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Community-County Collaboration for Neighborhood Preparedness

May 28, 2021

Community-County Collaboration for Neighborhood Preparedness

Port Townsend’s unique county-community neighborhood preparedness project, NPREP, grew from a big-hearted sister-city project that took volunteers from a coastal town in Washington State to Bay St. Louis, Mississippi (pop 9,260). That isolated community had been hard hit by Hurricane Katrina. Federal aid dollars poured into nearby New Orleans, while Bay St. Louis struggled to recover.

Judy Alexander was one of the Katrina sister city project organizers. “When we came back, we recognized the similarities between our communities, and we thought about the exposure we had to earthquake risk.”  After hearing Judy’s stories, Deborah Stinson reflected that, “We could be in the same situation, but would have no advanced warning. We knew we had to do something to make ourselves more resilient.”

The Katrina volunteers met with folks from Local 20/20, a newly formed sustainability and resilience group.  Local 20/20 got on board with starting an Action Group to increase community preparedness.

Judy and Deborah began by surveying the community to see who else was working on this issue. “We did a little gap analysis, but mostly we were mapping assets,” Deborah said.

That’s when they invited Bob Hamlin, Director of Jefferson County’s Department of Emergency Management (DEM),  over to Judy’s house for lunch.

“We were fascinated with Bob and the impressive network of resources and connections he’d established over the years,” Deborah said. “Together, we recognized that DEM’s biggest challenge would be incorporating engaged residents into that network. In the spirit of partnership, we said, ‘We have the capacity to organize neighborhoods and if we can connect with your officialdom, we can expand your capacity to respond to emergencies.’ He was receptive, fascinated, and a bit dumbfounded.”

Now they needed to show him that their fledgling group could deliver.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Transitioning Our Money to Invest Local

December 11, 2020

Transitioning Our Money to Invest Local

People often ask, “So what do Transition Town groups do?” One answer to that question would be, “We take good ideas, bring them home, and make them real.”

That’s what Pat Thompson and Sherm Eagles did when they attended Jay Tompt’s REconomy workshop at the Transition US National Gathering in St. Paul, Minnesota in 2017.

“Hearing that such a thing exists as the REconomy Centre, that was an eye opener. Wow! Someone is doing this thing and maybe we can do something like it,” said Pat. “I was also inspired by the people who attended the workshop. There was a woman from Brooklyn who owns a building that serves as a community center and helps percolate programs to start things the community needs. There were people doing online crowdsourcing to fund Transition-related things. There was local currency. All these different angles from different parts of the country.

“My first thought was that our Transition group – Transition Town–All St. Anthony Park (Transition ASAP) – could set up something like the Community of Dragons, community-supported entrepreneurship, that they have in Totnes. But we’re in a really big market here in the Twin Cities, and some things like that already exist. So instead, our group set up Transition Your Money (TYM).”

Sherm and Pat now convene a monthly group that talks about ways people can get their money out of Wall Street and bring it back into the local economy.

“Our neighborhood is a pocket of fairly well off people – not all, but some – and also people with a strong social conscience,” Pat said. “They’re concerned about climate change and they want to do something about it.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Building Community Resilience: Before, During, and After COVID-19

April 8, 2020

Building Community Resilience: Before, During, and After COVID-19

Growing Seeds

Dear friends and fellow Transitioners,

So much has changed in so short a time: tens of thousands of people are now testing positive for the coronavirus daily in the US, most of the world is self-isolating at home, large sectors of our economy have ground to a halt, and politicians are currently debating how best to spend trillions of dollars to combat the global pandemic. We are definitely riding the exponential growth curve, and there’s no end yet in sight.

Both strangely and predictably enough, this crisis has presented a massive opportunity for those of us who have been or are currently engaged in building local community resilience. Our job is now, as it has been in the past, to offer relevant and practical solutions that meet real needs. In fact, many groups all over this country have already been taking inspiring and meaningful actions to counter the economic, social, and health impacts of COVID-19: scaling up efforts to teach people how to grow their own food, banding together to provide local investment for struggling local businesses, organizing mutual aid networks, and advocating for a “green stimulus.” These efforts should be celebrated, supported, and replicated throughout the US. Many more should be developed to help meet skyrocketing needs.

The difference is now that we have the wind at our backs. Through these projects and others, we can reach out further to unprecedented numbers of people who are just now waking up to a more acute sense of their own vulnerability, interconnectedness, and responsibility for the well-being of others. We can share our visions with them and encourage them to develop their own, invite them to step into a leadership role or join a local community that’s already working on something they’re passionate about.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

10 Stories of Transition in the US: The Evolution of Transition Town Media

April 27, 2018

10 Stories of Transition in the US: The Evolution of Transition Town Media

The following story is the fourth installment in a new series we’re calling “10 Stories of Transition in the US.” Throughout 2018, to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Transition Movement here in the United States, we will explore 10 diverse and resilient Transition projects from all over the country, in the hope that they will inspire you to take similar actions in your local community.

