Ingredients of Transition: Social Entreprise/Entrepreneurship

Preparing vegetable boxes at Growing Communities, a local food social enterprise in Hackney.

Context

Your ENERGY DESCENT ACTION PLAN (5.1) (if you do one) will identify a range of key catalysts for the creation of STRATEGIC LOCAL INFRASTRUCTURE (5.5), and will stimulate thinking about SCALING UP (5.3) your initiative to take a greater role in making that happen. Also, as a range of PRACTICAL MANIFESTATIONS (3.9) start to emerge, and the need for FINANCING YOUR WORK (3.3) in the current funding-starved environment, it makes sense to start looking WORKING WITH LOCAL BUSINESSES (3.12) and also to thinking about what new enterprises can be created from what your initiative is doing.

(We are collecting and discussing these Transition ingredients on Transition Network’s website to keep all comments in one place. Please leave feedback and comments, suggestions for alternative pictures, anecdotes, stories and projects for this ingredient here).

The Challenge

The model of community initiatives that are dependent on external funding from philanthropic organisations, governments and external grant giving bodies is becoming increasingly redundant as economies contract and budgets shrink. In a wider context, we are still living off the surplus generated at a time of high Energy Return on Investment, which enabled surplus to be redistributed. That window of opportunity is starting to close as we enter a time of declining net energy and economic contraction. There is often a resistance within community organisations, especially those with an environmental agenda, to think about how they might operate in such a way that pursues their ethics but also functions as an enterprise, generating revenue for the ongoing development of the organisation, but that resistance needs, increasingly, to be overcome.

Core Text

As your Transition initiative evolves, it will need to make some choices about how it evolves. There is one model, more common among environmental organisation, which is for it to continue as a largely volunteer-driven effort, dependent on occasional grants and income from events, but this is an approach which comes with certain risks. As Middlemiss and Parrish put it[1], “volunteers can face challenges in running grassroots initiatives for sustainability, including hostility from local people, difficulties in securing funding, and ‘burnout’ as the strain of volunteering with limited support takes its toll”. Also, if the aim in the longer term of Transition is the creating of a new, economically viable local infrastructure which in turn creates livelihoods, skills and resilience, these projects need to be economically viable.

The concept of social enterprise is something that is gaining a lot of traction and interest at the moment, not least from the government with its ‘Big Society’ agenda, but what does it actually mean? The first thing to note is that it is really not a new idea at all. The Cooperative movement in the 1860s created viable businesses which were built around the need to strengthen local economies and create meaningful employment and local ownership. Future Builders define a social enterprise as “a business or service with primarily social objectives whose surpluses are principally reinvested for that purpose in the community, rather than being driven by the need to maximise profit for shareholders and owners”[2].

In essence, they are financially viable enterprises, with explicit social aims, and with a model of ownership which increases social participation. Often they are the product of one visionary, bold individual with a big idea, an entrepreneur. As the Skoll Foundation put it, “social entrepreneurs act as the change agents for society”[3]. I asked Nick Temple of the School for Social Entrepreneurs[4] what were the qualities of a social entrepreneur. He told me that being a social entrepreneur is as much a mindset and an attitude as a specific business model, and that in essence it is about approaching social and environmental problems with an entrepreneurial mindset. I asked him if he had 4 tips for individuals or projects within a Transition group wanting to develop a social enterprise. Here they are:

1. Just get on and do stuff: the best thing is to get started and to learn from your own and other people’s experience. Pilot things, measure what happens, don’t wait for permission, just get started on a scale which feels achievable

2. Mission before everything else: why are you doing this? What is the big idea? Being clear about your mission enables you to check back against it when you are planning how your enterprise will function … everything else flows from a clear mission

3. Measurement: the whole reason for creating a social enterprise, as opposed to a more conventional business model, is to make a difference, to make things happen, to produce beneficial impacts. Measuring the impacts you are having is vital in terms of funding, investment, credibility and so on. A range of tools already exist for measuring social impact, don’t reinvent the wheel.

4. The Person is the Organisation: social entrepreneurs often have a certain ‘something’. They don’t go to an interview for what they do, in that respect they are self-appointed, but they have often got to where they are through being naturally gifted at building trusted relationships and leading by example.

As a result of its Energy Descent Action Plan process[5], Transition Town Totnes identified a number of what it saw as ‘Catalyst Projects’, things it saw as being central to the relocalisation process, which could be viable social enterprises, and which could interconnect in some interesting ways (see left). But what might it look like if a Transition initiative tries to create a culture of social entrepreneurship in order to develop enterprises like this? This is still an area which is emergent, but here are a few thoughts.

Often in the environmental/activist world there is a resistance to the idea of bringing business thinking to activism, the two cultures don’t necessarily sit easily alongside each other. However, as Nick Temple of SSE puts it, “the important point is to not fear business, not all successful businesses are inherently in some way wicked. All of the practices utilised by business aren’t evil, they have evolved over time with good reason”. At the end of the day, if an operation doesn’t make money, it loses money, and that has to come from somewhere. When you start looking at the potential and the possibilities created through a process of intentional localisation and resilience-building, the number of potential new enterprises is huge.

So what would it look like if your Transition initiative set out to found itself on a culture of social enterprise, and to look to create a new generation of entrepreneurs dedicated to making localisation happen? Firstly, inspire people with some good examples of existing social enterprises, arrange visits, bring in inspiring speakers. You might then offer some kind of training, ideally drawing in local entrepreneurs, and provide an engaging course perhaps spread over a few evenings. You might also invite some input from the School for Social Entrepreneurs, UnLtd, or any local organisations with relevant skills. If you have identified particular catalyst projects, there are organisations who offer some start up resource in order to take the project up to a stage of being investment ready, for example the National Energy Foundation[6] for energy projects or the Community Builders Programme[7]. The skills and support are available, all that is required is a refocusing of the vehicle by which the initiative plans to move forward.

The Solution

The relocalisation process creates huge potential for a range of industries, energy companies, local food businesses, manufacturing and so on, which could either be run purely for profit, or in such a way that they are commercially viable and also reinvest their surplus into the wider community. Understand, from an early stage, the need for social entrepreneurship, and design and support emergent initiatives. Provide training and events, and link with existing providers of support for entrepreneurship.

Connections to Other Patterns

Successfully creating a culture of social entrepreneurship, both within your initiative and within the wider community will depend, in part, on successfully BUILDING STRATEGIC PARTNERSHIPS (2.12). While each enterprise will be different and will develop its own approach, there is much that can be drawn on to avoid reinventing the wheel. For example, there is much that can be learnt from the COMMUNITY OWNERSHIP OF ASSETS (5.8), the movement around COMMUNITY SUPPORTED AGRICULTURE/FARMS/BAKERIES (5.9) and approaches for ENSURING LAND ACCESS (3.13). Other tools that may be useful include ENERGY RESILIENCE ASSESSMENTs (4.5) as a way of ensuring you build in resilience from the start, and also the need for ongoing MEASUREMENT (2.5).

Organisations that can offer support

• The School for Social Entrepreneurs: www.sse.org.uk

• Regional Social Enterprise bodies; eg. Social Enterprise London (www.sel.org.uk)

• Social Enterprise Coalition: www.socialenterprise.org.uk

• UnLtd: www.unltd.org.uk

• www.socialenterpriseambassadors.org.uk

Further Reading

Baderman, J. & Law, J. (2006) Everyday Legends: the stories of 20 great UK Social Entrepreneurs . WW Publishing.

