What is the Transition Movement and Transition Towns?

Transition has grown and developed its scope since its inception in 2005. It is mostly about sustainability, local resilience to change and building community infrastructure that uses local resources to protect against future risks in an environmentally friendly way. Instead of worrying or getting angry about the difficulties that face us or waiting for someone else to fix things, it is about finding solutions and being proactive ourselves with the talent and resources we have in our local communities. To make a global impact by building a network of smaller local groups that deliver incremental gains that move us towards a future we want and can be proud of. The small local group is the Transition Town and we now have one here in Blandford. So get involved now!

Here’s what it says about the movement on the Transition Network’s website:

Transition is a movement that has been growing since 2005.  It is about communities stepping up to address the big challenges they face by starting local. By coming together, they are able to crowd-source solutions. They seek to nurture a caring culture, one focused on supporting each other, both as groups or as wider communities.

In practice, they are reclaiming the economy, sparking entrepreneurship, re-imagining work, reskilling themselves and weaving webs of connection and support.

Horst Köhler, former German president and former president of the IMF says this about transition:

“I see [Transition] as a wonderful combination of civic local engagement and a worldwide network. In many towns throughout the world people get together, finding community, enthusiastic about the idea of together envisioning a future model for their town that will make it worth living in. There is something out there ladies and gentlemen, I’m deeply convinced, that was set in motion already quite some time ago…”

What is Transition Blandford?

The Blandford group are looking to build local resilience to external influences and change, in particular climate change and extreme weather events, economic fluctuations such as the 2008 crash as well as oil dependency and commodity price shifts and finally the impending changes of automation and AI.
The idea is to use local resources including people, to build sustainability and resilience in the town and surrounding villages. We are dedicated to working with Government, politicians, business etc to ensure that the environmental and economic concerns held by many are addressed. We are building a network of active and positive people to create community projects that will make the town a better place, not just to protect against the potential end or stagnation of economic growth but right now and every day even in the prosperous times.
We will be starting small with simple easy to manage projects to raise awareness of our aims, generate a small revenue and build a reputation for delivering high quality community projects. From there we will progress up to much larger scale projects that include Government, local businesses, entrepreneurs and other organisations. We plan to access some of the huge amounts of money available for environmental, community and business development projects. These projects will bring jobs to the town and generate wealth, a wealth that stays in the town because we are using local resources to maintain them. The big projects are ambitious, but if you do not dream big how can you receive big?
Check out the Projects page to see what we are doing already.

Sign up to be a volunteer, brainstorm ideas, donate money, lend equipment or help in any other way you can think of, please use the contact form and let us know what you can do help, thanks.