Footloose and Community free

I'm trying to avoid thinking about the future in too much detail at the moment. There are too many questions, possibilities, uncertainties. I find it unsettling. This is at least partly because I am looking at the future without a community by my side to vision with. My work and therefore my involvement with Transition University of West Scotland is coming to an end. I don't even know if I will be staying in Glasgow, so I can't even count on the community I have met here. 

My community's future

But first I want to start by looking at the future of my current Transition UWS community. It is also rather uncertain. We have applied for more funding, but we don't know whether we have got it yet. Even if we do it is for different projects and there will be different staff. This is not great for 'building community' and I feel sad to be leaving our embryonic projects to fend for themselves, but unfortunately this is often the way that funded projects work. I just hope that we have lit the spark that will ignite future projects or community initiatives, but big institutions change slowly.

I am hopeful that we can at least get the halls reuse scheme established as a regular project and we have definitely made some environmental improvements in the unions, including recycling pens through the exciting Terracycle. I am also very excited and hopeful about the community garden I am helping to set up on my campus. There is a lot of enthusiasm and fingers crossed that the staff and student community will take it forward themselves. It is definitely looking hopeful.

I feel that I have made connections and bought potential pioneers together, but who knows where it will lead. Everything can change on such a small action, the falling of a leaf, the sprouting of a seed.

My future

As for me, I have a growing desire to find my community and to start building it, cultivating resilience. But in order to do this I need to decide where my community is going to be and then find a job there (or more likely the other way round!) but I have no idea how to start except for trusting in fate and biding my time. 

And in the meantime I am just going to be a Transition Individual, not connected to a Transition Initiative, just like so many of us were before Transition and still are across the country and the globe. But hopefully not for too much longer...

Photos: where is the Transition UWS signpost pointing next? and me as a Transition Individual before Transition Norwich