Transition Streets

Aims:

The Transition Streets project forms small, social groups of friends, neighbours and colleagues and then supports them in taking a number of effective, practical, money-saving and carbon-reducing steps. It's a great outreach tool and is available to any community, Transition or otherwise.

Further information:

The award winning Transition Streets project (formerly known as Transition Together) forms small, social groups of friends, neighbours and colleagues and then supports them in taking a number of effective, practical, money-saving and carbon-reducing steps.

A workbook helps each person to build their own Practical Action Plan that improves household energy efficiency, minimises water use, reduces waste (and consumption), explores local transport options and promotes the great value, healthy food available locally. It also helps everyone to understand what’s behind the rising energy prices and climate change, and what this means for them, their family and their local community.

This project was developed by Transition Town Totnes (TTT) initially using funding from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, and the Big Green Challenge Plus. We were then awarded £625,000 from DECC's Low Carbon Communities Challenge which we used to provide grants for solar PV for some of the participating households.

We now (as of Jun 2012) have about 65 groups with around 500 households doing/having done the programme in Totnes. Although being able to offer the solar PV grants helped with recruitment, only a small % of households joined the project only because of the grant offer, most joined to meet their neighbours and save money. The grant money is no longer available but we still have new groups starting.

We hope that our project may be of interest to other Transition Initiatives and low carbon community groups around the UK (and beyond), and we'd like to offer all of our materials and learnings so far to those who are interested in starting their own Transition Streets project.

If you would like to find out more about this project please see the Transition Streets Project Report and also keep an eye on this part of the Transition Streets Totnes website for information on the imminent 'how to start your own TS project package'.

What about EcoTeams, CRAGs, Carbon Conversations and so on?

Other projects exist that are similar to Transition Streets in that they get small groups of people together to work through a carbon-reduction programme. We are not promoting Transition Streets over and above these programmes - please take the time to research them and make up your own mind about what you think works best for your own community. There will certainly be valuable learnings across all these projects as we all experiment with community engagement, encouraging practical carbon-saving actions and strengthening resilience.