For more information about Transition, please visit www.TransitionUS.org/Transition-101. Click here to view other stories in this series that have already been published, and here to subscribe to the Transition US newsletter if you’d like to be notified of additional stories as they become available.

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When Aleisa Myles attended a talk on permaculture in 2010, hosted by Transition Town Media, she immediately knew that she had found an initiative she could get behind. The discussion that followed that event helped her to understand how the principles of permaculture could be applied to local communities in order to build greater resilience and sustainability. Since then, Myles and her fellow Transition Town Media members have helped to make it one of the most robust and successful Transition Initiatives in the United States.

“There was, and has been, throughout Transition Town Media’s many events and projects, a sense of possibility and aliveness in people taking bold ideas and putting them into action right in our town for the benefit of all,” explains Myles. “I found that, early on, everyone was welcomed to step in and be a collaborator. No matter the size of the group in any meeting or event, the energy was infectious.”

Sari Steuber says she joined the initiative in 2008 because it appealed to her desire to find like-minded people with whom she could work on a big, all-encompassing cause. Recently retired, the articles she was reading about fossil fuel depletion, climate change, and economic instability left her feeling thoroughly depressed, scared, and hopeless.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Igniting the Local Food Revolution in Your Community

April 2, 2018

Igniting the Local Food Revolution in Your Community

Webinar Description:

For the local food movement to grow exponentially in your community, you must take your place on the front lines. To ignite a new level of impact, effectiveness, and scale, you must master the seven revolutionary steps of building a regional foodshed:

Making the transition from the global industrial food system to a highly localized regional foodshed is an evolutionary process of healing and regeneration that you can learn and align with. If you are serious about local food systems, and want to significantly increase the potency and legacy of your work, this webinar is for you.

In this 90-minute session, Michael Brownlee and Lynette Marie Hanthorn—long-time foodshed catalysts and founders of the Local Food Academy—will reveal:

– Why the local food movement has stalled, and how it can be re-ignited

– How regional foodsheds can become our society’s lifeboats to a regenerative future

– The seven practical steps towards becoming a leader of the local food revolution in your community

“A hundred years from now, everyone will be eating what we today would define as local organic food, whether or not we act. But what we do now will determine how many will be eating, what state of health will be enjoyed by those future generations, and whether they will live in a ruined cinder of a world, or one that is in the process of being renewed and replenished.” – Richard Heinberg, Senior Fellow, Post Carbon Institute

About This Webinar:

This free, interactive webinar is limited to 100 participants, so please register early! If all spaces are filled, you will still be able to watch a live broadcast of this event on the Transition US Facebook page. However, only those who have registered in advance will be able to participate in polls and ask questions of the speaker.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

10 Stories of Transition in the US: The Spread of Repair Cafes

March 3, 2018

10 Stories of Transition in the US: The Spread of Repair Cafes

Rob Hopkins at Transition Pasadena's Repair Cafe

In the midst of America’s Great Depression, merchants and manufacturers were looking for ways to quickly reboot the national economy. To get more people working and factories operating again, so the story goes, two main things needed to happen:

First, people had to replace what that they already owned. Through a process that real estate broker Bernard London called “planned obsolescence,” products began to be designed so they would soon fail. Second, the American people, and eventually the rest of the world, would need to shift from being the thrifty citizens that were so celebrated towards the end of World War I to the voracious consumers we are today.

While this extreme wastefulness was once seen as our civic duty, there is now a growing movement of people throughout the United States and all over the world who are finding better ways to strengthen their local economies while helping to heal the planet. One of the most exciting new strategies for doing this is a repair cafe.

Even a few decades ago, shops that fixed shoes, televisions, and a number of other everyday products were still commonplace, but these institutions have been nearly wiped out in recent years. In their place, repair cafes are now providing people with opportunities to breathe new life into broken things while cultivating community at the same time.

The modern repair cafe movement was born in the Netherlands in 2009, and it is now estimated that there are more than 1,300 such cafes operating in over 30 countries.

When Therese Brummel of the Arroyo S.E.C.O. Network of Time Banks and Transition Pasadena first read about the concept in the New York Times in 2012, she saw it as an opportunity: “The idea of keeping stuff out of our landfills and raising awareness about decreasing consumerism was something that deeply appealed to us.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Olduvai IV: Courage
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Olduvai II: Exodus
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