Our mission

The mission of Transition Town Totnes (TTT) is two-fold.  The first is to explore and then follow pathways of practical actions that will reduce our carbon emissions and dependence on fossil fuels (getting to zero carbon is increasingly seen as viable response). The second is to build the town's resilience, that is, its ability to withstand shocks from the outside, to be more self reliant in terms of food, energy, employment and economics.

Aims & objectives

The main aim of TTT over the next 12-24 months is to produce and begin to implement an Energy Descent Action Plan (EDAP), which is a visionary yet practical strategic document that sets out pathways for how the town can safely transition from its present fossil-fuel dependency to a place of oil independence and enhanced local resilience.  This plan bears little resemblance to the community planning documents we are used to.  It will offer a practical 'roadmap' from the present to this lower energy world, but will also paint a compelling picture of this destination as somewhere potentially more fulfilling, abundant and connected that that of today. 

Our objectives include;

Brief history

Highlights include World Cafe sessions for people working for parish and county councils, one looking at the implications of peak oil and climate change on their planning decisions, and one on affordable housing.  Training has been delivered on film-making, teaching people how to make their own short films and put them on YouTube, as an imaginative way to increase documentation of the project.  In June 2007, a day long event was held at Dartington Hall called 'Estates in Transition' which brought together local landowners to look at how peak oil and climate change might affect their management decisions and how they might better connect with their local Transition Initiatives.

At the same time, the Open Space technique was widely used to engage the public directly to share their concerns and ideas for community-led solutions, This resulted in people coming forward to form working ‘theme groups’ in Food, Energy, Transport, Building & Housing, Economics & Livelihoods, Local Government, Health & Wellbeing, Heart & Soul, Education and the Arts (so far!). The group leaders sit on the TTT management team. The groups have since initiated a number of projects that work to further engage the community and take the first steps towards energy descent.

Our structure

Since September 2007 we have taken on a small office on Fore Street, whre some project workers are based. We are in the process of setting up a limited company with charitable status to manage some of the central support functions for Transition Town Totnes.
 
A co-ordination team (the core group) meets monthly with a varying agenda, and aims to provide the essential integration between the multiple groups and projects and make decisions that affect TTT overall. Representatives of each theme group, and other major projects, are invited to represent and communicate back to their group. The structure and membership of this group has evolved several times as the project develops, and is still open to review and change.
 
We aim to create a decision making and membership structure that is as open, democratic, transparent, inclusive and effective as possible and we welcome feedback and suggestions that will help us achieve this.

Main achievements

So far we estimate about 10-15% of our community have had some involvement with TTT. The theme groups and projects together actively engage about 80-100 people, our e-bulletin goes to 800 recipients and our events attract 50-200 people. We are working with local schools and businesses as well as residents and other community groups.

We have a wide range of projects in progress and have built good working relationships partners including Totnes Council, Totnes Chamber of Commerce, Totnes & District Strategy Group, Totnes Development Trust, Dartington Hall Trust, Schumacher College. Other regional or national organisations include the University of Liverpool Oil Depletion Group, the Centre for Alternative Technology and the Soil Association.

TTT have enjoyed a great deal of media coverage, including BBC 1's The One Show, ITN News, BBC South West and BBC Radio Scotland and You and Yours, and the Transition concept is being featured in The Archers. 

Next Steps

Our focus for the next 12 months is to embark on a wider range of practical projects that will really start to deliver some significant progress in terms of wider community engagement and real carbon reduction (driven by the EDAP process). We want to engage a much larger proportion of the community, and ensure better representation from all sections and age groups.  We will also continue to provide a wide range of exciting and enjoyable events, talks and film screenings.

We also need to build the ability of the TTT ‘centre’ to support projects and people to help ensure they get the desired outcomes in a cost and time effective way. To date TTT has been very successful with very little - surviving on volunteer time, self-funding, a local generous benefactor and some revenue from public events. This has worked well for our first 12 months’ awareness raising stage. Now we are ready to ramp up our delivery and community engagement work but are finding a number of financial barriers such as:

• Need for equipment and resources for community projects
• Cost of putting on events and communicating with a growing number of participants
• Cost of running our small central office, with a co-ordinator, printer, shared desk space etc·
• Lack of means (technology and process) for capturing the learning and knowledge from TTT, in order to share it through the Transition Network.
• Sufficient resource to permit experimentation with different engagement and delivery models, such as ensuring a balance of giving and receiving for volunteer resources that results in longer term commitment.