Transition Network

Description

Transition Network is a small UK charity which supports the Transition movement, amplifies stories of community-led change, and nurtures collaborations across difference to challenge us all to reimagine and rebuild our world.

Transition Network works in service to the international movement of self-organising Transition groups and Hubs, and others who are creating community-led change for a sustainable and just future founded on wellbeing. From our place within the movement, we encourage Transition to spread and evolve. We facilitate the sharing of inspiration and learning, identify common needs and exciting possibilities, and curate and develop tools, training and resources. We cultivate peer-to-peer support and help build capacity across the movement.

We are learning to embody and integrate the inner dimension of Transition in all that we do, and commit to the love, beauty, passion, playfulness and courage so needed in these times. We are nurturing healthy collaborative group cultures rooted in caring for, and connecting with, ourselves, each other and the natural world.

We aim to make Transition more visible, creating opportunities for diverse Transition stories to be shared, to show that a shift to a more equitable and healthy culture is possible.

We look for ways to collaborate across and beyond the Transition movement, and to support others to connect and collaborate. We support and co-design emerging approaches that reimagine and rebuild a compassionate culture within resource limits, beyond the norms of the industrial growth system. We experiment with and cross-fertilise ideas to help Transition become more diverse and to respond to changing contexts. We recognise that power and privilege shape our behaviour, as much as they shape the behaviour of the wider world. We actively commit to addressing this, and particularly to welcoming, listening, and responding to marginalised voices within and beyond the movement. In the way that we work, as much as in what we do, we aim to bring people together, to help us to connect with our longing for a better future and our sense of interdependence. We speak from the heart to highlight alternatives to unsustainable systems and challenge assumptions.

Transition Network is a support organisation to the international Transition Hubs Group and is exploring with that network how to develop new models of leadership, share power and resources, and collaborate across distance.

We currently have ten employees, all of them part-time, plus ten trustees. We have a modest office in Totnes where five of our staff are currently based and the rest of us work from home in the South and South West of England and in Brussels. We work closely with freelancers and volunteers across the world, including members of the Municipalities in Transition project team and the Transition Hubs Group. In England and Wales, we are working with Transitioners to develop grassroots-led Hubs with the capacity to catalyse and support Transition in this territory and connect to the wider international network.

Experiences with Sociocracy

We have developed a shared governance model for our organisation which draws heavily on sociocracy and holacracy.

Members of our team and the groups we work with started experimenting with sociocratic decision-making and election by consent processes at least four years ago. Our organisation embarked on an organisational development project in 2016, accompanied by Universite du Nous. We practiced more sociocratic patterns alongside processes and tools found in holacracy while exploring the individual posture and organisational cultural that would support us to work in a self-managed way. Together, we developed a new shared governance model based on what we’d learnt and we implemented this in April 2018. We have moved away from our previous loosely hierarchical structure, have agreed a new evolving organisational purpose and are working in circles. We’re still very much in a transitional phase and are constantly learning. At the moment, we’re involved in a collective inquiry into pay and are exploring how to find a good fit between our shared governance model and the legal roles and responsibilities of our charity trustees.

Posted on 2018-11-01 11:59 (GMT), last update 2018-11-01 11:59