Crutchfield, L, McLeod Grant, H. (2007) Forces for Good.

Dearden Phillips, C. (2008) Your Chance to Change the World: the No-Fibbing Guide to Social Entrepreneurship. DSC.

Dees, G. (1998) The Meaning of Social Entrepreneurship. Duke University.

Elkington, J. & Hartigan, P. (2008) The Power of Unreasonable People. HBS.

Leadbeater, C. (1997)The Rise of the Social Entrepreneur. Demos.

Mawson, A. (2008) The Social Entrepreneur. Atlantic Books.

Nicholls, A. (2008) Social Entrepreneurship: new models of sustainable change. Oxford University Press.

Young, C, Edwards-Stuart, F. (2007) Leadership in the Social Economy. School for Social Entrepreneurs.

[1] Middlemiss, L, Parrish, B.D. (2010) Capacity for Low carbon Communities: the role of grassroots initiatives. Energy Policy, Article in Press, corrected proof. doi:10.1016/j.enpol.2009.07.003

[2] http://www.futurebuilders-england.org.uk/making-sense-of-futurebuilders-terminology/

[3] Skoll Foundation (2009) Glossary of Terms Used in Application Materials. http://www.skollfoundation.org/skollawards/glossary.asp

[4] http://www.sse.org.uk/

[5] Hodgson, J, Hopkins, R. (2010) Transition in Action: Totnes and District 2030: an Energy Descent Plan. Transition Town Totnes/Green Books.

[6] http://www.nef.org.uk/

[7] http://www.communitybuildersfund.org.uk/

Please leave any comments here.

Any questions for Stoneleigh?

Many of you who attended or followed the 2010 Transition Network conference will have either been to, or have subsequently listened to Stoneleigh’s presentation, which led to the coining of the term ‘The Stoneleigh Effect’, which generally consists of rather glazed eyes, sweaty palms and a look of distinct panic. Well, in a few weeks, Stoneleigh is back in the UK to do a short series of talks (I will let you know the itinerary when I have it), and Peter Lipman and myself, the Paxman and Dimbleby of Transition, will be interviewing Stoneleigh for this very website. We’d love to know what questions you would like to ask her, and we’ll take as many of your questions as we can along to the interview. Do post any questions you have in the comments below…. Thanks.

The Transition Network Guide to making celebratory cakes: a free download

Last week I posted one of the ‘Ingredients of Transition’ called ‘Transition Cakes’ which observed how many Transition initiatives make some kind of stunning centrepiece cake at certain key moments in their evolution. I has asked Julia Ponsonby, chef extraordinaire at Schumacher College, to give me a recipe for a good cake to make, and in the end she wrote me a whole guide to making celebratory cakes, including loads of decorating ideas too. In the Ingredient I could only use the actual cake recipe, but what she had written was far too good to waste, and she has kindly allowed me to turn it into the “Transition Network guide to making celebratory cakes” and to post it here for you to download. Happy baking.

Ingredients of Transition: Backcasting

Context:

Backcasting is a key ingredient of the creation of an ENERGY DESCENT ACTION PLAN, and an essential companion to any process of VISIONING, if that visioning is going to stand any chance of moving beyond being fantasy. It enables clear and practical STRATEGIC THINKING and an in-depth consideration of how a new STRATEGIC LOCAL INFRASTRUCTURE might become a reality.

(We are collecting and discussing these Transition ingredients on Transition Network’s website to keep all comments in one place. Please leave feedback and comments, suggestions for alternative pictures, anecdotes, stories and projects for this ingredient here).

The challenge:

Creating a vision of the future is all very well, but could well become an enjoyable but rather abstract dreaming exercise if it is not also accompanied by a process of backcasting. Visions of the future are the first step to a concrete plan for how to make that future a reality, otherwise they are a waste of time, and merely fantasy.

Core Text

Backcasting is a straightforward idea, one which follows on naturally from the process of visioning. I’m sure it has been around for a while, but the first time I heard of it was in an excellent book “Natural Step for Communities: How Cities and Towns Can Change to Sustainable Practices” by Sarah James and Torbjorn Lahti (2004). They argue for a process which starts with visioning a desirable future and then working backwards. It is based on the question “if we want to get somewhere, what actions do we need to take in order to get there?”

For example, if by 2018, 50% of any new buildings in a community are proposed to include 50% local materials, backcasting is very useful in terms of identifying what would need to be done by when, in order for this to be a possibility. If construction-grade hemp is to be a key part of that, backcasting allows you to consider:

• By when would the infrastructure for processing locally grown hemp need to be in place?

• At what stage would it be necessary to begin training local builders in using hemp in construction?

• When would the first trials on local farmland need to take place?

…. and so on. Key to successful backcasting is that the future scenarios that underpin it are desired outcomes, and have emerged from some sort of visioning process. It can also be done for a range of scenarios which can emerge from a futures scenario planning process. You could think of it that forecasting and scenario planning go in one direction, from here forward, whereas backcasting comes the other way, from the future back to us.

When Transition Town Totnes was creating its Energy Descent Action Plan, backcasting played a key role. In the first round of workshops, people identified their key assumptions about the kind of future they were anticipating. Then they looked at future scenarios, and what they felt to be most likely, concluding with a visioning exercise, inviting people to imagine the scenarios they had created. After this was done, the backcasting began, in two stages. Firstly workshop participants were invited to backcast in groups, moving around between the tables to share ideas, identifying what felt like the crucial stages in the journey towards the vision of the future that they had created. They also made use of ‘The Transition Timeline’, a long laminated board showing a line running from 2009 to 2030, onto which people were invited to post future events or stories written on Post-it notes (see photo above). Secondly, the team creating the EDAP then pulled together the material created in the workshops and used them as the foundation for a more detailed narrative, a more thorough timeline for Transition¹. Backcasting proved to be a dynamic and highly creative process, involving a great mixture of serious thought and silly imaginative flights of fancy.

One exercise which is a good way of bringing backcasting to life is the 2030 School Reunion exercise which was first done at the launch of the process that led to the creation of TTT’s ‘EDAP’². Here 4 actors play different characters who all attended the local secondary school in 2010. The group divides into 4 smaller groups, each of which has lots of cards each of which tell a different aspect of the story of where the character’s life went between 2010 and 2030, and what happened in the world around them. The audience share what they know about the character, and then after discussion in groups, the actors role play a school reunion, and the characters meeting each other and catching up on their lives. If done well, with good actors, it can be a surprisingly engaging and moving exercise.

The solution:

Once your initiative, through a range of activities and processes, has developed a vision of the future of the community in a lower-energy world, the next step is to backcast. How might we get there, year on year? Which structures and institutions would need to be in place in order for it to become a reality? Where do we start, and indeed, what have we already done that might also be useful? The process of backcasting is creative, fun and also very much focuses the mind on where best to expend our energy to get the Transition process underway.

Connections to other patterns:

Facilitating successful backcasting is a great opportunity to engage ARTS AND CREATIVITY in the process, and also some of the COMMUNITY BRAINSTORMING TOOLS may also be useful. Some of the existing PRACTICAL MANIFESTATIONS already underway can be a good place to start in exploring their potential. MEANINGFUL MAPS can be very good for rooting your backcasting in a context, as can the ROLE OF STORYTELLING, to bring these ideas to life.

