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In Transition 2.0
Transition stimulates the creative juices of people on the streets
to get together beyond their differences
to make the best use of their resources, their energies, their spirits.
It's not about trying to change behaviour,
it's about setting in place structures which can be available when needed.
When there's the perceived need for them, they're there.
For me, Transition is moving towards an economy
where everyone has a place, a value and a purpose.
That includes the environment having a purpose, but also people.
For me, Transition is more engaging your community,
building your community and helping your community.
Everybody cares about their community, so everybody has something to offer.
I love that inclusivity about it. To me, that's what Transition is about.
So Transition for me is imagining what our community looks like
20, 30, 50 years into the future
where we've done a really good job of creating something that's inclusive, that's thriving,
where people are happy and our way of living is sustainable,
and then figuring out today what we can do to help us get there.
Humans have been going, 'Oh, what's this stuff, oil? We've just found it.'
'Oh, this can be quite useful.' So they started using it more.
And then, 'Oh, this is really useful.' So they started using it even more.
And we're increasing the levels that we use oil,
and meanwhile, the levels of oil left are rapidly decreasing.
That is causing a big problem.
All the greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide,
that are released when we're burning it, go up into the air.
It captures the heat from the sun, keeps it in, stops it from getting back out,
bounces it back in, and it will actually heat up the earth.
Which will cause unstable weather, a general rising in temperature,
the poles will start to melt and sea levels will rise, flood land,
and it will generally cause climate chaos.
Peak oil's also linked to another problem, called economic crisis.
Economic crisis is when the economy goes bust.
Basically, for the economy to grow, first of all you need consumers.
Then you need stuff for the consumers to buy.
The stuff is produced in factories.
And the factories need cheap energy, such as oil.
And when they don't get so much of that cheap energy, because of peak oil,
the stuff becomes more expensive, so less consumers buy it
and the economy shrinks.
What Transition people would want is for us to have a sustainable economy
instead of one that grows and shrinks like anything,
because the economy that we have now
could go 'boom!' at any moment and just disappear.
But if we have a sustainable economy, it won't.
So we all need to transition in some way or another, but we need a guide.
Our culture is so strongly set up for us to be consumers
and to be unaware of what's going on in the world,
that to make those changes, you need support.
And so Transition, the community, supports us.
The way we are living is not sustainable.
So this is an alternative to consumerist behaviour
that's becoming ever more unsustainable.
It's the way to create a world of people that are more connected.
They're more connected with themselves and each other and the natural world around them.
Everybody can feel they have something to offer and contribute.
And it isn't something for experts out there somewhere to do.
It really feels like it's given me momentum and a real sense of purpose in my life.
And it's a lot of fun. It's so rewarding, so nourishing
to get to know people really really well and talk about real things.
I enjoy talking to people, helping people, building my community.
Transition Initiatives around the world
900 Initiatives registered and over 1800 around the world
Transition starts with a group of people coming together,
and that group of people can come from a range of different places.
They might be a group that's already been meeting as something else,
it might be a group of people who already know each other but don't work formally together.
It might be a group of people who meet at an event or in the pub and say, 'Why don't we start Transition?'
But that initial coming together of people, that forming the group,
is the seed for the whole process.
The first event was on the 3rd of April. Eight people showed up.
And then the second event, one person showed up.
And I remember coming home and my husband commiserating with me for the low turn-out.
I looked at him and said, 'You're wrong.'
'All the people who came were the right people.'
And we have this saying in Transition that 'whoever comes is the right person'.
I was very sceptical about that - 'yeah, sure' -
and I must say it's true. It totally turned out to be true.
Of those eight people who came to the first event,
four of them are now part of Transition Wayland initiating group.
And that one person who showed up, he's part of Transition Wayland initiating group as well.
The last event, at the library, there were maybe 10 of us, most of us Transition Wayland.
We talked into the night.
The librarian had to kick us out of the library because we just went over.
I walked out of there knowing that that was my own event that I had planned,
and I was walking on clouds, because I knew we had a group.
What we've observed from looking at what Transition groups are doing,
as part of this five-year experiment we've been doing,
is that they go through a number of stages.
STAGE ONE: Starting Out
The first stage, we call 'starting out', is that creative, playful, storming stage
where you're showing films, putting up posters, organising events, doing awareness-raising stuff,
starting to lay the foundations for what will become the Transition Initiative.
But at that stage, you might not even call it Transition Wherever.
Moss Side is a very, very inner-city area.
It's very densely populated, it's very multi-cultural,
and it's had this horrific reputation as being the Bronx of Britain.
