Transition Culture

24 Jul 2014

Divest! Then what?

It was, for me, a low point in an immersion into how some parts of the world of philanthropy work.  A massive endowment is invested in such a way as to generate the maximum returns.  Fund managers are told to invest so as to get at least a 10% return a year.  A 10% return is very difficult to do ethically.  So money is invested in all sorts of things, including fossil fuels, housing developments etc etc, whatever generates the best return, so that the interest raised can then be invested into projects that try to clear up some of the mess that the endowment may well have played a part in creating.  So, put crudely and at it’s worst, for the damage generated by every £1 million invested, £10,000 is put up to try and clean up that mess.  What a conflicted model, but one that, to a degree, makes possible the work we do here at Transition Network.

Yet within the funding community, the conversation is starting to change.  Philanthropist Peter Buffet (right) wrote in an article last year called The Charitable Industrial Complex about meetings with heads of state, corporate leaders and investment managers. He wrote “all are searching for answers with their right hand to problems that others in the room have created with their left”.  He referred to philanthropy as increasingly becoming “conscience laundering” and suggested that given the scale and severity of the climate crisis, foundations need to practice what they preach more, arguing “foundation dollars should be the best ‘risk capital’ out there”.   He also added “money should be spent trying out concepts that shatter current structures and systems that have turned much of the world into one vast market”.

Divestment is one of the great campaigns of our times.  Last week saw the announcement that The World Council of Churches will be pulling its investments out of fossil fuels, joining a rapidly growing list of organisations in what Archbishop Desmond Tutu calls an “anti-apartheid style boycott of the fossil fuel industry”.  Even President Obama alluded to his support for the concept, recently stating “you need to invest in what helps, and divest from what harms”.  But the question then arises, “then what?”  If the World Council of Churches, a university, or a pension company decide it’s time to divest from fossil fuels, then what might they do next?

The first thing is to recognise that the severity of the climate crisis is such that an endowment will be of little use in 30-40 years.  This, here, now, is the time when the window of opportunity exists to avoid the more catastrophic lines (usually in red) on the climate models. I’m not suggesting that now is the time to blow the lot, but some fresh thinking is called for.  That thinking is starting to emerge.  Confluence Philanthropy is one organisation focused on “guiding foundations towards mission-related investing”.   Another, which makes an explicit link between divestment and taking a new approach is DivestInvest, who I only came across while researching this piece.  Here’s how they offer to help foundations rethink what they do:

1. Assess: Conduct an assessment of your exposure to climate change risk, defining the degree to which you are invested in fossil fuels versus climate solutions and investments that support your mission.
2. Consult: Launch a dialogue among Board and Staff on investment strategies that align investments with mission and support a sustainable and just economy.
3. Commit: Commit to a timetable and process, commensurate with the pace of climate change, for eliminating all fossil fuels from your investment portfolios while investing in a new, clean energy economy through renewables, clean tech and other innovations.

But what do they propose foundations invest in instead?  This is from their FAQs:

“Investment means allocating endowment assets to sustainable, fossil-free investments in climate solutions and the new energy economy. Fossil-free investment opportunities exist across all sectors of the economy and across all asset classes of a diversified investment portfolio, from conventional asset classes such as cash, fixed-income, and public equities (stocks) to alternative asset classes such as hedge funds, private equity, real estate, farmland and timberland, and other commodities and real assets. Investors can invest in clean technology and renewable energy sources such as wind and solar and incorporate environmental, social and governance (ESG) factors into fossil-free investments in other industries, and move their money to more resilient community investing institutions. All portfolios can be readily structured around themes of climate-related strategic asset allocation, carbon risk mitigation, sustainability solutions, and positive environmental impact”.

What else could foundations do?  The first point is they will most likely need to lower their expectations in terms of returns.  Some more enlightened foundations have already lowered their expected return to closer to 5%, which enables them to invest far more ethically and in a way consistent with their values. 

Secondly, get behind the quiet revolution unfolding around the world, through Transition and many other bottom-up community-led processes.  There is a new economy out there, being created through community farms, community energy companies, new food business models, new models for care for the elderly.  All founded on principles of being rooted in local communities, being low carbon, operating with a wider social purpose, building community resilience.  Some of them are captured in last year’s REconomy/Transition Network report The New Economy in 20 Enterprises.

They are doing amazing work mobilising people, innovating and creating new opportunities.  But they need support, and as Peter Buffett put it, “foundation dollars should be the best ‘risk capital’ out there”. I’m part of a project in my town called Atmos Totnes, which will be a community-led development, a model of Transition in action.  It is just weeks away from signing a historic agreement with the site’s owners.  But to get to that stage we had some grants to cover the initial work, without which we wouldn’t have got this far. And it’s a project that over time will need ‘patient capital’ which will be able to unlock the community developing an asset that can then be a real driver for an ambitious relocalisation programme. 

Bath & West Community Energy were able to use £1 million invested in them at an early stage to create a share option that then raised £750,000 from local people and inspired further investment from other local organisations.  They are now working to support neighbouring communities to do the same thing (see right).  Enlightened support can unlock much more more, including investment opportunities for foundations’ endowments. But foundations need to take some of the risk to bring those things into being.