References:

1. Which can be read in Hodgson, J, Hopkins, R. (2010) Transition in Action: Totnes and District 2030: an Energy Descent Plan. Transition Town Totnes/Green Books.

2. You can read a write-up of this exercise and how to do it on Transition Culture here.

Please leave any comments here.

Brand New Tadelakt

Had great fun over the weekend plastering my shower with this amazing stuff called Tadelakt. Tadelakt is a traditional Moroccan plaster, a lime-based, polished waterproof plastering technique. Originally used for waterproofing cisterns, and then used for public bathing houses, Tadelakt had almost disappeared from use before being rediscovered and there is currently a revival in its use. The real Tadelakt is produced from a specific lime found in the foothills of Marrakesh, but something almost as good can be produced from limes found here too. Clearly importing plasters half the way around the world is not the greatest use of finite fossil fuels (nice of the IEA by the way to inform us last week that the peak in conventional oil production happened in 2006 after denying the very idea for years… anyway I digress…), so it is good to know we can get by with a more locally-made version too.

The de-tiled, de-woodchipped bathroom awaiting its Tadelakt...

So, I am redoing my bathroom. When I moved into my current house, we inherited a bathroom that almost certainly wasn’t even fashionable when it was installed in the early 1970s, but certainly pale blue bath, toilet and sink and brown tiles with gold flower motifs don’t really do it for me. Anyway, that certainly isn’t sufficient excuse to toss out a functioning bathroom, so it was only when the bath sprung a leak, the toilet sprung a leak in sympathy, the sink came away from the wall, the toilet seat broke free from its moorings and the floor started to go rotten that we decided it was time for a change.

After a couple of weeks of stripping the last section of woodchip wallpaper left in the house (we have stripped acres of it since we moved in) and smashing tiles off the wall, we finally got back to the bare bones of a bathroom. Most of the room I replastered with a lime plaster (gorgeous, and bought ready-mixed, a revelation!), but around the shower we had a choice. Did we do tiles, which are a lot of work, easy to get a bit wrong so that water gets in behind them, and often not that nice, or did we perhaps do something else?

A couple of weeks ago I went round to my friends Paul and Ivana round the corner who are building the most gorgeous cob house in history, and checked out the bathroom they had just finished, and it blew me away. They had rendered the whole room with Tadelakt, and it looked and felt like the inside of a glazed pot. It was warm, curvy, beautiful, with a gorgeous lustrous shine to the whole thing. “That’s what I want” I decided… Luckily, after I had dragged my family round to see it, they agreed too.

Paul applying the first layer of Tadelakt.

I ordered 20kg of it from Mike Wye Associates who are suppliers of natural building stuff here in Devon. They supply Tadelakt mixed to one of 54 colours on their lime pigment chart. It comes as a powder which you mix up to the consistency of stiff icing in the tub, using a plasterer’s whisk. Paul (he of gorgeous cob house fame) kindly came round to give me a hand on Saturday, and so, with Man Utd against Aston Villa playing on the radio, we set to work. The plaster went on easily enough in two layers, the second of which we trowelled as smooth as we could with a plastic float.

The wall after its first waxing (not all the wax has been absorbed, hence the swirl patterns...)

When the second layer had had a day to dry, I applied a Moroccan Black Soap and rubbed the wall up with a smooth stone, which compacts the surface. It is hard work, very physical, but it is the energy you put into it that gives it the finish it is famed for.

I still need to give it a couple more layers, but already it is looking gorgeous. Much nicer than tiles. But can it really bear up to the wear and tear of being the shower for a family of six? Time will tell, but I have to say it is far more enjoyable to put in place than tiles, far more beautiful, and has a quality to it that is really very special. It already feels like stone, with a lovely irregular patterning to it. I’m hooked. No more tiles for me….

Ingredients of Transition: Energy Resilience Assessment

Context:

Vital to successful Transition is WORKING WITH LOCAL BUSINESSES, and engaging them in STRATEGIC THINKING and helping them to see their role in that. Energy Resilience Assessments offer a great tool for MEASUREMENT of the degree of a business’s vulnerability, and enables the formulation of practical solutions. This work can be a very useful part of your AWARENESS RAISING work, especially with businesses, and can also be a good way of ENGAGING THE COUNCIL.

(We are collecting and discussing these Transition ingredients on Transition Network’s website to keep all comments in one place. Please leave feedback and comments, suggestions for alternative pictures, anecdotes, stories and projects for this ingredient here).

The challenge:

Transitioning the business sector is a key part of the Transition process. Many environmentalists see business as the problem and retreat into cynicism rather than fruitful engagement. The Transition model and practice for communities are not suitable for most businesses. It talks the wrong language and is not focussed on businesses concerns. Without tools that businesses can relate to and see as relevant, Transition is doomed, in the eyes of the business community at least, to be seen as irrelevant.

Core Text

Energy Resilience Assessment (ERA) is a tool developed by Transition Training and Consulting (TTandC) for use with businesses and organisations. It is based on the observation that in a time of rising and volatile energy prices, a business’s reliance on fossil fuels, especially liquid fuels, comprises a key vulnerability to that business. This reflects a recent report by Lloyds and Chatham House, which looked at the combined impacts of peak oil and climate change on business viability, concluding that:

“energy security is now inseparable from the transition to a low-carbon economy and businesses plans should prepare for this new reality. Security of supply and emissions reduction objectives should be addressed equally, as prioritising one over the other will increase the risk of stranded investments or requirements for expensive retro-fitting”.

In other words, both climate change and peak oil now comprise key vulnerabilities and key risks for any business wanting to be successful over the next 5-10 years, echoing the case the Transition movement has been making for the past 4 years. But where might a business or an organisation start in identifying where in its operation those vulnerabilities might lie, and how might a Transition initiative seeking tools with which to engage local businesses get started?

An ERA examines, among other things, the use of fossil fuels in transportation and power; where raw materials in the supply chain are vulnerable to the oil price (e.g. plastics and other petroleum-based products); and how customers’ behaviour may change in a high energy cost environment. It identifies where a business has the greatest exposure to rising or fluctuating energy prices, quantifies this risk and highlights potential mitigation strategies. This analysis and information are vital for assessing the assumptions that underpin any business model and strategic plan. Energy prices and availability potentially affect every aspect of an organisation so this is a valuable tool for all decision makers. An ERA can make a clear, hard business case for reducing direct and indirect energy use, for becoming better connected to the local economy, and for thinking laterally about how the business might look in a lower-carbon, more localised context.

For example, one ERA carried out by TTandC for a National Trust property calculated the likely impact of rising oil prices on visitor-related revenues, given 94% of visitors drove private cars an average round-trip of 66 miles. To offset this potential drop in visitor income, a number of new commercial opportunities were identified. These included the creation of a number of on-site enterprises, that the property become a food producer, offer training to local people, and start producing building materials onsite, both for maintaining its own buildings onsite, and also for local builders.