And because it's so densely populated,
you can go along a whole row of houses, knocking at quite a speed.
As soon as someone's not in, you can move on.
I used to work for a double-glazing company, knocking on doors,
I worked for an energy company as well.
That built up my confidence in door-knocking,
and I just thought, 'Well, I know I can knock on people's doors and be persuasive and make a good impression.'
I believe in Transition so much more than I believe in those other things,
so that increased my confidence as well and made me think,
'Actually, I could probably do a really good job of door-knocking for Transition as well.'
I think you get a very different response through the door-knocking
than you probably do through any other type of awareness-raising.
It's a numbers game, you know.
The majority of people I guess don't sign up, and it's just a case of keeping going.
'What's the best way of getting in touch with you?'
'I'm always in. Every day.'
'OK great, I'll make a note.'
One of our core group members, Ali Mohamed, who I met through door-knocking,
had not as far as I know been involved in any kind of environmental work before.
When I first saw Joel, I wasn't thinking, 'What he's doing is great.'
But I was open to him and I was listening to what he was saying, especially when he said 'Moss Side'.
I felt like this is something about our community, so I started listening from that time.
The door-knocking seemed to me like a really exciting way of engaging new people
who've not been involved at all in any kind of environmental activity before.
It's good to know your neighbours as well.
Because if something happened to you, your neighbour could help you.
And with the door-knocking as well, we're building up this relationship with our community.
And if we build this relationship, that means that our community is well protected
and people know each other and they can help each other.
Joel has knocked on more than 1420 different doors.
Transition Moss Side now has 237 people on their contact list.
Two thirds of these have come from door knocking.
There's no right way to do Transition.
Sometimes, you'll start your core group and then one of the first things that core group will do
is start an awareness-raising programme.
So it'll do flyers and posters and show films and so on.
The other way round often is that just a handful of people, or maybe even one person
will start an awareness-raising programme,
go out, show films, network with other organisations,
do all that sort of thing.
Then from that programme of awareness-raising, the core group will emerge.
Neither is the right way, it's really about what feels most appropriate in your place.
The earth where we live belongs to our grandchildren.
We have to live from what she gives us, without destroying it and without depending on other regions.
Aldeia das Amoreiras is our land and we have to manage it sustainably.
The first step isÉ to dream.
What is your dream for the village and what is your dream village?
The village is not small but it is almost empty.
The old have been dying. The young go find their way to other places.
The village is half a dozen elders and that's it.
My idea is that we would have good relationships between everyoneÉ
which is what we miss. To all get along together...
and help each other in all that we can.
My dream? You know what that is?
Is a place for the doctor to come to.
That soon I won't be able to go up there.
That was my dream.
To have something more for the children.
Like a park or a playground.
Ah! Already thinking about the baby! Ahaha!
To have shops so that people wouldnÕt have to make long journeys
to go to Ourique.
So to have more trade in the village?
Yes. To have a little trade in the village.
Everything cleaned.
Cleaned yards.
It would be great if even only some of the dreams
of the village were achieved. That would be very good...
because the village really needs that...
to be more dynamic and sustainable.
Something that it deeply needs.
Sustainable Village of Amoreiras has already achieved some of its dreams.
They've cleaned and painted the whole village.
They've created a local market.
And meetings are taking place
to discuss facilities for children and health care improvements.
Having a vision of the future becomes like throwing a magnet or a whirlpool in front of you
that over time starts to draw you in that direction.
There's a real power to doing that, I think.
If our vision is that we have communities that are thriving, where people feel included,
where people have a sense of wellbeing, we need the basics of our living systems to be working for that.
But the biggest journey, I think, and the biggest transition that we need to make
is actually on the inside.
To understand how to create wellbeing in people,
because it's not through having masses of stuff.
Actually, we need a culture that supports people into a state of wellbeing.
It's something about what goes on inside us, that we're aware of.
And start to feel into what also happens that we're not so aware of,
and how much those things that are happening inside us
shape the way that we are with each other,
shape what we do in the world.
It's a way of looking into, 'How does a human being work on the inside?'
The way that we've made the world that has this focus on competition,
on getting as much as you can,
on keeping up with the people that have more than you,
and often seeing the other person or the person who's different
as somebody who's a threat -
that comes actually out of a state of consciousness and something that's happening inside us.
Until we can feel that and own that
and look at what's happening and work with it in some way,
that will keep on expressing itself in the world.
STAGE TWO: Deepening
The second stage, we call 'deepening',
which is where you realise all of a sudden,
'We're now Transition Wherever-it-is and we're becoming an organisation and
we're having to make things a bit more structured and a bit more formal.'
