A week of training and a new organisation

The NSW Southern Highlands town of Bowral was a modest location for the creation of something auspicious. It was there, on a cool, overcast and occasionally rainy day that TransitionAustralia was born.

The organisation was brought into being at the transition national networking day, on Sunday 15 February this year. People from Adelaide, central Victoria, the Bega Valley of southern NSW, Sydney, the Blue Mountains and the Sunshine Coast attended. Notable among attendees was a man whose fire damaged home was one of two left standing by the bushfires in the Victorian town of Kinglake. He attended to take transition ideas back to Victoria to use with the community during the reconstruction. Also present were Sophie Banks and Naresh Giangrande from the Totnes transition project in the UK.
 
In structure, TransitionAustralia is to be a ‘light’ organisation. It will not tell local transition initiatives ‘what to do’. Rather, it will provide networking services for emerging transition initiatives across the country and liaise with similar international transition organisations in the UK as well as those being set up in New Zealand and the USA. As such, TransitionAustralia will become a major node in the unfolding network of global transition initiatives. The validity and need for such a structure has emerged from the experience of the transition movement in different countries. Having a recognised national body brings greater presence and influence.

Working teams, representative across regions, have been set up to address specific structural needs such as the creation of a website based on Web 2.0 technologies.

TRANSITION IN A WEEK
TransitionAustralia was the final outcome of a week of transition activity organised by the capable and now somewhat weary Transitions Shire Wingcaribee team. The location was the Kerever Spirituality Centre at Bowral, an old convent building enclosed by a mini-forest of cold climate trees from around the world. Suitable plantings, given the week of cool, wet weather that followed the two day course.

Led by Sophie and Naresh, the first course – the course provided to new transition teams in the process of setting up - ran over two very hot days. This was a course they have developed to start transition groups and it included organisational as well as psychological components, some drawn from the work of Joanna Macy. It is and intensive and, in some cases, a potentially challenging experience for people planning to become transition activists. It is not a course for introducing transition initiatives to the interested public.

Approximately 32 people attended. Others had applied to for a place but the course had quickly filled.

After a two day break, the four day train-the-trainer course introduced around 18 participants to the techniques, processes and motivations for offering the two day transition groups course. This was another immersive, sometimes challenging but always revealing experience.

Sophie and Naresh guided participants through the process over what turned out to be an intensive and tiring four days during which the weather remained overcast, cool and somewhat wet (I understand that this is fairly normal for the Southern Highlands), in contrast to the blistering heat of the two day workshop.

EVENINGS OF QUIET CONTEMPLATION
Not quite. Nights were the time for networking, talking, eating and... well... sampling a range of wines. One night was remarkable for the performance by an ad-hoc and occasionally out of tune choir. This formed spontaneously around the circular dining table and shattered the calm night air with a selection of songs of distant and doubtful vintage that ranged through jazz, rock, folk, various genre that could only be guessed at and a sample of opera from Harry, who is perhaps more at home with his interest, rare fruit. It was mostly the female voices that were in tune, though I don't know why this should be so.

One evening presented the sight of the dining room table clustered full of laptops with the people behind them typing eagerly and shuffling mouses. A young woman remarked that it would have been perhaps saner to actually speak to each other rather than interact with machines, however this turned out to be a misreading of what was actually a social - if you will believe me - activity of immense potential value... perhaps.

No, I’m not trying to butter-up what could easily be mistaken as a conclave of nerds indulging their favourite activity. What the young woman who made the possible disparaging comment misunderstood was that she was witnessing a spontaneous info-mart in operation - clearly the emergent property of a bunch of creative minds clustered in the one place. During this, people shared what must have been terabytes of useful files.

THE POOL
An outcome of this mentally strenuous and physically exhausting train-the-trainer course was the formation of an Australian transition initiative training pool. That is, a bunch of people who can go out into the world to deliver transitions training in the form of the two day course and, later, the four day train-the-trainer course. Some have started.

The agreement reached was that the pool will receive requests for the two day course for people wanting to set up transition groups and allocate trainers in their regions. This will head off competition, actually implementing the permaculture directive of ‘cooperation rather than competition’, as someone pointed out, as well as the principle of localisation that is central to transition initiatives. In this case, this takes the form of the locaiisation of training... ie. using local training resources and people.

The purpose of 'official' transitions training is to facilitate training that complies with the definition of transition initiatives that was agreed to at the train-the-trainer course here and in other countries. That definition identifies the key indicators of an authentic or ‘official’ transition project (organisation, activity, course, workshop etc) as having the characteristics of:

- localisation
- generating paradigm shift (ie. world view)
- having multi-level support – the support of other transition groups, support for the transition network; that is, not an individual, stand-alone effort.

The idea behind this is that transition initiatives are substantial operations that have particular structure and direction. An example would be the transition projects in Totnes and on the Sunshine Coast. This should prevent co-option of the term by organisations that sought to contain it as a subservient component of their own programs.

The agreed-upon characteristics of an authentic transition initiative are what will distinguish it from something - meritorious although it may be - that merely seeks to take the transition initiative term or to apply it as a stand-alone offering.

TRANSITION AND PERMACULTURE
Rob Hopkins, who developed the transition concept with Sophy and Naresh and others, has described permaculture as the philosophical underpinning of the transition idea. Wiith the emergence of the global transitions movement, permaculture gets a second lease on life in a more structured, but also global approach, to sustainable living.

Transition initiatives have existed since the Sunshine Coast crew made a start, and from the time that the Bega crew started their inspiring work and, later, with the start of TransitionKatoomba and TransitionSydney and others, it was born in this country as a national entity only in February. It will follow an evolving path in its early life as it negotiates a role in society and alongside existing organisations.