Often the results of its analyses can be surprising. I remember an early assessment done for a printing business. One would have assumed that the main vulnerability was the fact that the business kept its presses running 24 hours a day, which must have been very energy intensive. In fact, the ERA revealed that a key vulnerability was the fact that all but one of the staff lived at least 7 miles from the business, due to the high house prices in the town which meant that none of the staff could afford to live there. The lack of affordable housing was revealed as adding to the oil vulnerability of the business (and the town). As a result, they began an apprenticeship scheme for local young people, in order to bring more of them into the business.

The solution:

An Energy Resilience Assessment will help any business or organisation to calibrate its vulnerability to energy shocks and disruption. It translates energy security issues and resilience into language business can understand, based on its own financial data. By offering clear and practical insights into business resilience, it makes a good starting place before anything else is done, a vital, and common-sense first step. Suggesting an ERA to businesses with whom your Transition initiative is interfacing can offer a powerful bridge, a common language of relevance and of great practicality to both.

Connections to other patterns:

Getting some people in your Transition initiative trained up in doing ERAs through TRANSITION TRAINING and Consulting could, if seen as part of your initiative’s application of the concept of SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP. It can lead to your doing VISIONING and BACKCASTING with local businesses, helping them to better identify their place in the Transition process.

Please leave any comment here.

The first day at the Diverse Routes to Belonging conference, Edinburgh

After a hectic day at the Diverse Routes to Belonging conference here in Edinburgh, I sat down here to blog about it, but having had a look at the conference’s blog, I’m not sure there is much I can add! The conference team have done an amazing job, doing excellent write ups of the sessions and workshops as well as films of interviews with Alan Stibbe, Alastair Macintosh, Jonathan Dawson and myself, and also films of Justin Kenrick’s opening talk and the mapping activity. It is real state-of-the-art conference blogging, great stuff. My workshop seemed to go OK too. There are also Transition gatherings going on in Hannover and in Brazil over this weekend, and we tried to do Skype chats with both at the end of the day, as well as with groups in Portugal and Spain, but only the Portugese and Brazilian ones really worked. Oh well. So, been an amazing day, I’d better get back for the Open Mike… keep an eye on the blog tomorrow and perhaps I’ll write something more useful when I get home….

Seeking your stories about using maps….

Maps. Wonderful things. From Googlemaps to scribbled-on Ordnance Survey maps: from sophisticated GIS maps to huge maps of the area that people can stick stuff to, maps are a fantastic tool for bringing the area you are working in to life. One of the Ingredients of Transition is called ‘Meaningful Maps’, and it looks at the importance of using maps in both serious and playful ways. For example, the picture above is Transition Hereford’s ‘Mappa Sustainability’, modelled on the 1300s Hereford Mappa Mundi, the largest medieval map still in existence, which was exhibited in the town in order to gather peoples’ sustainability projects and stories. Does your Transition initiative use maps? How? Please tell me your stories….

Ingredients of Transition: Working with local businesses

Context

Engaging creatively with local businesses will be a key part of your STRATEGIES FOR PLUGGING THE LEAKS (5.6). It can also be key to BUILDING LOCAL STRATEGIC PARTNERSHIPS (2.12) and can greatly strengthen and bolster your AWARENESS RAISING (2.9) efforts.

(We are collecting and discussing these Transition ingredients on Transition Network’s website to keep all comments in one place. Please leave feedback and comments, suggestions for alternative pictures, anecdotes, stories and projects for this ingredient here).

The Challenge

Often the relationship between environmental groups and local businesses has been one of antagonism, of distrust and/or simply ignoring each other. Businesses are very busy, and often are running incredibly fast just to stay still. Environmental campaigns that take a perspective of being judgemental and critical will fail to engage. Any meaningful Transition process will need to create a meaningful, respectful, mutually beneficial relationship with local businesses, acknowledging the vital role they will have to play in the Transition process.

Core Text

Successfully working with the local business community is very important for Transition initiatives. Yet it may not be something that comes naturally, and it will take some of us out of our comfort zone, and require our learning a new language, new concept, and a new way of connecting. Here are a few examples of Transition initiatives working with their local businesses. Early on in the life of Transition Town Totnes, workshops were run with local businesses using the NISP (National Industrial Symbiosis Programme) model, which brings together local businesses in a workshop format to look at how best they can match up their outputs with another business’s inputs. Ideally they are businesses from the same industrial estate, and the kinds of connections made include a business that has lots of cardboard boxes it needs to dispose of being connected with a local removal firm who need cardboard boxes. The workshop was very productive.

Some places set up local loyalty schemes to encourage people to use local shops. Caterham has the Caterham Shop Smart Card, for which people pay a small membership, the card entitling them to up to 20% off produce from shops. The card is accepted in over 60 shops, many of whom run promotions based around the card. People signing up for the card get the first two months’ membership free. A scheme like Caterham’s can be a good way of engaging more conservative local traders for whom the idea of a local currency is a bit too out there.

Local currencies can be a great way of drawing in local businesses. Transition Town Lewes’s Lewes Pound a list of the key local businesses who support and endorse the Pound printed on the back of the note. The launch of the Lewes Pound was attended by many local tradespeople, and the local brewery, Harveys, who are one of the supporting businesses named on the notes, brewed a commemorative beer called ‘Quids In’ to celebrate the launch of the currency. At the launch of Transition Town Brixton’s Brixton Pound, one wall of the venue featured a display of all the businesses that had agreed to accept the Pound.

Sometimes a Transition initiative might decide to promote a particular aspect of the local business community. New Forest Transition (NFT) recently launched the New Forest Food Challenge (funded by the National Park Authority), which although an NFT initiative, was deliberately branded without much reference to the organisation, and was set up to support local food businesses in the area. After a year’s creative promotion of local food across the area, (which included the creation of a local food Googlemap), on 30^th September 2010, they organised a ‘Local Food Summit’, which brought together 70 people, representing over 30 local businesses, as well as members of the District Council, the National Park Authority and the local MP, to look at the role of local food in regenerating the local economy. All those who attended signalled a commitment to helping and a framework for moving forward was agreed. The next part of the project is the creation, with the engagement of the network of local food businesses that has been created from the first year’s work, of a Local Food Strategy for the Forest. This approach, of engaging local businesses on their own terms and then inviting them to be part of larger strategic thinking has much to recommend it.

On a smaller scale, Transition Cambridge recently ran a story-writing competition which was sponsored by a range of local businesses, they advertise a different newly established Transition-related business in each of their newsletters, and they are, like the New Forest, creating a Googlemap of local food businesses. I asked Fiona Ward of Transition Training and Consulting for her top 5 tips for engaging with local businesses:

1. Be credible: You need to speak their language, look appropriate for the setting, and understand basic business concepts such as revenue, profit margins, fixed/variable costs etc.


2. Be open-minded: Do not be judgemental in any way about their business decisions. Present facts not opinions, and meet them where they are now ideologically speaking, gain trust and credibility, then you can start to introduce new ideas and concepts.


3. Be realistic: Realise that the bottom line is key, even in environmentally minded businesses – if they’re not at least breaking-even then they will not be around to do their work more sustainably. Also small businesses have very little time or money to do anything other than survive – even if they want to do the ‘right’ thing they may not have the time to attend events etc. You’ll need to be creative about how you work with each one


4. ‘Sell’ the benefits: be very clear about the benefits to the business of whatever it is you want to do with them - be they financial, environmental or social benefits.