It feels very different from that initial starting-out phase. It feels like you are becoming an organisation.
You don't have to be an organisation to transform your neighbourhood...
Whitney Avenue Urban Farm near Pittsburgh is making a difference without doing 'Transition'.
I was looking for a place to blog. Whenever I found Transition,
it seemed like they were basically working with all of the tools that I was trying to implement.
It seemed like there was a lot of knowledge there and I really wanted to tap into the knowledge resources.
I noticed that there was permaculture stuff on there,
which was something that I was interested in, something that I wanted to start to integrate into urban areas.
Transition was like a culmination of everything that I was interested in on one website.
It's kind of tough to find other people like that.
I used to not think that there was anybody that was really interested in gardening, my age.
And Transition Pittsburgh, that website and everything associated with it, showed me that
there are people out there that are gardening, which was kind of considered a girly hobby in the past.
Now I can listen to heavy metal, dress like a punk and still garden and be cool.
We're in Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Pittsburgh
a blighted area by any means.
The first thing we do in the morning is we go and check the abandoned houses
to make sure that there's no squatters in them so it's at least safe for us to operate.
We're going to do the yellow house. 20% of the lots here are boarded up or vacant lots.
Hello? Hello? Anybody home?
You will become something magnificent. Keep going.
Well, the good news is there's nobody in here.
This is Whitney Avenue Urban Farm.
There were houses here I think about five, six years ago before they burned down.
Everything that we grow here is pretty much given away for free or donated to the food bank.
People from the neighbourhood also know that they are welcome to come here
and pick fruits and vegetables whenever they feel like it.
When Chris and Carly came on Whitney Avenue,
it was a street mainly of vacant houses and old, dead lots.
And they beautified this whole street, single-handedly.
It started people appreciating what they eat.
Some people on this street were hungry,
and they could go up to that garden and pick something to eat.
We work with the kids in the neighbourhood to do this.
Basically, we had a whole bunch of kids that got in a whole lot of trouble
and needed a way to keep them occupied, keep them busy. This turned out to be our way.
When I first started coming, I said, 'That's lame!'
It still is, kinda, but it keeps me out of trouble.
We had other kids on this street that were giving Brandon a bad influence.
He was following other kids that were a bad influence on him.
And then so once the kids moved away, and then Chris and Carly give him projects to do,
he turned out to be a nice little kid.
When you start picking the food from the garden, what do you do with it?
Like the corn?
All of it.
Oh, we sold it.
Oh yeah? Where did you sell it?
Right over there.
Want to take me there?
Yeah.
We wait for the people to come down there.
Then we ask them do they want to buy some tomatoes, or some zucchini or corn.
And if they say no, you say, 'Thank you, have a nice day.'
We love the kid. He's like a son to me.
I want to teach him everything that he's not getting at home.
What happened here in Wilkinsburg, one of the main things that the downfall has been attributed to,
was the loss of fathers, basically.
A lot of kids that are here, either their fathers are in jail, they were murdered at some point,
or they've just disappeared altogether.
There were gangs here, and whenever the FBI came and dismantled the gangs,
then that meant they hauled off and threw in jail for 20 years sometimes 60, 70 people at a clip,
all men, most of them fathers.
JUDGEMENT STOP
My goal over time would be to establish more of these types of gardens around Wilkinsburg
so that people can feed themselves.
This is a model, what I'm doing here, of what could be done in every street in Wilkinsburg.
Every street has at least one lot that's had a house torn down in it.
It's ridiculously simple.
Every little neighbourhood in Wilkinsburg should have a little garden.
In a way, I guess I am showing them sustainability,
but I don't even think that most of the people on this street could have told you
what sustainability was two years ago.
It's changed the block to where everybody else in Wilkinsburg envies our little street.
Everybody wants to come to Whitney Avenue. It's the best street in Wilkinsburg.
I'm crying, you got me crying!
It makes me feel proud, to myself.
Because when my family come around, I feel proud of where I live.
And that's changed me.
In terms of practical projects, food is where a lot of Transition groups get started first.
Because you don't have to wait for anything to get on with that.
You don't need permission to do it, you don't need funding to do it.
If you want to set up a windmill on the edge of your town, that could take you five or six years.
You can start a garden-share scheme, you can start growing food, you can start windowboxes...
you can start that really really quickly and really simply, so what we see time and time again
is that local food projects are the first things Transition Initiatives do
and the first thing that they start to gain some momentum around.
We're at Kilburn station on the Jubilee Line,
and four months ago, these beds were empty.
That's what gave us the idea of asking the Tube, 'Could we plant something here?'
