Five Transition Groups report on themselves

by Pam Hartwell-Herrero, Cecile Andrews, Sarah Anne Edwards, & Michael Levy

I asked several people on the Transition CA ning site to send me 200 words of what their organization is all about. – Bob Banner

Sustainable Fairfax

Sustainable Fairfax is on the cutting edge of bringing communities into a sustainable future. Sustainable Fairfax has been an active and influential non-profit organization since 1999. Our model is unique in that we have only one part-time-paid staff, and a pool of volunteers does the rest of the work. And oh, the work we do. The Community Education committee hosts monthly classes that draw between a few dozen to a few hundred attendees on a wide variety of sustainability topics, our Communications team sends a bi-weekly newsletter to 950+ subscribers (up from 250, just two years ago), our Policy committee actively participates in town and county decisions on Climate Change, Waste, Water, Food, Local Economy, and Affordable Housing, and our Project committee brings our ideals into action in the community. Early policy work led our entire county to embrace the Community Choice Law and create a program called Marin Clean Energy that will bring an increase of 20-100% of clean and renewable electricity generation into our power mix. We recently worked on the first ballot measure for a town-wide Plastic Bag Ban that won 79% of the vote. We also have a community-created Sustainability Center in the heart of downtown Fairfax that acts as the hub of our activities, a hands-on demonstration site for best practices inside and outside a home, and a local resource for sustainability information and goods. We achieve these actions with a budget of about $50,000 a year. Please check our website for more about what we do. www.sustainablefairfax.org

Pam Hartwell-Herrero, Executive Director
Sustainable Fairfax
141 Bolinas Road, Fairfax, CA 94930
415-455-9114
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Phinney EcoVillage

Phinney EcoVillage is a project in Seattle to create sustainability and community in an urban neighborhood. (We’re part of a larger group: SCALLOPS: Sustainable Communities All Over Puget Sound that is comprised of over 30 “sustainability” communities.) Phinney EcoVillage focuses on bringing people together to create community. Whether the subject matter of the gathering is global warming, combatting the car culture, or fighting to end the war in Iraq, community and camaraderie is always on the top of the list. We need to change our culture from every man for himself to we’re all in this together. We can only do that by giving people the experience of caring and community. Only when we activate this basic human response of caring for the common good will we inspire people to live more sustainability. So, we focus on congenial, convivial groups. We have a climate change group, a simplicity group, a group we call the Phinney “think tank” where we just get together to hang out. My favorite is our “Democracy Conversations: A Civics Book Club,” which is offered in cooperation with the local library. This one seems most important to me because we must build deliberation into our democracy. We must accustom people to think about the consequences of our actions. As John Dewey said, “Democracy is born in conversation.”

Cecile Andrews, author of Slow Is Beautiful and The Circle of Simplicity
http://www.cecileandrews.com
http://www.phinneyecovillage.net

Let’s Live Local

Let’s Live Local began in August, 2005, as an informal group of interested volunteers in Pine Mountain Club, CA. Given the small size and remote location of our community, our goal has been to address how to

reduce costs of heating, lighting, cooling and otherwise running our homes
reduce fuel costs of transportation,
create sustainable ways of relocalizing, and
share what we learn with other rural communities as well as with self- defined urban and suburban villages or neighborhoods.

We have spearheaded a well-attended Energy Fair and participated in the annual Community Strategic Planning process. Our first official project was the creation of a Pellet Coop in the spring of 2008. Three semi-truckloads of pellets were subscribed, and a trade name and bank account established. This month we have formed an organic food coop to buy produce from a nearby CSA. Our Water Conservation sub-committee is developing plans to work with the locally-owned water company to accommodate water allocations for community and home food gardens. A Food Garden and Local Economic Development group are setting up field trips, lost-skills workshops, and outreach.

Serendipitously, our process has parallelled the 12-Step Transition Towns process, which we are now aware of and drawing on. We’re also a Post Carbon Outpost and in the final steps of becoming a 501(c)3 with the intention of seeking grants for other projects.

Sarah Anne Edwards, LCSW, PhD
Ecopsychologist, co-author Middle-Class Lifeboat, Financial Mental Health Counseling
P.O. Box 6775
Pine Mountain Club, CA 93222
661-242-2624
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Transition Santa Cruz

Transition Santa Cruz is in the early stages of forming a strong grassroots movement to move our city toward local resilience. We are fortunate to be working with a town full of people concerned with sustainability, with a strong environmental movement and many leaders and organizations who have been committed to “green” causes for many years. There is also a “Think Local First” campaign for local business. Many of the things we are interested in promoting have already been started, or at least tried, in Santa Cruz.

This ferment of activity can be daunting as well as encouraging, because the public’s attention can be divided among all the great movements and initiatives. However, we leverage the situation by forming alliances with various other groups in town, particularly by co-sponsoring events. What we bring to the table is an overall vision of how the community can embrace the huge changes of the coming decades in a thoughtful, inspiring way.

Our events have been well-attended, and we have an e-mailing list of 130 people. In January, as part of our awareness-raising effort, we will be hosting a panel of speakers on local food, followed by an Open Space community-discussion-day on the same topic. The question of the day will be, “How will we feed ourselves in the coming decades?”

At this point it is difficult to gauge when will be the right time for a large event (known in the Transition movement as a “Great Unleashing”); however, we are aiming for late Spring 2009. You can have a peek at our work on our website at http://transitionSC.org .

Michael Levy
Transition Santa Cruz
http://transitionSC.org
831-427-9916

The Environmental Change-Makers

The Environmental Change-Makers meet in the Westchester area of Los Angeles. They’ve been offering free monthly public meetings for three years on a variety of sustainability-related topics.

The Change-Makers put a new spin on what the term Urban Permaculture might mean. From a site mere blocks from Los Angeles International airport, most of their work takes place in the “Culture and Education” petal of David Holmgren’s Permaculture Flower. Their ongoing series of meetings has brought Solar Cooker craft sessions, Local Food potlucks, Vegetable/Herb seed swaps, bicycle transportation, and rainwater harvesting workshops to a rather conservative part of the city. In September, the group hosted a “Life After Oil” conference for leaders from throughout Southern California, and in December they hosted Southern California’s first-ever Training for Transition.

Last June, the group created a Community Garden on the grounds of the local church that is their meeting place; with dual purpose the Garden feeds the needy and reskills the community. The Garden’s front yard vegetables underscore the issue of Food Not Lawns in the local upscale neighborhood, while an ongoing series of free public Organic Vegetable Gardening classes and workshops draw people from the greater Los Angeles area.

The Change-Makers realize that a community doesn’t simply jump from mainstream consumerism into Transition Town overnight; it takes time, commitment, and a continual presence of Transition ideas within the community.

A key part of their success has been the groups of like-minded peers who together venture into positive environmental action.

This December, the Change-Makers released a book, Environmental Change-Making, which tells what they’ve done to get their community ready for Transition ideas. Joanne Poyourow, the group’s co-founder and author of the book, views their activities as the precursor to the Transition Handbook -- this is what it takes to get a community “ready” to work on Hopkins’ ideas.

The book, resources, and calendar of Environmental Change-Makers meetings are available through www.EnviroChangeMakers.org

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