5. Tell stories: Case studies of other credible, local/well known businesses are very powerful (so long as they can relate to the size/type of business). Try to work first of all with a small number of friendly but influential local businesses, create good success stories with quantifiable benefits, and they will then attract others. Explore the TN list of projects for inspiration by seeing how other transition places are working with local businesses.

Another good strategy is to ensure that your Transition initiative has a Business and Livelihoods working group, which creates a forum for local businesspeople and acts as an incubator for ideas and projects.

The Solution

There are various ways in which a Transition initiative might engage local businesses. They will need to offer services that help and support those businesses, and offer to connect them closer to the local economy. Putting this work in the context of making the local economy more resilient makes it a relationship that serves everyone. Forming an ‘Economics and Livelihoods’ group as part of your Transition initiative will be key to this.

Connections to Other Ingredients

BECOMING A FORMAL ORGANISATION (2.7) will greatly help with the credibility with which your initiative is viewed by local businesses, as will the impact of your PRACTICAL MANIFESTATIONS (3.9). There will be areas in which your efforts might be seen as being competitive with local businesses, for example LOCAL FOOD INITIATIVES (3.10) and promoting SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP (5.2), if they promote things currently done by local businesses. However, if done well, building good links to local businesses can bring support with FINANCING YOUR WORK (3.3) as well as stronger NETWORKS AND PARTNERSHIPS (4.14). While engaging with businesses, be mindful of HOW OTHERS SEE US/HOW WE COMMUNICATE (1.6).

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New Report: ‘So what does Transition Town Totnes actually do?’

Transition Town Totnes has been running now for just over 4 years, and recently a group of us sat down to try and capture what has actually been achieved by the process. It has been a very illuminating process, one that is very useful to do in terms of being able to get a sense of what has actually been achieved on the ground (I highly recommend it). The name of the report, ‘So, what does Transition Town Totnes actually do?‘, comes from the question often asked by visitors to the town who come to see a Transition town, wander round the High Street and wonder why there are still cars and not windmills everywhere. This report is designed to explain all that is going on below the surface (as well as on top of it…).

Copies of the report were distributed to the Town Council and last week I attended a meeting where I gave a brief presentation about it, following which the Councillors talked about how proud they were of TTT, and then unanimously passed a resolution supporting our work (here is a report from the local press). The resultant report can be downloaded here (it’s a big file, about 5.5MB). As TTT is a community organisation with no core funding, we are offering this report for free, but we hope that having read it you might feel inspired to make a donation to support our vital work:

My favourite bit of the report, the Executive Summary, sets out in numbers the impacts of TTT thus far:

People visiting Totnes to find out about Transition have brought an estimated £122,000 to the local economy • over 300 people have visited the town to undertake Transition Training • TTT raised the funding for the 74 solar panels on Totnes Civic Hall which will generate around 13,000kWh (a third of its demand, leading to the Council saving over £5,500) • 186 hybrid nut trees have been planted throughout the town • over 4000 Local Food Guides (in 2 editions) have been distributed • our Garden Share scheme means that now 30 gardeners in 13 gardens are able to grow food, providing food to over 50 families • over 70 businesses now accept the Totnes Pound • organised over 140 public events • more than 1,000 students at King Edward VI Community College have now participated in our ‘Transition Tales’ programme • over 75% of people in Totnes and Dartington are aware of TTT’s work • more than 600 people attended 4 workshops on renewable energy • there are now 59 ‘Transition Together’ groups in and around the town, who will each reduce their carbon emissions by 1.2 tonnes, each saving £601 per year • over 50% of those households are low-income • ‘Transition Tours’, a structured tour designed for those who want to visit the town to learn about Transition has, so far, had a local impact of £52,166 • The work of TTT has inspired an international network of thousands of Transition initiatives • TTT has formed partnerships with 25 other organisations • the creation of the Energy Descent Action Plan engaged over 800 local people, gave talks to 35 local organisations and held 27 public meetings • 50 people have learnt to garden through our basic gardening course • over 400 people attended ‘Winterfest’, a one-day celebration of the work of TTT • 3 annual ‘Edible Garden Crawls’ have been attended by over 500 people • the 2010 ‘Energy Fair’ was attended by over 400 people • TTT’s email newsletter is received by over 2,000 people • TTT’s Garden Share scheme was the inspiration for Hugh Fearnley-Wittingstall’s national ‘Landshare’ campaign • Produced 10 short films about various TTT events • ‘Estates in Transition’, a day conference co-organised with Dartington, brought 65 local landowners and managers together to explore the impacts of peak oil and climate change • 57.2% of local people feel TTT’s work is either ‘highly relevant’ or ‘relevant’ to their lives • the Heart and Soul group provides support to 15 people working in TTT so as to minimise incidents of burn-out • TTT’s website has over 4,500 registered users • our annual Seedy Sunday events each attract at least 200 people • a recent grant of £75,000 from Community Builders is supporting our efforts to bring the derelict Dairy Crest site back into community ownership • TTT has generated a great deal of media coverage, including BBC’s The One Show, Al Jazeera TV, ‘In Business’ on Radio 4, and pieces in most daily papers, as well as regularly attracting international media attention….

Ingredients of Transition: Building Strategic Partnerships

At the Brixton Pound launch event, every participating business had their details posted on the wall, offering a powerful visual representation of the diversity of partnerships behind the scheme.

Context

In order to bring into being STRATEGIC LOCAL INFRASTRUCTURE (5.5) and meaningful PRACTICAL MANIFESTATIONS (3.9), as well as to embed DIVERSITY AND INCLUSION (2.2) in its work, a Transition initiative needs to have built good working relationships with other organisations in the area. Whether WORKING WITH LOCAL BUSINESSES (3.12) or ENGAGING THE COUNCIL (4.4), forming meaningful partnerships will be key to your success, and to your ability to deliver successful projects.

(We are collecting and discussing these Transition ingredients on Transition Network’s website to keep all comments in one place. Please leave feedback and comments, suggestions for alternative pictures, anecdotes, stories and projects for this ingredient here).

The Challenge

Any Transition initiative that thinks it can go it alone, without the support of, or partnerships with, other organisations will sooner or later find itself isolated and far less effective than it could have been. At the same time, entering into partnerships with other groups or organisations, if not done skilfully, can lead to disenchantment, bad feeling and divisiveness. While creating partnerships is vital, if not done well, they can do more harm than good.

Core Text

It has always been the thinking that a Transition initiative isn’t intended to be the organisation that does a multitude of projects, rather that it tries to catalyse and then support projects, trying to change the cultural story a place tells about itself so that Transition becomes a way of thinking across the community. Doing this requires some skilful collaborative work, and the building of a set of strong local partnerships.

In an interview that appeared on the Mid Wales Permaculture Network’s website, Dave Prescott of Transition Hay-on-Wye reflected on the partnerships his initiative had created. One such as an alternative transport day which was co-created with Herefordshire and Powys councils, Sustrans and local business and environment groups, and they had also done work with the local Chamber of Commerce. He reflected on the role of partnerships thus:

“For me it boils down to the fact that as a group of six individuals there isn’t a great deal we can do, but if we collaborate with existing groups and, over the longer term, encourage other existing groups to recognise that Transition is something they can be thinking about and acting on, then we have a chance of creating meaningful change”.

