Transition Hobsons Bay For people who like having fun building local resilience and a better future

We wonder about the 1 hour being a 5 minute presentation of the Transition Town concept (a little history, what Transition Towns can do, what we aspire to, etc), then a short introduction (5 minutes) for the workshop, presenting some ideas and motivational material, then the workshop itself (40 minutes-ish) perhaps forming a few little groups (maybe around interest areas) to brainstorm ideas (perhaps on butcher's paper). All being loose, easy, and welcoming.

It has been suggested that if we could find an artist or two they could rove about capturing the vibe, then quickly create an artwork from the ideas/words/thoughts, perhaps a colourful drawing.

Then a wrap-up, 5-10 minutes, perhaps with Q&A.

Other thoughts?

The Festival program is out. Our slot is Saturday (7 July) 12 noon at the Scout Hall, for one hour. Entry free.

Check out the Featured Events http://www.nffc.org.au/festival.html

A great little paper from a Permaculture conference capturing outcomes of a workshop entitled "Urban Eco-villages Group In Melbourne"

http://permaculturewest.org.au/ipc6/ch07/simpson/index.html

The paper sets out 28 indicators of urban villages (useful idea seeders, and inspirational concepts too).

A few more interesting resources, the Gilman definition and lists of challenges (the ecovillage challenge), and a couple of ecovillage/cohousing projects in planning in Melbourne (SoftLoud architects).

Check out the Hampstead Common, a community (Transition Town) led project in Brisbane to transform one entire street into a green, ecofriendly environment - a very inspiring vision. The link is to a slideshow with 14 pages.

Visioning is a key element of the Transition Town concept. Here are two instructional and illuminating articles, one written by Rob Hopkins, about the visioning process.

www.energybulletin.net/stories/2010-09-24/transition-pattern-language-visioning

www.transitionnetwork.org/ingredients/starting/visioning

Here's a brief summary of the workshop (raw text in PDF attachment):

The visioning workshop was attended by 25 festival participants. After a brief introduction involving a description of the Transition Town concept and a social exercise to make acquiantances, 3 working groups were formed to quickly brainstorm ideas from the prompting question "if you could wave a magic wand, how would you want Newport to look in 2020, 8 years from now?"

A surprising number of common themes arose after 10 minutes of discussion. Every group wished for less cars, better bike paths, and better public transport. All groups envisaged more edible gardening, including community gardens, street and verge gardens, more fruit and nut trees, and community orchards. Other common desires were the reclaiming of used industrial land for community purpose, less waste generation and more recycling, greater community participation in community centres and local enterprises, more sharing of resources and better work/life balance, and interest in locally generated renewable energy.

After reviewing the thoughts of each group 5 common themes were identified. Participants were then invited to choose their favourinte idea for a further 10 minutes of imaginative brainstorming. The themes were Social Life, Local Energy, Local Food, Transport, and Less Waste.

The Social Life group imagined building on local resources and organisations to engage and communicate with more sections of the community, the creation of a tool sharing facility, a local film club and a community newsletter.

The Local Energy group envisaged a local community owned power generator using solar panels on the roofspaces of large community assets with some simple but empowering community financing arrangements.

The Local Food group could see grand designs for community gardens and orchards, street food gardens throughout the town, community shared chooks, water and land sharing, food sharing through weekly markets and swaps, more community picnic spots and even a children's farm that emphasises the source of food.

The Transport group thought through better bicycle usage support and considered greater provision of local services within walking or cycling distances.

The Less Waste group could see community composting facilities, support for local traders to compost their waste, school recycling programs, refunds to encourage recycling, encouragement of greater reuse of resources, and a complete rethink of waste generation, including reductions of packaging and dealing with waste locally.

VisioningIdeas.pdf

Jason it was a great workshop, well done.  It would be interesting to run it in a few different demographic groups - eg with school children, at a migrant resource cente, at a ment's shed - to see what different priorities and ideas people had. I suspect we were a pretty homogenous bunch. I found it inspiring to think about all th things we could do, and all the things Newport already has going for it.

That's mighty Jason. 

What would you like to happen next with this 'Visioning' ?

John 

Good question - in an ideal world more people would take interest and effort in visioning the future they'd like to have - and then they'd self organise into neighbourhood groups and start making the changes. I ordered the "Superbia! 31 Ways to Create Sustainable Neighborhoods" book at the library; the next step for me is to read that book when it comes in.