We specifically wanted fruit and vegetables, to show people how easy it is to grow fruit and vegetables anywhere.
We believe this is the only Tube platform in London that's got fruit and vegetables growing on it.
And even an apple tree.
We've got this plot in such a high-profile place, with 12,000 people coming through the station every day.
We're delighted with the idea that a commuter can get off a train
and pick a strawberry or a tomato and munch it on the way home. It's fantastic!
We went to Transport for London and asked if we could grow some food here.
I think at first their reaction was a little bit nervous.
'We don't want to grow food there, but we're quite happy for you to plant flowers.'
So our first attempt at it was a little bit disheartening.
When we went to have a meeting with them, they introduced the idea of the Underground in Bloom,
and they said, 'We'd love for you to do this as part of our Underground in Bloom competition.'
And when we went through the list of categories to see which one we may want to enter,
they seemed to be genuinely surprised that there was a 'grow your own food' category.
We pointed it out to them and said, 'We'd love to take part in that. We have an apple tree and we have some veg seeds.'
They weren't even aware that they were allowed to grow food on their platforms.
It pays to be persistent because sometimes, like with a lot of things,
it depends on the personalities that are involved.
Somebody might not really be willing to take a risk, but some people just get really excited about it,
so it depends on which person you speak to, at any organisation.
A different way of seeing the place that you see.
I've been living here for ten years, so to see it in a totally different light...
This is the first time that I've ever done something that's made these connections in this area for me.
That's quite an exciting thing.
It's really important when we do Transition that we design in some space to celebrate.
There's that cycle of dreaming and planning and then doing something,
and then remembering to celebrate what you've done before you go back into that cycle again.
Transition Town Tooting celebrated with a Trashcatchers' Carnival
Over 1 million plastic bottles and shopping bags...
half a million crisp packets...
and a ton of other materials...
were collected over 6 months to create this extravaganza!
Celebrating, appreciation, all of that, positive communication really helps us as human beings
just to feel resourced and good about ourselves.
Where we create space to celebrate each other's achievements,
to appreciate the qualities that we see in each other,
people build trust and they enjoy being together.
Whereas if we're in a constant state of pressure and we don't have time for that
because we're moving onto the next thing, actually, that's just a recipe for people to be exhausted very quickly.
Welcome to Tooting Carnival!
Transition feels more like a party than a protest march.
Every meeting, there should be some celebration and appreciation of what's happened,
as well as having events where you very consciously celebrate the things that you've done.
It would be really deceptive if this film gave the impression
that Transition always works and is always glitteringly, dazzlingly successful.
Sometimes individual projects or different initiatives or the entire organisation
will fall to bits acrimoniously, or maybe they've run out of steam.
Transition Lancaster folded within a year.
We can have a rosy vision that if we all have the same dream, we'll all get on.
It's not going to be true. Difference and conflict are always going to come into our groups.
If I'm absolutely honest, it was horrible.
I won't go into the full details because some of it's private, but it had an absolutely horrible ending to it.
I was very scarred by some of the things that had been said, and very very upset by some of the abuse that had been hurled around.
And quite upset at myself that by the end of it, I was equally willing to get quite engaged in being not very nice.
Gosh, if this is the people that are coming together trying to save the world,
get me off this planet. I don't want to be here because we ain't got a hope.
And maybe we are probably all completely misguided and naive and a bit stupid.
And if we can get through it and be open to learning, it's transformational.
It can really help us the next time to do it better.
What was learned was, when a new group did arise, we realised that the most important thing,
beyond saving the planet, or beyond whatever, peak oil,
was that people really focused on being able to hear each other and have respect for each other's view.
Not necessarily agree with it, and be able to say we don't agree,
but to tolerate and consider relations between people as the primary thing.
The new Transition City Lancaster now has nearly 450 local members.
After countless films, talks, discussions, market stalls, meals and festivals...
they officially 'unleashed' in April 2010.
I think one of the things that 'inner Transition' points to and one of the ways it can really help people
is by providing support structures,
providing spaces where people talk about just how it is to be carrying responsibility in this work of Transition.
Because we're not in Transition Town Inc., there's no line manager giving you a pat on the back.
So for people who are running things, it's good to have peer support,
other people like yourself, who can hear what you've been up to and who understand the problems you're facing.
It's very tiring, being at the front of what you're doing, or feeling that you're at the front of what you're doing.
You can forget why you're doing it.
But there's something about going back to the emotional pool, the emotional source,
that reminds you why you're doing it and puts you back in touch with that drive in a very good way.
You feel happy about it again, rather than on a treadmill.