It isn’t just individual initiatives that can benefit from partnerships. In November 2009, a one-day conference was held in Slaithwaite in Yorkshire called ‘Transition North’, bringing together Transition groups from across the north of England. The event was a partnership with the Co-operative Group and Co-operatives UK, and proved a dynamic coming together of organisations with many overlaps in terms of philosophy and practice.

It is worth remembering that within your community there will be many organisations who, although not obviously aligned with Transition, will overlap with some area of what you do. The partnerships you forge which are the unexpected ones are the ones more likely to lead to some more interesting interactions and interesting new contacts. Offer presentations to a wide range of local groups, and tailor your talk, as best you can, to their interests. I once gave a talk to the local Women’s Institute, and prior to my talk they had been discussing how the price of milk was too low and how that was affecting dairy farmers. It meant that I was able to start by talking about localisation and globalisation, relating it to milk production as an example.

Key events can also be great opportunities to make those connections visible and to bring in the other organisations in the community that overlap with the Transition initiative. For example, at the Unleashing of Transition Town Lewes, those attending entered the hall through another room, which included dozens of stalls, of local groups, food producers, businesses and so on. Much the same thing happened at the launch of Transition Town Chepstow, with various local enterprises and organisations having stalls. The Unleashing of Transition Whatcom in the US featured stall from a wide variety of local organisations in the foyer of Bellingham High School.

Do be careful in making sure that when you enter a partnership with another organisation, however informal, that you both have a clear sense of what you are doing, and what you are committing to submit to the process. Misunderstandings can easily lead to fallout that takes a lot of energy to resolve. In essence, what is vital is that your initiative manages to do some skilful networking, because if Transition is going to work, it will need the input of a far broader range of bodies than has been the case in the past.

The Solution

Think strategically about which partnerships it would be beneficial for your Transition initiative to enter into. Be clear with each organisation what each expects from the arrangement, and how you see roles and responsibilities being divided up. Some arrangements might just be about co-presenting events and sharing speakers, or about collaborating on a project, but might feasibly be as significant as joint funding bids or event merging organisations. What is vital at every stage is clarity and honesty, and having a clear joint understanding of what each party expects, and what is expected of it.

Connections to Other Ingredients

When approaching other organisations to explore possible partnerships, be mindful of HOW OTHERS SEE US/HOW WE COMMUNICATE (1.6), dress the part, prepare what you are going to say, and do your homework in advance. Also, bear INCLUSION AND DIVERSITY (2.2) in mind, go out beyond the usual suspects, beyond organisations that you feel comfortable talking to. There may also be times when building strategic partnerships becomes key to FINANCING YOUR WORK (3.3), such as for joint funding applications. The promotion of SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP (5.2) will also benefit greatly from good, carefully chosen partnerships.

Please leave any comments here.

Ingredients of Transition: Inclusion and Diversity

Today’s ingredient follows on nicely from last weekend’s ‘Diverse Routes to Belonging’ conference in Edinburgh….

Context

At the stages of FORMING A CORE TEAM (2.1) or BECOMING A FORMAL ORGANISATION (2.7), diversity and inclusion need to be designed into how the organisation functions. Some of the tools that underpin this will influence how the group sets about RUNNING SUCCESSFUL MEETINGS (2.4), and ultimately, a more diverse and inclusive organisation will be of benefit to the PERSONAL RESILIENCE (1.5) of those involved.

(We are collecting and discussing these Transition ingredients on Transition Network’s website to keep all comments in one place. Please leave feedback and comments, suggestions for alternative pictures, anecdotes, stories and projects for this ingredient here).

The Challenge

Transition tends to appeal to what academics call the ‘post-consumerists’ i.e. those who have reached a level of sufficient wealth and education to feel comfortable in letting go of some of it, who are often, but not always, white and middle-class. However, if Transition is serious about creating resilient communities but fails to create a process over which all sections of the community feel some sense of ownership, it will not truly be creating resilience.

Core Text

This ingredient looks at both inclusion and diversity. The two are intertwined but are not the same thing. If a Transition initiative brings down any barriers to participation that it might have, it in turn becomes more inclusive which should lead to it becoming more diverse. At an event held in November 2010 by Transition Scotland Support called ‘Diverse Routes to Belonging’, Danielle Cohen of Transition Stoke Newington (TSN) held a workshop on diversity where, introducing herrecent research on Transition and diversity, she played a recording of an interview with a black woman, who had been one of the initiators of TSN, but who had recently left. Here are some excerpts from that interview:[1]

“It’s quite hard being the only…um…like, not-white person or something sometimes and I kind of, as well, feel like a lot of people have more maybe experience of talking and stuff like that and I’m not always very eloquent in my speech or whatever. I have really good ideas but I’m not always that great at saying them and putting them forward and… so I definitely didn’t always feel that comfortable. And it wasn’t because of even specifically, you know, people, but it was just like… I didn’t feel like there were that many people like me.

Our meetings have often been quite formal and quite quiet and quite sit-downy and chaired and stuff, whereas in a lot of other cultures you don’t get that, you just get people talking in a really animated way and over each other and blah blah blah and…like…there is no right or wrong way of doing things and I felt like as well if I brought my family or something there it would be…they would be disapproved of and it would be looked at as if they’re not serious or they’re not doing things in the right way because they’re not taking notes and they’re not blah-di-blah. I don’t think Transition Town Stoke Newington was in a place to…would have welcomed a whole new way of doing things.

If you’re, say, working class and you’re around a lot of middle class people it makes you feel really stupid, you just do and especially when those people aren’t that aware as well, so often we just wouldn’t say anything. I remember being in meetings and there was someone just chatting complete shit for 15 minutes but thought they were saying amazing stuff and it’s like we kind of knew so much but were so quiet and often just found it really hard to talk. We did the training as well and we really should – I mean there’s no point saying should have – but could have taken an initiative there and just structured it differently so everyone did talk. Even kind of doing that for me just felt really scary. I just feel quite, like, insignificant or something.”

Listening to the recording at that event was challenging and thought-provoking, as it represented a voice that is not often heard, and because it was referring to something I care very much about, the Transition movement, voicing a deep sense of disappointment with her experience of it. There is a danger that people involved in Transition, as with many of those in the wider environmental movement, can sometimes see inclusion as being about bringing more people over to ‘our’ agenda, that it is about winning over those who don’t ‘get it’. This somewhat smug and superior approach is not appropriate for the work Transition is doing. As Danielle puts it:

“…people in Transition…. often talk about inclusion with a view to bringing different people into the movement. I have argued that this view of inclusion can imply and perpetuate hierarchical power relationships underpinned by assumptions of assimilation and integration. As one … participant (in Danielle’s research) put it, Transition should perhaps not be seeking to include others but should be seeking to be included by them”.

Transition, an approach designed to build resilience at the community level, needs to actively include the needs of everyone in that community in order to truly create resilience. Also, inclusion is simply the right, fair and just thing to do. In our society there are many truths held by many different people. Certain versions of the truth tend to dominate groups and society, but there are many others, and Transition needs to create space for this wide diversity of truths.

