Stories from the movement: Transition Toronto
The principle in Transition of focusing your energy on what you are passionate about is beautifully captured in the work of Transition Toronto in Canada.
The principle in Transition of focusing your energy on what you are passionate about is beautifully captured in the work of Transition Toronto in Canada.
What if, as climate activists, we were to respectfully adopt that concept of “I’ve been to the future. We won” and build on it.
What’s it really like to start a Transition group? To stick your head above the parapet and see who in your community would like to engage in community action to build a better future? And how do you get something off the ground with all the constraints of a global pandemic?
How might we collaborate to design a highly interactive and creative online learning environment to share, in a popular, accessible format what we have been learning over the 8 years?
Plugging in to a wider network of other groups also developing grassroots climate responses can help our local ideas and projects to flourish, help us learn and share with others that have the vision of more sustainable and equal communities where we have control over our day to day lives.
This impulse toward activism is the sound of love when it roars–when it demands to be heard. The universal is deeply personal.
What if the plans for the thriving future became widely available? With accessible language, beautiful art and friendly faces to discuss and plot new plans with?
What if these hubs of information, inclusivity and imagination popped up in a park, or a high street corner, or place of worship?
The function of imagination is to bring “longing into the world”—I’d say that what this does is to create a narrative gap that we are then moved to fill.
If everyone in every local community starts to believe that and starts to take action, then there will be a synergy and this kind of community transformation would accumulate.
How do we turn those visions from rewilded imaginations into reality? How might ideas of initiatives for environmental sustainability and social justice drive transformative collective action?
Community Resilience in the face of disaster… What does it mean to care for your community in unprecedented times, and how do you successfully navigate a rapidly shifting landscape of needs, opportunities, and challenges?
Young people aren’t going to be attracted to Transition if it stays in its little bubble. I think there’s widespread understanding that Transition needs to reach beyond the choir.