The Essential Guide to Doing Transition. The Essential Guide to Doing Transition. | Page 50

Congratulations! Your Transition group is now up and running. That feels good doesn't it? By now you probably find yourselves making connections with organisations, groups and individuals who are largely supportive, finding ways to put on events together and promote each other’s work, and building the Transition Initiating Group to become effective at working together.

You might also take time to do some training or a workshop together – learning about effective meetings, exploring “The Work that Reconnects” (the work of Joanna Macy), attending a Transition:Launch training (this is also available on-line). As you engage more people you’ll be building a contact list, maybe setting up a website or social media site such as a Facebook page, keeping people informed about what’s happening and much more.

There are some questions that often come up in this phase: see the FAQs here:

http://transitionnetwork.org/do-transition/starting-transition/how-to-start/ for some answers to things like

• Should the group be open or closed?

• When should we seek funding?

• How should we structure ourselves?

Transition Kensal to Kilburn’s ‘Unthinkable Drinkable’ urban winemaking project celebrates its first taste of the final product. Photo: Jonathan Goldberg.

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Up and running

In the Healthy groups ingredient here:

https://transitionnetwork.org/do-transition/starting-transition/7-essential-ingredients/healthy-groups/ you will find information on how to run effective meetings, how a group develops, how to get and keep people involved in your Transition initiative and how to make decisions, but there are some other things to think about as the Initiating Group:

• Initiating Group meetings may be more relaxed than big public meetings, but you should still take them seriously and make sure that you decide on actions and agree who will carry them out

• It is very important to decide as a group how you are going to make decisions, as you will need to make lots of them

• Make sure to have fun as the Initiating Group, celebrate successes, value each person’s contribution, and have a social side to your group as well as doing stuff together! This might be the most important thing of all to do