Transition groups in England, Scotland and Wales – help us shape the future!
By Mike Thomas 7th August 2019
Transition Network is developing a National Lottery Community Fund bid, and we need your help. This funding would enable us to support and develop the Transition movement in Britain over the next 3 to 5 years. We want this bid to be shaped by people from the movement in Britain (England, Scotland and Wales).
We invite all individuals involved in Transition initiatives to respond to this survey; and we’ll follow up conversations with some groups on specific topics. Please complete this survey by Sunday 8th September – every response will help to strengthen our application, and we will find out in March 2020 if we have been successful.
We hope to create a project that truly benefits the movement, which is led by the real needs of Transition groups, and that creates strong networks at a regional and national scale – enabling our movement to scale up and out.
The National Lottery Community Fund bid builds on the work carried out in 2017/2018 when we delivered ten Regional Network Workshops across England. We explored what helps groups to thrive and how regional networks can support Transition in local communities. Read more about these workshops and the resources we developed to deliver them here.
Building on our findings from these workshops, the bid will include possibilities such as developing thematic networks (e.g. food, energy, housing and more) and exploring how to make our groups more inclusive and representative of the wider communities in which we live and work.
The survey asks about your own experiences of Transition. We want to learn about:
- How your group is doing and the support that would help you to be more effective. Understanding your needs will help us to design how it could be most effectively delivered.
- How your group has engaged with the diversity present in your community, in particular anything that has been really successful. With this insight and knowledge, we could help others to do the same.
- Your interest in being involved in networks around specific themes and how that could be made accessible to you. This information will help us to know which areas to focus on and how we can create them.
- Your thoughts on the possible development of a Transition Hub for England and / or Wales, and what we can do to make that happen.
The survey may look quite long, but many of the questions are multiple-choice or use a sliding scale and you can whizz through it. We hope that as many people as possible from your group will fill in the survey! We need multiple perspectives and different experiences.
Please pass this on! We undertake to report back and share with you an overview of the responses we receive. And as an incentive we offer a prize draw for three copies of Rob Hopkins’ new book From What Is to What If: Unleashing the Power of Imagination to Create the Future We Want – due to be published in October 2019.
You will also be invited to an online webinar with Rob where he will talk about the ideas in his book and what they mean for the Transition Movement and wider social change.
Get started with the survey here and encourage others to complete by Sunday 8th September.
Why this focus on Transition groups in Britain? Transition Network functions at a global level while at the local level there are core teams of local initiatives and groups, and between them are National and Regional Hubs. As Transition initially began in England, Transition Network has informally held the role of England and Wales Hub, which can look and feel different to other Hubs. This work could help in the development of a self-organised Hub that is networked internationally and better able to catalyse Transition at different levels of scale. You can read more about Transition Hubs here.
We acknowledge National Lottery Community Fund support for the development phase of this work, which enables us to focus on Britain whilst maintaining our wider, international areas of focus and support to the global Transition movement.
Thank you so much for taking the time to help shape what could be a major opportunity for Transition groups in Britain.
2 Comments
Still need a group in Newcastle-upon-Tyne!
Hi there, there is a guide here: https://transitionnetwork.org/resources/essential-guide-to-transition-v-1/ on how to do it if you are interested.
Cheers,
Mike Thomas
Transition Network