Transition Hampshire Unrecognized

Transition Hampshire is a local version of the global Transition Town movement. Our goal is to harness the power of community to create a more just campus in social, economic, and ecological terms.

= News and Updates =

Click here to view our running meeting notes!

Click here to access all documents related to Transition Hampshire!

TRANSITION MOD SET TO LAUNCH IN FALL 2012

Born from the frustration of an unsustainable lifestyle, the Transition Hampshire Mod aims to close the gap between the just future we desire and our everyday reality. The six mod members will take multiple small changes in their lifestyle while monitoring energy usage, hosting community events, an EPEC class, and advocating for more just choices on campus. Commitments include: sourcing food from all local/seasonal/responsible sources, monitoring and publishing all energy usage, utilizing all non-toxic, natural cleaning methods. We welcome any suggestions about how to make our mod and our lifestyles, more sustainable! Look for more information in the coming weeks!

IA 220 THINK GLOBALLY, DESIGN LOCALLY: THE FIRST TRANSITION CLASS

Taught by Colin Twitchell in the new Center for Design (aka Lemelson). Class description below: "Think Globally, Design Locally: Every day the danger of human dependence on natural resources becomes more and more apparent. It manifests in systemic exploitation, socioeconomic inequality, and continued corruption in our systems of power, knowledge, economy, and culture. How can design be used to create small but powerful, lasting action that both raises awareness of pressing global issues and positively impacts our community? This course will work in conjunction with the Transition movement on campus to design and implement projects that lead Hampshire toward a more just and resilient future."

= Mission =

Transition Hampshire actively works towards a just future by enabling individuals to identify problems on global, regional, state, and community levels, envision a positive, alternate future, and act locally in accordance to their positive vision.

= Description =

A Call to Transition
The realities of energy crises, climate change and environmental degradation and neglect are issues that are embedded in and surround all the political, social and community issues we are, in different ways, concerned about on campus. The Transition Movement concept is one of the big ideas of our time. Transition aims to mitigate a future that remains dependent on corrupt systems of power, economics, and exploitation for one of resilient, relocalized and inter-dependent communities. We build resilience through small but powerful, lasting action that both raises awareness of pressing global issues and positively impacts our community.

The Transition Movement approach works within communities.

By building an organic awareness within specific communities of complex world issues we are able to harness frustration, anger, and sadness as motivators for positive, collective, action-oriented responses. Just as ecosystems work interdependently to sustain themselves, we see human communities functioning as localized systems of individuals working together to meet their needs.

The Transition movement works in a mode that is inspirational, harnessing hope instead of guilt, and optimism instead of fear.

It supports deepening critical understanding of the wide remit of environmental problems - while being grounded in diverse, locally based activities and initiatives to transition to a more caring, more equitable and ultimately more nourishing future. Questioning consumerism, interrogating exploitations and social injustices, the transition idea engages people locally, within their communities, to build new understandings together and develop a diversity of local environmental actions to make changes within actual places, lives, networks. Its aim is to foster a community seeking change toward ecological, social, and economic sustainability – to engage whole communities in a transformative process.

The Transition Movement focuses on finding common goals among diverse interests and actively collaborating to achieve those goals.

A shared ideology is not a prerequisite for collaboration. Transition Hampshire seeks to harness everyone’s individual talents toward a common good. “We don’t need to see eye to eye to walk hand in hand."

Hampshire College is not a town in the conventional sense, and has its own strengths and needs. Transition Hampshire aims to build our own transition culture, develop and foster actively within our community Hampshire-based understandings of sustainability and strategies for local involvement and resilience among our student, staff and faculty.

= Want to get involved? =

Last semester the Transition Group meet on Wednesday afternoons in the KIVA. Meeting dates for Fall 2012 have not been set yet. Keep an eye out on the Daily Digest, in your mailboxes, on facebook, and around campus for meeting announcements! If you have any ideas for how we can make our community more just socially, economically, and ecologically, please post them on our facebook (link in 'Some More Information') or send them to transitionhampshire@gmail.com

= Some more information =

'''Talk to us. We like to stay connected.'''

Website: bit.ly/Walkthetalk

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/TransitionHampshire

Twitter: @TransitionHC

Email: transitionhampshire@gmail.com

More about Transition Hampshire, and some links to some pretty awesome groups, centers, events, etc:

Transcript of Transition Hampshire presentation from Second Nature Conference (March 2012): https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&amp;pid=sites&amp;srcid=ZGVmYXVsdGRvbWFpbnxoYW1wdHJhbnNpdGlvbnxneDo0YjdhN2Q5NDc1YzE5ZjQ1

New Leaf: https://hampedia.org/wiki/New_Leaf

LFI: https://hampedia.org/wiki/LFI

Farm Center: http://www.hampshire.edu/academics/5728.htm/

Hampshire Slow Food: https://hampedia.org/wiki/Hampshire_Slow_Food

Five College Sustainability: http://www.facebook.com/FiveCollegeSustainability

About the Transition Town Movement:

Transition Network: http://www.transitionnetwork.org/

Transition US: http://www.transitionus.org/

Transition Amherst: http://www.transitionamherst.org/blog/