A societal transformation such as that on the scale envisaged by Transition which imagines it can look at inclusion later in the process is deluding itself, it needs to be central from the start. The British Trust for Conservation Volunteers took a decision a few years ago to stop preaching to the converted, and to actively work with those who, up to that point, they hadn’t engaged with much. They intentionally sought to develop projects and initiatives in as inclusive a way as possible, by ensuring that those running the organisation asked themselves the following questions, all of which are just as relevant to Transition initiatives, offering a great checklist for Transition core groups to keep referring back to:

• Do we really mean it? (that is, do we really mean to address this issue?)


• Do we know where we want to get to?


• Do we know why we’re doing it?


• Does our leadership champion this?

There is a perception often in environmental groups that some sectors of society are ‘hard to reach’. What is less often considered though is the possibility that it is actually we who are ‘hard to reach’, that for many people, due to how we work, communicate and position ourselves, we can be seen as remote, distant and irrelevant. Sometimes the idea that some groups are ‘hard to reach’ and “harder to engage” than others are simply not the case. For example, the environmental movement has traditionally viewed BME groups as ‘hard to reach, yet one recent study found that only 5% of white respondents were happy to engage with community voluntary projects, whereas 23% of black respondents were.

I asked Catrina Pickering, Transition Network’s Diversity Coordinator, who has been running trainings around the UK with Transition groups, for the main tips and insights she communicates in the training:

• Listen: seek out common ground and common language. Work with people where they are at, for example if working with a faith group look at Transition from their point of view, if working with low income groups, it may well be more useful to focus on the building of economic resilience.


• Language: avoid jargon and imagery, language and approaches which may marginalise people


• Choose your medium: explore alternative means of communication, such as the arts, and try to make events fun and celebratory. Traditional meetings or events with a speaker can be a real turnoff for lots of people, and many different sectors of society meet each other in very different ways to that


• Learn to Recognise Power Dynamics: this means that when coming to this work having honesty and a commitment to an ongoing inner dialogue with ourselves that explores our own feelings about prejudices, power and being taken out of our comfort zone. Being mindful that this will be a process of being open to the discomfort and questioning of assumptions that may well arise. How do we feel about letting go of ways of thinking?

Transition Town Tooting (TTT) in London have, since the group’s inception, seen diversity as ‘a way of operating’ rather than an optional add-on. Tooting is one of the most diverse areas of London, and the group has striven to reflect that. In the summer of 2010 it held the Trashcatchers’ Carnival, which involved about 30 groups in creating a street carnival around the theme of caring for the Earth, using nearly 1 million plastic bags in creating the amazing floats for the event. Over 1,000 people took part in the parade, and many thousands turned out to watch it. They also hold an annual ‘Earth Talk Walk’, which visits all the main centres of worship in the area to share thoughts on caring for the Earth, and also the Foodival, an annual event which brings surplus produce from allotments to chefs from different ethnic restaurants in the area who cook them in their tradition. AsHillary, a member of TTT, and an organiser of the Carnival, put it, “I’ve lived in Tooting for 22 years, but I think I’ve lived more in Tooting in the past 2 years since I’ve been involved in Transition than I have in the last 20 years”.

Whether we are talking about Totnes, Manchester, Forres or Los Angeles, inclusion will look different in each place, but it is equally as important. Every community has a diversity of political opinion, incomes, backgrounds, gender and sexuality and so on, as well as of dominant and non-dominant people. In practice Transition initiatives need to start out from a position of recognising that everyone is important and has a role, regardless of the above, and should seek to acquire the necessary tools to make diversity and inclusion central to their work.

In conclusion, Alastair Macintosh put it beautifully when I spoke to him, and to return to the food analogies that run through this book, he suggested that in terms of diversity, the challenge for Transition is to move from being the oil on top of the gravy to being like salt which is able to dissolve quickly into the gravy. A very clear assessment of that challenge this ingredient is addressing.

The Solution

Building an Initiative that integrates all the strengths and concerns in your community means starting with everyone in that community and interweaving diversity into everything you do. In practise, it’s about a lot more than putting up posters in a few carefully chosen places. Rather than inviting people to your meetings and expecting them to come along, it’s about going out to other people and listening. It means finding out about the strengths, concerns and the passions that fuel the fire of everyone in your community and then together with your own ideas, using that as the building blocks for creating an inclusive vision that informs everything you do. The result will be a just, fair and infinitely more resilient Transition.

Connections to Other Ingredients

Inclusion and diversity can strengthen greatly many aspects of your initiative’s work. AWARENESS RAISING (2.9) will be much stronger if it involves BUILDING STRATEGIC PARTNERSHIPS (2.12) with a diversity of organisations. ORAL HISTORIES (4.7) can be a great way of hearing the stories not just of those whose roots in that community go back generations, but also those who arrived into that community from elsewhere, and the difficulties they faced. When you are considering HAVING AN OFFICE OR NOT (3.1), it is good to remember how where you choose to have an office comes across in terms of inclusion. In many cultures, the ROLE OF STORYTELLING (4.13) is much stronger, and it is good to weave this into events. In terms of how the initiative functions internally, it is important to be mindful that those in the minority in a group often feel uncomfortable and find it hard to find their voice in meetings. RESPECTFUL COMMUNICATION (1.7) and considering HOW OTHERS SEE US/HOW WE COMMUNICATE (1.6) are important, as is the possibility that some people may need some support with STANDING UP TO SPEAK (1.8). For the initiative to design in regular SELF REFLECTION (3.8) is important on this topic.

Ingredients of Transition: Engaging the Council

Councillors from Somerset County Council taking part in a Transition Training

Context

Building a constructive relationship to your local authority can be a very constructive thing for both organisations. Once your initiative has dealt with BECOMING A FORMAL ORGANISATION (2.7), it could set about BUILDING STRATEGIC PARTNERSHIPS (2.12) with a range of organisations, including the Council. Such an approach can happen either as a single initiative, or could come from a NETWORK OF TRANSITION INITIATIVES (4.2).

(We are collecting and discussing these Transition ingredients on Transition Network’s website to keep all comments in one place. Please leave feedback and comments, suggestions for alternative pictures, anecdotes, stories and projects for this ingredient here).

The Challenge

To be able to really have an impact, you will need to develop a good working relationship with your local authority. Often community organisations are seen by their Local Authorities as disorganised, reactionary, unrepresentative and troublesome. Community consultation processes can be tokenistic and exclusive, leaving community groups feeling sidelined and unheard. Many community groups end up feeling excluded from local politics, and they retreat into knocking their local authority, rather than engaging and, for example, putting people forward for office.

Core Text

Let’s suppose that your Transition initiative decides it is time to go and talk to the Council, in order to try and engage them in your work. What is the best way to make sure it goes well, and what are the things to avoid that would mean it goes disastrously badly? A recent report by the Community Development Foundation [1]offers four tips to help community groups wanting to approach their local authorities:

1. Your group must be persistent, positive and ready to work with others

2. You need patience and networking skills to find the right person within the Council who is interested and supportive of your work

3. You must have something to bring to the table, for example, how can your group help the Council to meet its targets?

4. Often the Council is already dealing with other Third Sector groups, and it might be that you will have more of an impact if you go as part of a coalition

Alexis Rowell was a Councillor in Camden for four years and one of the founders of Transition Belsize, and in his book “Communities, Councils and a Low Carbon Future”[2], he sets out his advice for Transition initiatives wanting to approach their local council. Firstly, he suggests, Councillors are only human, and spend much of their time being berated about different problems and crises, and therefore they love people who bring solutions rather than problems. Think, when you are preparing to meet with them, what your initiative can do that helps them to solve a problem that they are facing.

