12 Key Steps to embarking on your transition journey

#1. Set up a steering group and design its demise from the outset
This stage puts a core team in place to drive the project forward during the initial phases.

#2. Awareness raising
Build crucial networks and prepare the community in general for the launch of your Transition initiative.

#3. Lay the foundations
This stage is about networking with existing groups and activists.

#4. Organise a Great Unleashing
This stage creates a memorable milestone to mark the project’s "coming of age."

#5. Form sub groups
Tapping into the collective genius of the community, for solutions that will form the backbone of the Energy Descent Action Plan.

#6. Use Open Space
We’ve found Open Space Technology to be a highly effective approach to running meetings for Transition Town initiatives.

#7 Develop visible practical manifestations of the project
It is essential that you avoid any sense that your project is just a talking shop where people sit around and draw up wish lists.

#8. Facilitate the Great Reskilling
Give people a powerful realisation of their own ability to solve problems, to achieve practical results and to work cooperatively alongside other people.

#9 Build a bridge to Local Government
Your Energy Descent Plan will not progress too far unless you have cultivated a positive and productive relationship with your local authority.

#10 Honour the elders
Engage with those who directly remember the transition to the age of cheap oil.

#11 Let it go where it wants to go…
If you try and hold onto a rigid vision, it will begin to sap your energy and appear to stall.

#12 Create an Energy Descent Plan
Each subgroup will have been focusing on practical actions to increase community resilience and reduce the carbon footprint.

The 12 steps are not prescriptions, but principles that anyone can use to begin the process of transition from oil dependency to local resilience. It is worth noting that although the term "Transition Town" has stuck, what we are talking about are Transition Suburbs, Transition Islands, Transition Valleys, Transition Anywhere-You-Find-People.

Please click on the title of each step to read more detailed descriptions and to engage in discussion and questions about them.