Consolidating
In the move to a Core Group, your focus shifts:
• From laying the foundations for your group to embarking on ambitious and impactful projects
• From a group of people who are foundation layers to a group of people who will build a great and beautiful building upon those foundations
• From decisions being made by a group of people who have come together because they want the Transition group to exist and to thrive, to a group that wants a number of specific projects to exist
and thrive.
All those really great projects you associate with Transition: the local currency schemes, the intentional relocalisation schemes,
the community energy projects, the urban agriculture initiatives: they all need the foundations, structures and processes in place that the Initiating Group creates, but they also need a Core Group where the decisions are made by those who are running the projects on the ground.
You will know that your Core Group is working well when it:
• Gives those affected by decisions a say
in making them
• Creates ways to be accountable and
transparent about its activities to those
within it, and those it serves outside
• Balances transparency with enough privacy to create internal safety for discussions and process
• Maintains some continuity while allowing
in new ideas, people, and ways of
doing things
• When it is creating new ideas and helping to seed (but not necessarily doing on its own) new projects and new enterprises
So, what are some of the things you need to ensure you get in place in your Core Group?
Theme Groups
By now you will probably have some theme groups forming (for example: food, energy, Inner Transition, education and so on).
Having healthy functioning theme groups is vital to your being able to build a Core Group, as the Initiating Group steps back to provide the active support that those doing the projects need.
If you don’t yet have Theme Groups, here are some ideas for how you might bring them into being:
• You could put on events with films or
speakers which look at a particular aspect
of Transition, like food or energy
• Follow those events up a few days later
with some public Open Space sessions
(you’ll find our Open Space guide here
• At the end of both, announce that you are
hoping these will lead to the creation of a
Theme Group on that subject, and invite
people to come forward
• You could also explicitly invite people you think might be good, and ask them if they’d like to take on setting up one of the groups
• Sometimes people will come to the group
and ask if they can set one up!
• You could seek out existing projects
already working in the field you’d like to
create a Theme Group on, and ask them
Once they are up and running, invite them to send one member to each meeting of the Core Group, so that the group becomes shaped by and focused on the needs of the people who are doing the projects on the ground.