The T2R Alliance

INTRODUCTION
 
The next thirty years will see more change than any other period in recorded human history. The changes include the arrival of “Peak Oil”, climate change, the rapid growth of the human population, the loss of biodiversity as a result of the demands that we are putting upon our fragile marine, forests, soil and water ecosystems; and finally the need to build a a more resilient and sustainable economic system.
 
How can we meet these challenges, enabling people to live more productive and satisfying lives within the resource constraints that do no damage, but rather enhance the natural world of which we are a part? How can we build vital and thriving projects, organisations, towns, cities, regions and communities? How do we make our cities into hubs of hope and creativity?  The successful transition to a life sustaining culture requires the active participation of many. The most underutilised resource we have is the good intentions and creativity of ordinary women and men, and their willingness to make a difference. But how do we create learning adventures that help realize our dreams?  The Transition to Resilience Training wants to liberate, channel and utilise this resource in constructive ways.
 
Our goal has been to design a training program that builds the capacity of change makers to navigate through these turbulent times.  This course is not just about learning the details of what needs to be done, for example in ecology or technology.  It is about equipping participants with social tools that enable them to realise their visions through deepening the sense of community and spreading supportive networks for the transition to resilience.
 
Our European Learning Partnership brought together the expertise of eight key European educational movements in the field of community, social, economical and ecological sustainability.  It has enabled the creation of a two-year training for agents of change in the design and implementation of successful projects for sustainability, in both urban and rural contexts.  The training has been designed to support active citizens and their local governments in setting up projects for sustainability (building community in cities, setting up Transition Town Initiatives, achieving CO2-reduction, enhancing bioregions, establishing village networks etc.). We have been standing on the shoulders of the Transition Town Training, the Ecovillage Design Education, the Dragon Dreaming Training, the Permaculture Design Certificate Course, Spiral Dynamics Training, and many other systems, models and processes, ensuring they are relevant to a wide variety of contexts.  
 
The main focus of the Learning Partnership has been to develop an intelligent design for the integration of these already existing modules into an integrated whole.
 
The result is a two-year long curriculum of learning modules, which will be interspersed with action learning and the practical experience that participants gain through setting up and running real projects.  
 
This project was specifically developed to be part of the UN Decade for the Education for Sustainability, 2004-2014.
 
The major sponsoring organisation was GEN-Europe, the European branch of the Global Ecovillage Network, which has consultative status in the UN-ECOSOC.  Funding was provided by the EU Grundtvig Lifelong Learning programme, with support from the 6 national agencies.
 
The project has achieved:
  • the creation of a two-year learning journey for change makers
  • an exchange of best practice amongst the partner organisations for all aspects of adult education for sustainability
  • the building of a pool of trainers who can deliver the workshops and serve as multipliers
  • the building of a pool of organisations and institutions that can organise and host these courses

 

 
PARTNER ORGANISATIONS
 
  1. GEN-Europe
  2. Sustainable Projects, Ireland
  3. Transition Network, UK
  4. Findhorn Foundation, Scotland
  5. Centre for Human Emergence, Utrecht, Netherlands
  6. Associazione Dendera, Federazione Damanhur, Italy
  7. Permaculture Academy, Berlin, Germany
  8. The Hub, Brussels, Belgium

 

INQUIRIES
 
During the learning partnership there has been an ongoing collective enquiry into the themes of
1.  Change:
2.  Leadership, including gender
3.  Resilience
 
We have found that they represent the crisis of our times and cultures embodied and that there is an inner conflict  between our awareness of possibilities and actuality. It creates pain/discomfort/tension to be out of integrity between our values and dreams, and our actual behaviours.
 
This training supports people to be engaged in collaborative inquiry. Engage in the paradox that what seems to stay safe is actually very dangerous. Embracing change, which seems very risky, might be the safest place to be.
 
Metaphor:
 
When we feel we have the answers we can teach to the people to make a fire. But if we desire resilience more than learning a specific skill (such as learning how to light a fire), than we learn together. We do not only teach - we teach and learn together, we all become Teacher/Learners. It becomes a learning community engaged in the question “How do you light a fire?”
 
Because of the speed of change in our contemporary world we are in some ways doing something more shamanic than purely rational. It is a process that is not about giving data and information but rather one that involves passing on knowledge and wisdom.
 
In this way we do not have the same answer, the same explanation, but we need to communicate our reality of diversity. Experiences always passes through the differences between people. For example, do you want to join a community, a network?  The Transition 2 Resilience is not a training - as a training implies that we have all the answers to their problems. What we really need now is to inspired by the other participants on our learning journeys.  
 
 
WHERE TO FROM HERE?
 
The implementation of the Transition to Resilience Training will expand beyond the life cycle of the Learning Partnership program and as the program aims to be developmental, some of the most relevant evaluation activities will be carried out beyond the program period.  Feedback by training participants, trainers and organisers throughout the prototyping and program delivery period will be used to further improve the delivery of the training.
 
Collaboration with other organisations interested in hosting the Transition to Resilience Training is actively being sought (e.g. through GEN and other partner organisations) and assistance has already started through exchange of staff and/or teachers.
 
The training is centred around Action Learning and will eventually create a wide range of new and successful projects that we are sure will come into being. This dissemination of the training materials with their incorporated added value, will be of benefit to the regions within which the partner organisations are situated.
 
 
THE ALLIANCE
 
Inspired and connected by both the strength of the fellowship we have formed and the collective wisdom that can be harvested through the diverse nature of the organisations we represent, we have decided to form an Alliance of both individuals and organisations that are committed to carrying this work forward.  We have drafted a Collaborative Stewardship Agreement to further this.
 
 
WEB PRESENCE
 
While we have an immediate web presence here at:  www.transition2resilience.org that showcases our work to date, we will be developing this considerably in the future into an online, interactive forum where patterns can be added to and amended by participants and our world wide community of learners and trainers.