I think it's absolutely fundamental. I think Transition calls for everybody to step into a different level of leadership.
The leaders of different projects can get together, support each other, network with each other
and maybe even learn some skills they can take back to their own groups.
There's something a bit magical about it and it reconnects me to why I'm doing this in the first place.
And now I feel like I've got a really strong support network.
It's turned into much more than what I thought it would be.
STAGE THREE: Connecting
The third stage is connecting, and that's where, once you're up and running,
you start to really reach out into the wider community,
to the organisations and the people you might not normally have come into contact with at that stage,
the local council, local businesses, the wider community.
So connecting is really a stage which is about embedding the project much more deeply in the community
and making it much more relevant to as many people as you can.
In the summer of 2008 I held my first Transition talk in Monteveglio.
Those who came decided to learn more about Transition.
At the first meeting I was absolutely shocked by the information.
After a few months, we became much more aware.
Some of us decided to become actively involved in the Transition group.
Others, including Umberto and Daniele, decided instead to run for elections in the local council.
They won, and now they are Mayor and Councillor for the Environment.
So we ended up with a local council that had two members very aware of Transition.
And others with a clear sense of the challenges to be faced in the coming years.
How can a local administration, in a town of 5,000 people, face the crisis of unlimited growth...
the end of cheap oil and come up with policies?
The first thing was to write it all down...
And so a resolution was born...
which makes reducing fossil fuels a priority by creating an energy descent plan.
We are often asked, what did we do to force our politicians to take such radical decisions?
But the great thing is, we didn't need to convince anybody.
We've already achieved some important goals
First of all, a radical change in our plans for urban development
Working alongside our local council we achieve what might otherwise be impossible
For example the Enescom project will lead to six villages in this valley
signing a covenant enabling us to write energy descent plans for the entire area.
When these policies are back by solid reasoning
it increases resilience, helping to leave the oil-based economy behind.
The fact that the entire surrounding area will be part of the covenant becomes even more interesting.
The covenant is an EU program targeting CO2 emissions
and developing alternative renewable energy.
It is a good tool for Transition
because it keeps citizens and administrators focused.
In Monteveglio we see things happening which happen in most other Transition Towns.
But involving local institutions helps accelerate the process of change.
What's really fascinating is what it starts to look like when that bottom-up approach that is Transition
meets an engaged, proactive local authority who are also thinking in terms of localisation and resilience.
And that interface where those two things meet is really, really important and a fascinating area that's starting to emerge.
How can a council best support the Transition process rather than drive it?
How can they embed an awareness of peak oil and the need to build resilience into the work that they do?
And what do those two things look like when they come together?
Transition Together was originally conceived here in Totnes through the Transition Town Totnes Initiative
as a way of engaging people in a street-by-street kind of way.
So a group usually starts by somebody coming into the office or ringing us up
and saying they're interested in starting up a group in their neighbourhood.
And they are the ones who then actually go and recruit all their neighbours.
That is something that's a bit different about our project. We don't go out and knock on people's doors.
They're the one who does it.
They usually get together between about six and ten of their neighbours, and they then go through seven sessions.
They have seven meetings together. The first one, we facilitate.
We send somebody along to help them get off on the right track
and to set a schedule of when they're going to be meeting again.
Then the second session looks at energy use in the home,
there's about 10-12 practical actions that they can take, none of which cost much money at all.
So we're really focussing on no-cost or low-cost actions for people.
And then at the end of that session, they write a little action plan.
Each person usually takes on two or three actions that they say they're going to do, or try and do before they meet again.
Lots of things we were able to put into practice,
about how to save energy and how to be better users of the resources that are on this planet,
without suffering.
Actually without suffering, and that's the key. It was actually a fun thing to do.
Because it looks at it on a street-by-street level, it means people can start to imagine
the implications of that and start to think about what a post-oil, low-carbon world
is going to look like on a small scale.
It's not about, how are we going to imagine the world totally changed?
It's how can we imagine this bit of our bit of the world?
How can we imagine that transformed and made over? That feels much more digestible.
Applying the things that we read and talked about in the units made a big difference.
It's been more a sense of how we are in our lives, rather than what we're doing.
Being more aware, more conscious of what we're doing with our lives in regard to energy and wasting it or not wasting it.
Doing our best.
I think the long-term benefits of the group aspect in particular is really around the social cohesion.
It's a bunch of people that I wouldn't normally have any cause to have anything to do with,
so it's brought us together.
We're such a mish-mash of people, it's lovely.
But we've all got this thread in common, which keeps us as a group and keeps us meeting.
It's really brought a great sense of community to the street.
