"Official" Transition Town Criteria

These criteria are developing all the time, and certainly aren't written in stone.

1. An understanding of Peak Oil and Climate Change as twin drivers (to be written into your group's constitution or governing documents)
2. A group of 4-5 people willing to step into leadership roles (not just the boundless enthusiasm of a single person)
3. At least two people from the core team willing to attend an initial two day training course. Initially these will be in Totnes and over time we'll roll them out to other areas as well, including internationally. Transition Training is just UK based right now, but that's going to have to change - we're working on it.
4. A potentially strong connection to the local council
5. An initial understanding of the 12 steps (see website)
6. A commitment to ask for help when needed
7. A commitment to regularly update your Transition Initiative web presence - either the wiki (collaborative workspace on the web that we'll make available to you), or your own website
8. A commitment to write up something on the Transition Towns blog once every couple of months (the world will be watching...)
9. A commitment, once you're into the Transition, for your group to give at least two presentations to other communities (in the vicinity) that are considering embarking on this journey - a sort of "here's what we did" or "here's how it was for us" talk
10. A commitment to network with other communities in Transition
11. Minimal conflicts of interests in the core team
12. A commitment to work with the Transition Network re grant applications for funding from national grant giving bodies. Your own local trusts are yours to deal with as appropriate.
13. A commitment to strive for inclusivity across your entire initiative. We're aware that we need to strengthen this point in response to concerns about extreme political groups becoming involved in transition initiatives. One way of doing this is for your core group to explicitly state their support the UN Declaration of Human Rights (General Assembly resolution 217 A (III) of 10 December 1948). You could add this to your constitution (when finalised) so that extreme political groups that have discrimination as a key value cannot participate in the decision-making bodies within your transition initiative. There may be more elegant ways of handling this requirement, and there's a group within the network looking at how that might be done.
14. A recognition that although your entire county or district may need to go through transition, the first place for you to start is in your local community. It may be that eventually the number of transitioning communities in your area warrant some central group to help provide local support, but this will emerge over time, rather than be imposed. This point is in response to the several instances of people rushing off to transition their entire county/region rather than their local community. In exceptional situations where a coordinating hub or initiating hub needs to be set up (currently Bristol, Forest of Dean, Brighton&Hove) that hub is responsible for making sure these criteria are applied to all the initiatives that start within their area. Further responsibilities for ongoing support and possibly training are emerging as we see this role develop.

    Further criteria apply to initiating/coordinating hubs - these can be discussed person to person.

15. And finally, we recommend that at least one person on the core team should have attended a permaculture design course... it really does seem to make a difference

Once you can demonstrate to us at Transition Network that you're on board with these and ready to set off on your transition journey, you open the door to all sorts of wonderful support, guidance, materials, webspace, training, networking opportunities and coordinated funding initiatives that we'll be rolling out during 2007 and beyond.