Secondly, try and make them feel like a part of the process. Invite them to events, you might consider inviting your councillors to film screenings as a guest of honour, and invite them to comment after the film, to offer their thoughts. You could invite them as ‘Keynote Listeners’ to your events (as Transition Network did with Ed Miliband in 2009 when he was Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change). When you organise events, organise them in their field of vision, even if they can’t make it, they should be getting a sense of the buzz you are generating, at second hand at least. You might also invite them to Open Space events you are holding, indeed you could give them first refusal on dates when planning the event to ensure that they manage to attend.

Thirdly, think clearly about why you are going to see them. What are you asking for? Don’t go too early: as Alexis warns, make sure you get all your organisational ‘birthing pains’ out of the way first. It works better if the ‘buzz’ around your work reaches them first, or if you have a practical project under your belt first, to show that you aren’t just another ‘talking shop’. Make sure you have a clear ask, don’t just turn up empty-handed.

If you get to be asked to make a presentation to the Council, there are a few definite dos and don’ts:

• Do dress the part. Wear a tie, or wear something smart, have a haircut if needed.


• Don’t take your family friends, dog or cat along with you.


• Don’t spend the first ten minutes showing them peak oil graphs and pictures of stranded polar bears.


• Don’t slag them off, presenting them with a list of ‘the Council doesn’t do this, and it doesn’t do that…” and so on….


• Do tailor your presentation to your audience. If you are addressing the Financial directors, tell them how Transition can save them money. If you are talking to the disaster planning officers, tell them how Transition can help build resilience, and so on.


• Do practice in advance, make sure your co-presenters know who is doing what


• Do try to get one or two sympathetic councillors on board first in advance of your presentation


• Do offer your services as experts in consulation processes, such as Stroud (see below)


• Do try to not come across as unfocused, pie-in-the-sky woolly liberal activists…

Michael Dunwell of Transition Forest of Dean, who has done a lot of work with his local council on trying to embed Transition thinking at Council level, told me that for him, working with his Council really impressed on him the importance of having done the Transition Training. He identified two reasons why this is the case. Firstly because “the training itself strengthens and supports commitment and feeds the desire to see a healthy community”, without which it would be hard for people with little previous experience of local government to be able to withstand much exposure to it. Secondly because it brings you into contact with people who have experience of working with government, and this encourages you to seek their help. He concluded, “I have found that the impenetrable jargon of local government makes you doubt your own ability to think or speak, so be sure that you can express to yourself what it is you believe in, only utter what you know you can understand and don’t try and out-jargon the others. It really is important that the Transition message speaks a different language”.

Transition Stroud have cultivated a close working relationship with Stroud District Council. Speaking at the IDEA Conference in June 2009, Simon Allen and Cllr. Fi Macmillan told the story of how that relationship emerged[3]. Transition Stroud became involved with the Council’s Local Strategic Partnership (LSP) which held a series of ‘Inquiries’. When the Inquiry about food came around, the group realised that there were “no specialists on food supply in the district and we know as much as anyone”. The group focused on producing the report for the food inquiry, along the lines of ‘Can Stroud Feed Itself?’ They spent a huge amount of time on it, with a great deal of research pulled into the process, and the final report was accepted as evidence to the Think Tank on food policy. The Council later said that they saw this as a turning point in the relationship between Transition Stroud, the LSP and the Council. Asked to suggest some tips for other Transition initiatives based on their experience, they offered the following:

• Don’t worry if your transition group looks ‘home-knitted’ – we’ve got energy, commitment and great ideas


• Focus on what you want to achieve and not what sets you apart


• Look out for the people in your Transition groups who are up for collaboration


• Start working on something – anything- to build that relationship – take some risks and learn to trust each other


• Careful communication, review and reflection build that trust


• It won’t be an easy fit first off. You have to work at the relationship


• It won’t happen overnight. Be patient


• Remember internal concerns have to be managed


• Don’t get hung up on the outcomes because outcomes might change, just work on shared agenda.

One of the most amazing resolutions ever passed by a local authority in relation to that passed in Monteveglio in Italy in late 2009. Among other things, it committed the authority to:

“Strategic partnership with the Association Monteveglio Città di Transizione [Transition Town Monteveglio] with whom this administration shares a view of the future (the depletion of energy resources and the significance of a limit to economic development), methods (bottom-up community participation), objectives (to make our community more resilient, i.e. better prepared to face a low energy future) and the optimistic approach (although the times are hard, changes to come will include great opportunities to improve the whole community’s quality of life)”.

I asked Cristiano Bottone of Transition Town Monteveglio (TTM) for the story of how the resolution came about. He said that it began with his giving talks about peak oil and Transition, which were well attended by local councillors. This led to the forming of TTM, who organised talks by a series of speakers and other events, as well as hosting a Transition Training by Naresh Giangrande and Sophy Banks. Around this time, local elections were pending, and some within TTM decided to put themselves forward for election, while others felt they would be more effective continuing with the Transition initiative. Those running for office used Transition approaches, such as World Cafe, to generate ideas which were then woven into their electoral platforms. In the end, they were all elected, resulting in a situation where TTM and the council now work side-by-side in a very positive partnership, in spite of recent cuts in public spending. Cristiano offered three tips for successful engagement of local authorities:

1. When communicating with institutions always talk to the people, never to their roles: generate empathy, and speak to the parent, the citizen, the carer, rather than the title on the door of the office

2. Create the conditions for change #1: create a ‘new way’: when done well, Transition can create a new social and political space which is quickly noted by politicians, and which gives both they, and the local people, new room for expression

3. Conditions for change #2: move beyond competition: Transition offers an approach which strives to take the competitiveness out of local politics, cooperative activity, working together to achieve change with everyone contributing, is much more likely to succeed.

The Solution

When your initiative feels as though it is ready, and it feels that it has sufficient momentum under its belt, make an approach to whoever seems the most sympathetic person within the Council. Explore ways of collaborating, how they can help, and how your Transition initiative can feed into Council policymaking. Explore options for funding, or any other kind of support. You might explore the possibility of passing a peak oil resolution, or offer your services in helping draft policy on areas where your group has expertise.

Connections to Other Ingredients

Be mindful of not swamping your councillors with POST PETROLEUM STRESS DISORDER (1.1), feeling the obligation to expose them to endless peak oil graphs. When you get to meet councillors, or give them a presentation, be aware of HOW OTHERS SEE US/HOW WE COMMUNICATE (1.6). Invite councillors to your AWARENESS RAISING events (2.9). The Council might be able to help you with getting VOLUNTEERS (3.2), with OFFICE SPACE (3.1), with ENSURING LAND ACCESS (3.13) and with support for PRACTICAL MANIFESTATIONS (3.9). They can also give a great deal of support with your ENERGY DESCENT ACTION PLAN (5.1) process and could potentially be a partner for COMMUNITY RENEWABLE ENERGY COMPANIES (ESCOs) (5.4). Finally, it would be good to find ways to help them meet their objectives, perhaps offering them support with drafting PEAK OIL RESOLUTIONS (6.2), or carrying out ENERGY RESILIENCE ASSESSMENTs (4.5).