Rob Hopkins

Creating successful Transition groups is not easy, but one of the beauties of the Transition movement is that people often share what works as much as they share what doesn’t. Insights from the experiences Don shares here, his own and that of the wider movement, will make it so much easier for you to get started.

So perhaps the narrative of Transition over these 18 years (yes it really has been that long…!) has moved from being about creating catalysts for local resilience to being Time Travel Agencies, who through the work they do, and how they tell stories about what they’ve already done and the potential futures it makes more credible, more within touching distance.

This year, perhaps now more than ever, we need a taste of what policymaking underpinned by the radical imagination looks like.

I asked Cara what the group’s shift to a focus on young people had brought to the group. She said: “It helped us to view every aspect of the town from a young person’s perspective. Taking an approach focused on integrating their needs opened up many new doors and generated more interest in what we do.”

Georgia Woods, one of the founders of Grow Heathrow told me that the project “brought the ‘yes’ of Transition together with the need for resistance, linking the yes and the no”.

Last month, the River Exe came alive with song, night swimming, stories and a wild salmon run for the first Festival of the River Exe.