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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