Rob Hopkins

Rob Hopkins is a cofounder of Transition Town Totnes and Transition Network, and the author of The Transition Handbook, The Transition Companion, The Power of Just Doing Stuff, 21 Stories of Transition and most recently, From What Is to What If: unleashing the power of imagination to create the future we want. He presents the podcast series ‘From What If to What Next‘ which invites listeners to send in their “what if” questions and then explores how to make them a reality.  In 2012, he was voted one of the Independent’s top 100 environmentalists and was on Nesta and the Observer’s list of Britain’s 50 New Radicals. Hopkins has also appeared on BBC Radio 4’s Four Thought and A Good Read, in the French film phenomenon Demain and its sequel Apres Demain, and has spoken at TEDGlobal and three TEDx events.

An Ashoka Fellow, Hopkins also holds a doctorate degree from the University of Plymouth and has received two honorary doctorates from the University of the West of England and the University of Namur. He is a keen gardener, a founder of New Lion Brewery in Totnes, and a director of Totnes Community Development Society, the group behind Atmos Totnes, an ambitious, community-led development project. He blogs at transtionnetwork.org and robhopkins.net and tweets at @robintransition.

grain growing

Going with the Grain

Recent years have seen rising interest in community-scale grain growing. Part food security experiments, part community art projects, part research initiatives that could just turn out to be vital to our food future,

March 17, 2023

Travels in my Time Machine Part Three: visiting the Cornish beavers of 2030

What would it sound like to live in a future in which beavers were now considered an essential part of our now rapidly-rewilding landscapes?

February 3, 2023

community imagination

Creating space for community imagination

In all the work I’ve done over the last couple of years on the importance of imagination, I keep coming back to how vitally important it is to create space for the imagination, what I call ‘What If spaces’, whether in our own lives, our organisations or our communities.

January 13, 2023

trees

When Imagination Activists and graphic artists join forces

I am always on the lookout for new  tools to use in  helping people to imagine a different future, in helping people to cultivate nostalgia for a future that turned out as well as it possibly could have done.

November 30, 2022

dreaming

What if we became the best storytellers we could possibly be? A blog for Civic Square

It is my belief that we will create the future we long for only because we are able to master the art of telling the most compelling stories. Stories that are delicious, irresistible, mesmerising.

November 1, 2022

Portland 4 the Planet

Portland 4 the Planet sow seeds of local change

There are so many people out there just searching for something to do that’s positive, that’s going to make a difference.

October 24, 2022

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