So far, there have been 56 groups
involving 468 households
reaching 1,100 people.
Each household has saved an average of £600 a year
and each prevented an estimated 1.2 tonnes of CO2 from being released into the atmosphere.
You see that creativity spark, and people start looking at each other's gardens in different ways
and looking at each other's rooftops as having great potential.
I think probably in the long run, that's the change that will stick.
It's what society needs, what we all need, is to live in a safe world.
And I think this is a start for it.
STAGE 4: Building
The fourth stage is building. Building is that step of starting to think strategically
about the localisation of the place that you live.
It's the stage where you start setting up energy companies, local currencies, social enterprises...
So it's where it moves from lots of ideas into making a very tangible push at creating a new infrastructure locally.
There's been a greengrocer's here on this site for a long, long time.
I've been shopping here at least 50 years.
Certainly since the war, there's been a greengrocery business here.
The business was running down. It was looking increasingly like it was going to close.
So we started talking to the owner about how we might take over and run the shop as some sort of community business.
The community-owned approach was a very deliberate move, for ethical reasons I suppose,
but also very practical reasons. We wanted people to use the shop.
What better way to get them to use the shop than to give them ownership of the shop?
The local food side of things, we didn't do before. It's what we're all about now.
So people actually come in and say, 'I've got six cauliflowers, do you want them?'
As long as they're good quality, we'll take it off them.
I know, it's marvellous!
Local rhubarb! We love this!
I actually have customers that come into the shop specifically asking for Diggle rhubarb.
It's part of the 'rhubarb triangle'.
We want to encourage people to grow more stuff, we want to develop that whole thing
and enable our community to become a bit more resilient.
This is the £13.50 which we've got for selling our produce, and we recycle it back into the shop here.
I would expect we'll spend more, which is the usual!
We've added a lot of value to the community.
We've created jobs, we've enabled more people to do all their shopping locally.
We've improved the business of other retailers around here by being here,
because more people are now choosing to shop locally rather than drive off to a supermarket.
They're spending more money in other shops as well as in here, which is great.
I'm really pleased it's been as successful as it has been.
It might not have been like this, it could have been very different, I'm sure.
Right from the outset as well, we've done the bread, which is something really quite special.
It was a marriage made in heaven, really. The two businesses are both cooperatives.
The bakery's a worker cooperative where we're a consumer cooperative.
A worker cooperative structure means you're much more connected with the people you work with.
I've had colleagues all my working life, but it's not the same thing.
This is a different level of interconnectedness.
We started the bakery just over three years ago now.
We managed to get together a group of about 60 families
who paid upfront for their bread, sometimes up to 12 months at a time.
The longer they subscribed for, the bigger the discount we offered them.
There was such enthusiasm in the community that we knew we were onto a winner, basically.
Then we realised we'd run out of room in our little 15 metre squared cupboard,
so thought we had to take the big plunge this time and look for our own premises.
Still, we didn't have any working capital to do it, so we had to think again about how we might finance this.
It wasn't our idea, it was actually an Andrew Whitley suggestion, and it had been bandied around other places,
the concept of a 'bread bond', a series of individual loans from our customers and people in our community,
on which we would pay interest to them. We pay them a good rate of interest, 6.25%, but it's payable in bread,
which equates to £2.50 a week, which equates to a loaf of bread a week.
So you only get people that are committed to this place and this business,
and it's actually a very cheap loan for us and a very good rate of return for them.
You can't get a better rate of return on that kind of small investment anywhere from a high street bank.
Reconnecting with food is a fantastic metaphor for reconnecting with everything else in your life.
At the moment, every time we pay our energy bills, all that money just leaves our community.
It's ability to make things happen, make Transition happen, is lost.
It's really exciting to see now the number of communities that are starting to set up their own energy companies
in such a way that energy is generated but it benefits the community, it brings money back in.
We are the first community-owned solar power station in the country, in Britain.
That makes us feel pretty proud.
The solar power station is a rather grand term for a 98 kilowatt PV array.
We've calculated that it's enough for about 40 homes at current consumption rates.
We're not going to be able to power Lewes by means of solar panels,
but there are all kinds of other ways that we can do it.
It has the advantage of being easy, quick, cheap, instant and unproblematic in terms of planning.
We asked Harveys, the brewery, if they would be willing to lease us their roof.
They said, 'yes, in principle, fine' as long as we dot the i's and cross the t's on the legal side.
We had the launch in the town.
We advertised it very extensively, we've been in the local press making sure that everybody knew about it.
The money started coming in. We started getting cheques through the door, with the application forms,
and in a very short space of time, I think it was three weeks,
we had more than we needed to fund the installation.
