Transition University Participant
Patterns - Identifying key people and projects
Once you have identified your community it can be helpful to look at its patterns, in order to identify and involve key people needed to support Transition. These people are important as:
They can explain whom you need to contact when, and how. They may be able to lobby on your behalf in different circumstances, whether it be in Estates/Facilities Management to get access
to land for a community garden, in an academic department to encourage and promote academic research into Transition related topics, or in the Principal’s/President’s /Rector’s office to get financial support for employing a staff member.
Projects in particular will need support from key people in your University, as you will often have to get permissions and buy-in for things you want to do. It is helpful to have contacts in different decision making bodies and working groups who can speak on your behalf and help you comply with due process. If you are coming up against a wall in negotiations with the university it is in most cases possible to find an alternative route by persisting and approaching the right people.
As your University community will actually consist of lots of communities, it is really useful to map them out. We like using something we call The Big List Exercise. It is a simple tool to figure out who is out there in your community, and what their interests and motivations are. The basic idea is to write down all the people, groups, organisations, and decision makers that exist in your community and care about it, as well as those in your community who may not be supportive. Then reflect on how aware of and active these people are in sustainability projects, and how
you may want to work with them.
The Transition UoStA local
exchange trading scheme was
critiqued by the "Money" columnist
in the Student Newspaper as an idealistic, naive and irrelevant project.
I wrote a counter article, soundly deconstructing the fallacies of the original article, which the newspaper was happy to publish. This got
shared on social media and
gave us more publicity
than we had
ever expected!
36