Cambridge, Cambridgeshire

City: pop. 120,000
Timeline: Started February ’07,
became official July 08

Transition Cambridge is one of the Eastern region’s longest running initiatives and so far has successfully run more than 40 events. Helped by being in a thriving university town with a tradition of green and grassroots activities, TC has a particularly strong food group which works closely with the Trumpington Allotment Society. They have a core group, several active theme groups and a mailing list of 1,100 people.

The Transition Café is held fortnightly at a community café. TC also has an action-packed website and runs a concise weekly bulletin, keeping everyone in touch with what is happening. Their most successful events have included a participation with the Environment Festival in June in which they organised events most days, including workshops on wild food, education and psychology, a plant swap, The World Needs Your Passion and local and global food. They have also run two Storytelling events, two Open Space sessions, a Grow Your Own course and several film screenings (their Power of Community screening sold out, helped by distributing 150 posters through the town “we could probably have sold the tickets twice over,” reports core member Anna McIvor).

In spite of this high activity the group is keen to evolve and is aware of many of the difficulties faced by a movement that is itself in Transition: how to keep momentum and not suffer from
burn-out; how to proceed with new people once the theme groups are up and running (not same energy as when at their initiating creative stage); how to capitalise on the events. These
are all questions now being asked.

TC are presently forming a new training group for that will include Non-Violent Communication and group facilitation, “because it’s about working well in groups as much as it is about being in Transition.”

Recently the area of Cherry Hinton has become a Transition initiative and in the future TC see themselves developing into a communication and co-ordination hub with smaller neighbourhoods and villages in Transition working on a more local level, and facilitating their unleashing.

Future house from Transition Tales and Visions, April 25 '09

Website:
www.transitioncambridge.org
Contact Person:
Anna McIvor
Email:
transitioncambridge@gmail.com