a meeting via Skype.  It was taking place in Brussels, and featured a number of high profile people from government and from the business sector discussing resilient economies.  One of the highlights of the meeting for me was the fact that Filipa Pimentel knitted throughout the whole meeting.  I even […]

Sarah Woods and Fern Smith are founders of Emergence and authors of Culture Shift: how artists are responding to sustainability in Wales.  Fern spent many years as artistic director of Volcano Theatre Company, an experimental theatre company.  In the last 5 years she has been rethinking the role of the arts, inquiring “what is the […]

When I was a child there was an extraordinary show on the TV called Jeux Sans Frontières! (Games without borders!). In the early days of the European Union it brought together people from different countries to compete in ridiculous physical games involving huge inflatable cartoon characters, and a lot of people splashing around in jets […]

The final in our series of five ‘Transition Roadshows’ took place in Berkhamsted, joinly organised by Transition Town Berkhamsted, Transition in Kings, Haddenham in Transition, Tring in Transition, Transition Milton Keynes and others.  I have to confess that prior to going I didn’t know that much about Berkhamsted other than it’s a rather beautiful market town, […]

Ruth Ben Tovim is the creative director of Encounters Arts.  As a professional artist and consultant, she has used the transformational power of the arts to work with thousands of people over the last 20 years. She is one of the stars of Lucy Neal’s new book ‘Playing for Time’, so we started by asking for her reflections as […]

This week is Inner Transition Week here at www.transitionnetwork.org and over the course of the week, we’ll bring you stories, and a collection of specially-commissioned new films, as well as pointing you towards the tools we’re using to support the inner and outer in Transition.   We’ll hear from Rob Hopkins and Fiona Ward of Transition Network […]

“Dear Agony Aunt. We recently held a great event, loads of people came, and there was a real buzz. The next meeting we held, where we were planning actions, hardly any new faces came. What suggestions do you have for best capturing the energy and the people at big events and encouraging them to step […]

(Reposted from Transition US). In Sebastopol, CA, organizers of the first ever Sebastopol Village Building Convergence (a working group of Transiiton Sebastopol), a 10-day Placemaking (public art, permaculture, and natural building) festival modeled after the success of City Repair in Portland, OR. Village Building Convergence organizers have been collaborating with the Sebastopol mayor and City […]

Few articles about the UK’s upcoming election have raised my hackles as much as an article by Stuart Heritage entitled Ed Miliband admitting to not watching TV is a big mistake.  Heritage picks up on a quote in a recent interview with Ed Miliband for the Radio Times in which he said “I tend not […]

One of the names that recurs throughout Lucy Neal’s Playing for Time is that of Anne-Marie Culhane.  Anne-Marie is an artist living in Cornwall but just in the process of moving to Devon. Rather than trying myself to describe her and what she does, I’ll leave that to her: “I make things happen generally. I […]

Republished from Building Resilient Neighbourhoods.  In the fall of 2014, Building Resilient Neighbourhoods’ Rob Wipond and Michelle Colussi teamed up with theatre director Will Weigler and a group of citizens from Victoria West and other neighbourhoods to create and perform the comedic theatrical show, Laughing Allowed! The Slapstick World of Neighbourhood Activism. The idea was to playfully explore what we do and don’t like […]

To open our in depth exploration of Community Engagement, one of the elements of our Support Offer, Transition Network’s Transition Initiative Support Coordinator Mike Thomas sets the scene: We are all part of a community in one way or another. Often it is our commitment to improving the community we live in that leads to […]

Isabelle Frémeaux (IF) and John Jordan (JJ) are the co-founders of the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination.  It’s a collective which , according to Isabelle, “aims at opening spaces, real or virtual, and bringing artists and activists together to work on and co-create more creative forms of resistance and civil disobedience”.  Both have a long history […]

Transition Network is moving offices!  Since the organisation’s inception in 2007, it has been housed at 43 Fore Street in Totnes, in a building once described in the Sunday Telegraph as a “rickety set of rooms”.  The decision to find new premises was taken 3 years ago, but after a fruitless search for new premises, […]

Book review: How to save our town centres: a radical agenda for the future of high streets by Julian Dobson.  Policy Press (available here).  I cannot recommend this book highly enough.  Indeed, I wish I had written it.  It is, in effect, the Transition Guide to Reclaiming Local Economies.  It is quite brilliant.  My already […]

Lucy Neal’s ‘Playing for Time: making art as if the world mattered’ was published last week, and launched at a fantastic evening event in London.  Here’s how it is described by the publisher: This groundbreaking handbook is a resource for artists, community activists and anyone wishing to reach beyond the facts and figures of science […]

One Minute Review: Happier People, Healthier Planet by Teresa Belton.  Reviewed by Jesús Martín. Published last September , this is a book which deeply touches its reader, not only from a mental perspective also but from an emotional and active one. This is probably a book that doesn’t need to be advertised, word of mouth marketing […]

Dear Auntie, please help.  I love doing Transition, and I love the projects our group is doing, but I can’t bear our Core Group meetings.  They are lacklustre, tedious and I feel myself losing the will to live in them.  I would love to be able to take some suggestions to our next meeting for […]