Transition Together: A Blizzard of Positivity in One Summit

Imelda Havers / June 2022

The power of collective action

I recently attended the ten-day “Together we Can” online summit led by the Transition Together network. This is the latest iteration of the Transition Towns movement set up some years ago to get momentum and ideas around creating sustainable, resilient towns and neighbourhoods. From humble beginnings it is now a worldwide movement, and the summit was both celebration and think-do forum for grass roots systemic change to meet the challenges of social and economic inequality and climate change.

In these post-Covid, post-Brexit, partygate-obsessed times, it was a relief to spend time with like minded people, hearing about against the odds successes, and stories of hope and inspiration. If we could only bottle the positive energy bouncing around the summit we’d be made for life. Instead I’ll try to sum up as well as I can some of the main ideas and stories shared.

A blizzard of stories

The summit kicked off with a quickfire round of stories of communities which had gone above and beyond to build resilience within their neighbourhoods. Some were, understandably, further developed than others, but all food for thought, with lessons learned and shared along the way.

They included:

· A Gleaners Café, a London workers’ co-operative running a pay-as-you-feel cafe making tasty meals from rescued food every day of the week

· Transition Streets, which brings neighbours together to tackle local issues collectively. This was one of my favourites, with lovely stories of connection at a hyper-local level. Could this work in York? I’m certain it could

· Transition Black Isle in Scotland, working with local producers and consumers to turn the food system on its head, ensuring healthy, local, fresh, affordable food is within reach of more people

· Transition Town Wellington, a Somerset community acquiring acres of land to create a green corridor for food and environmental projects

· East Marsh United, a Grimsby community driving radical change through co-operative housing, healthcare, neighbourhood clean-ups, community wealth building and arts projects

Listing all the wonderful, inspirational stories of resistance would make this a very long read, so I suggest you catch up with the session here to find out what is happening elsewhere and how we could maybe use some of the acquired wisdom in York.

Doughnut Economics – Putting it into Practice

Many of us are big fans of Doughnut Economics, which gives us clear and practical ways to build prosperity within the limits of the planet. This session focused on the Doughnut Economics Action Lab (DEAL), and how neighbourhoods are already putting ideas into action in response to local needs and priorities.

We heard from the Bioregional Learning Centre in Devon, which has created a “Peoples Doughnut” to work through the development and delivery of their shared vision which is set to provide guidance for citizens and policy makers. We also heard how Civic Square in Birmingham is using citizen science collaborations to explore what regenerative neighbourhoods look like.

The themes which cropped up time and again were the need to develop action according to local needs and conditions; co-creation and collaboration; decentralised decision-making; and of course, all of this has community at its heart.

To hear all this fascinating stuff in detail, you can access the session here .

Flour to the People and other great food stories

Unsurprisingly, a lot of the summit focused on food, growing, rewilding and our impact on the environment. The “flour to the people” motto came courtesy of Andrew Whitby, a baker in Scotland who was part of a collective responding to lockdown shortages by growing and distributing ingredients and bread at a local level.

Another systemic approach to changing food growing and distribution was shared by Christian Jonet from the Liege Food Belt in Belgium, where, among other things, they have an annual “Feeding Liege” festival and now have around 300 producers in their network.

Rewilding was explored by the likes of writer and environmentalist George Monbiot, who talked not just of rewilding our urban and rural environment, but of rewilding our politics and our society too. He painted a picture of a nature-based economy which not only restored nature and the environment but stacked up economically too. His “hope over despair” call was for me, at least, most welcome.

Citizens, not consumers – supporting a thriving social economy

We heard about the need to reward people differently if we are to grow our social economy. How do we reward people who give their time, in a way that makes it sustainable for them, and for society? We talked of and “economy of kindness” where such contributions are valued, viable and meet local needs.

A great initiative is Kindred in Liverpool City Region – this is a mutually supportive, non-competitive social enterprise network owned by the community, for the community, forever.

Another session looked at how we can build inclusive movements, through bringing in more diverse groups, and shifting power from the usual suspects to local people. The question was asked, “what is the world we want to live in?” and then build collectively towards that vision.

A pet subject of mine is the fact we need to reorientate ourselves away from being passive consumers, to active citizens. Thinker and writer Jon Alexander spoke about the key to fixing everything is in all of us, citing the raft of mutual aid groups which sprang up in the early days of Covid lockdown, sadly crushed by subsequent government individualised messaging around common sense and staying alert.

An interesting case of flipping from top-down to participatory democracy is Taiwan, who switched to using open-source data and communications and building trust between government and communities.

What was so interesting about the sessions was the range from the practical and the pragmatic to wider philosophical and cultural ideas being shared from all around the world. For me, that is the key to deep and lasting change: It’s about embracing new philosophies, and adopting new cultures, in order to realise a whole new way of doing things, whether it is economy, politics, social, healthcare or feeding the planet.

And finally …. Is it all about the stories we tell?

The summit ended with open space sessions on a variety of topics, one of which was about stories for change, led by Scottish Communities Climate Action Network (SCCAN). I found this particularly relevant to the work we’re doing at YoCo, as sometimes it’s hard to encapsulate what we’re about in a handy sentence.

Here are some ideas drawn from the session …

· Build on local heritage, in particular the railways, to describe the future

· Collate local individual histories: What was it like in York when the railways were still an employer? How did people get around? What jobs did they do? What would they like to see continuing on York Central?

· Record stories of parents / grandparents about the area

· Build a loop of stories by talking about the past to local schools, and ask the children to talk about them to their families

· A visioning walk round York Central – how could it look in 2030?

· Create a two-minute story we can relate to anyone asking what we’re doing

Useful links

Recorded sessions at TransitionTowns - YouTube

Together we Can Summit Together We Can: Summit 2022 - Transition Together

Transition Network Transition Network | Transition Towns

Some (but by no means all) of the contributors:

Transition Streets Transition Streets - Bringing the Totnes community together, one street at a time.

Bioregional Devon The Bioregional Learning Centre UK |

Civic Square Introducing CIVIC SQUARE – CIVIC SQUARE