It's real community investment, so it gives something back to the community,
people get it, it's very straightforward. Also it's doing great things for the environment
it's saving us on our carbon emissions, but it's locally owned, it's local people coming together and doing it.
It's a very interesting precedent to set because what it shows
is that people power is actually the effective power in terms of community fundraising, community projects.
It's such a good seed for lots of other potential community activities.
It does demonstrate the community getting together in areas that even 10 years ago you wouldn't have thought possible.
If you have a renewable energy installation of any kind,
you will get paid by the government for every unit of electricity that you generate.
We're accumulating from the Feed-In Tariff revenue,
a lump sum out of which we can repay people's initial payments.
It's been a very difficult process for us.
I'm a composer. I'm not a businessman, I'm not a financial anything.
I've had to learn an enormous amount in a very short space of time. We all have.
Nobody should go into this with any illusions about the amount of effort, commitment and time that it takes to do it.
It is difficult.
Resilient communities are the future, that's where we're headed.
So it's all about having the structures in place locally to be able to supply the needs of the community.
The models that we're pioneering are models that can eventually be adopted in some form
by people in other communities and other parts of the world.
You can think of the economy of the place that you live
as being like a big bucket.
Into that bucket go pensions, wages, grants and so on.
But at the moment, things like supermarkets, paying our electricity bills, internet shopping, are all drilling holes into that bucket.
That means that our accumulated wealth and its potential are just draining away.
Everywhere that there's a leak in that bucket
is a potential local livelihood, potential local business or training opportunity for young people.
So things like supporting community energy companies,
supporting local food where it's available and boosting that where it isn't,
and using local currencies,
are all very skillful ways of plugging the leaks in that bucket.
Brixton is the most culturally diverse place in the UK. It's unique.
We have every single nation under the sun.
We started the Brixton £pound, it launched in 2009.
Now we've reached a number of about 200 businesses taking it, officially.
Tonight, we've been going electronic. We are the first area in the whole of the United Kingdom to have an e-currency.
Is that not a good thing?
We're now advancing into a digital age with the £pound.
I think it's another wonderful incentive for people to come down to Brixton market
and come to Brixton in general, and spend their money.
The New Economics Foundation, a Dutch organisation called COIN and Transition Network
have been developing the software to launch this kind of electronic currency.
Brixton is the first pilot where it's actually being tested in practice.
'Watch Doctor!!'
Hi there. Hello there, how's it going? Oh not too bad!
So I just want you to have a quick look at my watch.
You want me to fix it for you? I'll just get the special watch-fixing tool out!
Right, no problem, let's have a look. I reckon that's going to be a new battery in that one.
There you go, it's working! That's £2.50.
£2.50. Can I pay by text?
You certainly may. Absolutely.
So I just go to the Brixton £pound bank... and you're Stuart the Watchman - S T W. Got the message. Lovely. All right then.
Got my message? Job done! Lovely, fantastic! See you next time.
See you. Thank you. Goodbye.
What we've developed, which is a pay-by-text system, can be used by anyone, with no hardware at all.
You don't need a swipe-card machine, all you need is a mobile phone.
It doesn't need to be a smartphone, just a very simple basic mobile phone.
You can send a text, that's all you need.
Can I pay by text? Yes you can.
What's your username? Sana Foods.
Our local independent businesses are absolutely crucial to resolving the economic problems that we've got at the moment,
because small and medium-sized businesses are the life-blood of the British economy.
The thing about the Brixton £pound is, the whole ethos of it is about us spending our money locally
and turbo-charging our local businesses, so they thrive and prosper.
The importance of the Brixton £pound isn't about shifting money from, say, north London to south London.
It's about creating a different type of economy.
One where we're actually asking questions like, can we supply things locally?
Are there people that live locally that could fulfill this role? And can we do things a bit differently?
It's about having the sort of economy where everybody could have a role, have a job,
and where we have a really thriving, diverse, strong local economy.
Fantastic! I've got a confirmation text. Fantastic. Have a good day. See you again.
And there you go, the Brixton £pound. Electronic! Fantastic!
Transition initially was designed really as a detox for the west,
as a way for the more affluent west to reduce its emissions to meet the developing world coming up the other way.
But it's been fascinating over the last year or so to see it start to emerge now in the developing world.
In March 2011 Heal the Soil decided to adopt the Transition model...
We started with our first village, which is Kottakarai, where we live.
... making them the first Transition Initiative in India.
Our first goal is for the village, our homes, the families, to have access to nutritional food.
That's the core of our program and our project.
Everybody should have access to good quality food.
