What If? – Visioning Exercise

Times of great change invite us to rethink where we are at and what might need to be transformed in our communities.

As part of Transition: Bounce Forward’s work in Great Britain, we invite you to join together with your group to explore:

• What Is – what is the context for our work given all of the changes we’ve experienced in the last 12 months?
• What If – what are our visions for our communities in 2030?
• What Next – what next steps will enable us to move from What Is to What If?

A step-by-step guide will help you to develop a vision of the future that could become lasting change.

This first version of the visioning process will soon be available to download and can be facilitated with your group and close collaborators online. Later in the course of the project we will introduce you to a general version of the visioning exercise that can be used for wider community engagement.

Why take part?

• It’s a great opportunity for your group to come together and really work through what is going on at present where you live. The process will help you to develop a shared vision for your community, as well as the areas/themes you would like to focus on during further community engagement.
• Trying this out first with your group will help you to feel comfortable with running this session online, in preparation for expanding it out to wider local participation.
• We will be hosting a Transition: Bounce Forward ‘What Next’ summit in February which may impact on your group’s vision and how you might make it happen. We recommend doing this version of the process with your group first, and then organise a wider community visioning process for after the summit.
• This version has a ‘What Next’ section which gets you to explore who you will invite to a community visioning process after the summit. You can then begin to make contact with those people and groups, giving them plenty of notice to encourage their attendance.

We have produced a comprehensive facilitation guide to enable you to run this session. We’ll launch the guide at our upcoming webinar on 11th November in which we will introduce the ‘What If’ components of our Transition: Bounce Forward project in Great Britain in more detail. The guide will be available to download here from 12th November.

It may be that you’ll need resources to help you to run a local or regional visioning process – that’s just one of the things our seed-funding grants can help with.

Transition: Bounce Forward Seed-funding for Transition groups in England

Do you have a project ready to go, supporting Transition activity in your community under the shadow of Covid-19? Perhaps you have but you don’t know it yet! Or you may have ongoing Transition work that’s really giving value to your community, particularly during this pandemic, that needs support.

Thanks to funding from The National Lottery Community Fund we can announce the opening of the Transition: Bounce Forward seed-funding for Transition groups in England.

The funding is part of the Transition: Bounce Forward project that started in September with four “What Is” webinars mapping out the wider context in which Transition activity is operating around climate reality, wellbeing and social justice. These went on to look at what Transition initiatives like yours are doing, and how Transition work is adapting during the global pandemic.

We know Transition groups are doing fantastic work responding to the challenges of climate crisis, social injustice and inequality. We also know that there are very real capacity and resource needs for doing this vital work, and even more so under the changing circumstances of Covid-19.

Why “seed”? The National Lottery Community Fund have generously given Transition Network funding that can be given as seed-funding grants to Transition groups in England.  We’d like as many Transition groups as possible to benefit from this £140,000 pot, and we’ve heard that some Transition groups will find even a small amount of funding very useful.  We hope it helps Transition groups now, to unblock and release your activity to thrive whether it be maintaining work you were already doing or starting something new that addresses real need where you are.

So how’s it going to work?

We developed the seed-funding structure with a fantastic group of Transitioners and hope it really is light touch and open enough to support what you’re doing. The funding is divided in two pots –

• 140 micro grants of up to £500.
• 20 full grants of up to £3500.

To be eligible for a seed-funding grant you first need to be registered as an initiative on the Transition Network website, a simple gateway to tell us that you understand and practice Transition Principles in your work. It also means that you’ll appear on the Transition Near Me map – one of the most visited pages on our website and a great way for potential new members and collaborators to find you.

The micro grants of up to £500 are designed to be super light touch. We simply want you to let us know what you want to do through one short written paragraph, or short audio or video description. You might apply if you need to book a room, pay a facilitator, buy new garden equipment, make some signage or buy tools for a repair café, for example. The micro-grants are all about unblocking low cost solutions that only need a small amount of money to help you get on with what you do best, where you are. Projects need to be completed by the end of September 2021.

Full grants of up to £3500 are available to address larger challenges, longer processes or bigger events. Although we appreciate this is still not a large grant, we hope £3500 enables you to exercise your Transition muscles, particularly around social justice, collaborating with local partners and practicing Transition Principles. We’re going to ask you to tell us a bit more about how your project relates to these areas of focus and you’ll need to complete the projects by the end of September 2021.

If you’re thinking about applying for the micro grants or the full grants, the deadline for application is the same – 30th November 2020. To find out more, and to apply, check out the seed-funding page on the Transition Bounce forward website.

We’ll be hosting a seed-funding Q&A at our upcoming webinar on 11th November in which we will introduce the ‘What If’ components of our Transition: Bounce Forward project in Great Britain in more detail.

You’ll notice that the seed funding is directed at groups in England only – Transition Network is delegated to distribute seed-funding from The National Lottery Community Fund’s Covid-19 emergency response programme, which specifically supports communities in England.  We’d like to give our thanks to National Lottery players for making this possible.

For the latest news on Transition: Bounce Forward

Website: https://transition-bounceforward.org/

Facebook: @TransitionBounceForward

Twitter: @TTBounceForward

Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/53e828726cf4/transition-bounce-forward