SEAD (Scottish Education and Action for Development)

In December 2007 six people got together in the town of Forres to discuss climate change. In the year since then, they’ve developed a strong Transition Towns group with a clear programme for achieving energy descent in their community. Oh, and they’ve just been awarded £184,119 from the Climate Challenge Fund to carry out their community projects.

At their first December meeting someone mentioned the phrase “Transition Town” and so, to find out what Transition Towns are all about, they went away and read the Transition Primer over the holidays. The Transition model of creating an energy descent plan, to reduce their communities’ dependence on fossil fuels, appealed to them. So in January they were all fired up to give it a go.

“We started showing movies once a month, first in private and then in the local hotel. We invited SEAD to give two excellent workshops, we also invited several local speakers and three people attended the Transition Training in Dundee in June. One person went to the Transition Conference in Cirencester in April and three people went to the Scottish gathering in July. All this networking has been instrumental in keeping the energy for the project going. All our events have been very well received, except possibly for one event which was all doom and gloom. Until now we’ve had between 10 and 50 people come to our different events and talks and we hold an email list of about 120 people now plus an allotment list of 70 people.”

“Tip: Always aim to have suggestions for solutions to enable people to keep their hopes up. Despair makes people lethargic whereas action is an antidote to despair.”

The Forres Transition Town group has derived a lot of strength from having a clear set of aims, allowing them to achieve a strong group and a clear plan of action in only one year.

“Our aims are to promote a sustainable and resilient local community along the principles of the Transition Town ethos. The Future can be even better than the past if we are in charge of the change that must happen to preserve our planet. Community cohesion and empowerment as well as community engagement is what drives us forward.”

With these clear aims, they’ve been able to take their project forward, get funding but still keep the wider community involved in deciding what happens in their locality.

“In late October we were awarded £184,119 from the Climate Challenge Fund for our community project of starting allotments, a farmers market and awareness raising over a two and a half year period. This is giving us the opportunity to prepare a Development or Business plan which we are doing through community consultations, interviews and several drop-in sessions. We are increasingly working together with other groups in our community and we take every opportunity to promote ourselves at community events. We are forming links with Moray Council and are now planning events together. We have full support from our Community Council, our Area Forum and Forres in Bloom.”

It hasn’t all been success, and as with all groups they have faced challenges, but by building links and drawing on their strengths they have found ways to overcome their setbacks.

“The main problem so far is time. To affect change is time consuming. We’ve been lucky to have several very dedicated people on our steering group and several people with experience of setting up companies before. Forres is a small town with an already good community spirit and a number of useful organisations in place, this has helped enormously. We have had a lot of support from SEAD, from the Climate Challenge Fund, from Transition Support Scotland and from our local newspaper.”

Forres’ top tips for communities starting out:

“Start small, grow organically, be sure to have fun and make sure you see your own skills no matter how small they might appear. Together we can shift mountains. Take advantage of existing official local partnerships, local Area Forums and Community Councils, etc. Build bridges and have fun.”

This entry was posted on 12 January 2009 at 11:09 pm and is filed under Opportunities for community groups, SOCC News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.