We go to one house, we say, 'Do you want to start a vegetable garden?'
We bring the seeds and we show you how to maintain it.
And as soon as you start, then neighbours will come and say, 'Can we also have the same?'
That's how we have been growing with this concept.
So far they have introduced kitchen gardens to over 100 households in 4 villages in Tamil Nadu.
It can bring very positive results, working in rural India.
For example, if you say this is the size of a carbon footprint of a person living in the US,
this is the size of a carbon footprint of a person living in India.
And this is the size of a carbon footprint of a person living in rural India.
So, we don't have to come from all the way down to here. We're already here.
We just have to adopt models where most of our practices are green practices, are renewable practices,
and still keep the villagers of rural India in rural India. So it will stop migration.
We are bringing the transition from an old model of a traditional village to a developed India
and finding a balance where they don't feel they're left out not living in the cities.
We are very happy to see smiles on the faces of villagers.
They are very welcoming to us... to open their heart and their house.
>From when we started doing Transition, we always had the idea that it would be great if it was something
that was able to sufficiently get into the culture, into the DNA and the bloodstream of a place,
so that when it encounters times of great uncertainty or difficulty,
that Transition is one of the things on the table that people pick up and use to design their response.
So it's been really interesting over the last year or so to see places where things have got really, really difficult
and where Transition has become almost an instinctive, central part of that community's response.
Even before the disaster,
I thought Transition is the most wonderful thing I can do in my life.
After the disaster, it was even more obvious,
that Transition is just what we have to do, I have to do.
The Fujino Electric Power company consists of about 80 to 90 members who are on a mailing list.
It started when the nuclear disaster of 3.11 happened.
We got together to discuss the way we resource our energy and how safe and sustainable it is for the future.
We had a series of meetings and talked about what we wanted to do, but we weren't about to move into action.
So when 3.11 happened someone suggested we do something for the disaster relief.
... and that's when the company took off.
The Light Festival was a catalyst for the company to get clearer about its specific plans.
This year was the eighth year and we decided to generate all the electricity through renewable energy.
There were 5,000 visitors over three days
After the success of the festival, members decided to take it to Tohoku area where the disaster was
and we supplied electricity to the disaster area.
We would also like to make energy in our local area completely green.
So we have to find out what resources we have in Fujino and the first thing we thought of was this woodland.
And small hydro-electric generation.
There are some strong streams in the valleys.
We are now in the process of thinking how we can facilitate this dreaming the future together.
Transition is just one of many tools used by Project Lyttelton in Christchurch, New Zealand
Their Time Bank project is an inspiring example of community resilience in a crisis.
Lyttelton, New Zealand, the town where I used to live, was recently struck by a major earthquake.
Going back there was heart-breaking. "Breathe"
Much of the town had been destroyed.
Yet amidst all this loss was revealed the true heart of the community,
the goodness and the kindness of its people.
I was the Lyttelton Time Bank Coordinator.
I'd been working as the coordinator for the past few years building and connecting community.
Time Bank was brought here as a complementary currency,
people managing to find another way to live without constantly needing money.
And at the same time, it's an amazing community-strengthening tool,
because people could trade in skills, get to know each other, meet their neighbours.
Then we had this awful earthquake in September 2010.
Civil Defence had been called through to Christchurch
as it was deemed there wasn't any actual need here in Lyttelton.
However, there was a need but of a different kind.
The Fire Brigade phoned us and said, 'We know you're involved with the community.'
'We don't know what you can do, but what can you do? Can you help?'
So we set up base in our office and we were very very busy and frantic for many weeks,
helping meet community needs, such as delivering water and food and helping out with emergency repairs.
We'd kind of just got on top of things two weeks before the February earthquake hit,
and it was different this time. It was faster, it was worse. All buildings were down.
It was entirely different. It was like September was a practice run.
We pulled together as a community.
We found out what needed to be done and how we could get it, through this database of Time Bank volunteers.
At that time it was just over 400.
We just got things in motion and sent out these emails: 'This is where we are, this is what we need.'
And people came in droves, and then they sent those emails out to their own databases and on facebook pages,
and we had so many volunteers coming in, it was absolutely incredible.
I don't think the community would have pulled itself together
as quickly as it did without the community Time Bank here.
This goes out to everyone who lost anything but found each other,
because the true heart of a community is its people.
Cheerful Disclaimer
Transition is a social experiment on a massive scale. We don't know if it will work. What we are convinced of is that...
if we wait for governments, it will be too little too late.
If we act as individuals, it'll be too little.
But if we act as communities, it might just be enough, just in time.
This film was made without flying around the world