If other institutions, such as universities, decide to divest, then it can be a great opportunity for fresh thinking.  Why not take those funds and invest them instead in reimagining how your organisation operates? The Oberlin Project is a great example of what it might look like if a university divested and put the money instead into a crash course of renewable energy, community engagement, new business opportunities and much more, a kind of town-wide Transition.  If a hospital trust decides to divest, that could be the incentive for bold thinking in terms of how a hospital that models what a low carbon hospital could look, something we explored here recently.

We shouldn’t forget that divestment is something that we should only be pressuring large institutions to do.  Many of us also have pensions and investments, and we need to be more mindful about choosing investments that are true to our own values and sense of urgency around the climate issue.  Where community share/investment opportunities arise, get behind them and support them.  Also, as individuals, of course, we choose to invest or to divest every day when we go shopping.  Which economy is it that we want to create where we live?  Do we support local independent businesses or supermarkets? Do we reuse and repair or buy new?  We have a lot more power than we might think.  Divestment is not just an issue for large organisations. 

While the campaign for divestment rightly gains pace, we need, alongside it, a bringing together of foundations, larger institutions and Transition/New Economy organisations, to design models whereby divestment is just the first step.  Models which rather than just focusing on renewable energy, seek also to accelerate the new food systems, local economic models, new models for housing and development, new social enterprises, the multi-layered tapestry of new, diverse, resilient economy. 

It’s he first step to an urgently-needed model wherein foundations work alongside the communities working at the local scale to build the resilient local economies and infrastructures so essential to a low carbon world.  Divestment needs to be the catalyst for the conversations that could lead to so much more.    

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23 Jul 2014

Sophy Banks on Creating a Culture of Celebration

When I was about 12 a friend of my sister came on holiday with my family. We were quite a typical family of three irritable siblings – when someone started singing or playing an instrument another child was guaranteed to tell them to “Shut up, that sounds horrible”.  We were continually fighting over whatever shifting thing was deemed to be the desirable whatever – sitting in the middle, sitting by the window, going first, going last. My sister’s friend who joined us was an only child and I was stunned to find that she only ever said nice things – to everyone.

When one of us started singing she’d say “hey that’s nice”, pick up a guitar and play along. Anything creative, funny, she’d be interested in and complementary about. Somehow in just a week we all got a taste for how peaceful and lovely it was when someone was nice to you, and the habit stuck. We all turned into nice teenagers, who had our fights, but generally were kind and supportive to each other.

I’ve been fascinated by group cultures – from time spent in women’s groups and football teams to psychotherapy groups and workplaces. Most recently within Transition Network, we’ve been paying attention to our culture of celebration and appreciation, and experimenting with ways of warming up our meetings.

My favourite statistic at the moment is that healthy, happy, resilient workplaces, teams, friendships and relationships have a ratio of at least 3:1 positive to negative statements. For every criticism, put-down, negative remark, there are at least 3 positive complements, appreciations, supportive statements. Five to one is a better ratio. Happy couples in normal conversations have a ratio around 20:1 – the conversation is a steady stream of interest, positive response, support and appreciation. Having more positives means not only more happiness generally, but also that when negatives come along people can hear and respond to them more, because they’re not defending against what feels like a bombardment of complaint.

Why do we need such a high ratio? Brain scientists have found that our brains are wired to be like Velcro to criticism – it goes in really quickly, and sticks – but like Teflon to praise – it slips past and is slow to go in.

If you imagine that belonging to your social group was the absolute determinant of survival for early humans, over millennia of evolution, responding and learning quickly in order to avoid negative or shaming social signals was absolutely vital. It makes me imagine that we also evolved to give each other a lot of positive reinforcement – so receiving affirmation for what we’re doing feels like a normal state to be in.

I personally believe that when we don’t have this ongoing positive feedback we feel a sense of lack – and if we’re really short of affirmation it can create the kind of inner emptiness that our consumer society just loves us to feel so we will attempt to fill up that craving with food or shopping or some other marketable product or experience.

So creating a culture of appreciation is a radical, political and profound choice. Seeing and appreciating what each member of a team is contributing is like a kind of sweet honey that people will keep coming back for. If you have meetings which are all about actions, doing, agenda, what we could improve, and have a low positive statement ration people are likely to leave feeling unconnected and exhausted. Meetings with lots of shared appreciation, as well as celebrating what has been achieved together, usually mean people leave feeling more energised than when they started.

How to create a culture of appreciation and celebration?

If you think this is something that would be good for your group you could put it down as an agenda item and have a group discussion. See if your group will agree to try out some of the ideas below – or come up with your own suggestions for how to keep up the ratio of celebrations and appreciations.

Know that shifting the group culture is likely to feel uncomfortable. Some people may really find this difficult – often those who have a strong inner critic and are used to a constant stream of inner criticism (and sometimes outer as well). This kind of criticism may be masking fear or a need to stay in control. Some may feel that it’s “unprofessional” to be something other than critical – I believe especially here in the UKbeing critical can gain you a lot of status. Know that the research shows it’s destructive and unhealthy – of all kinds of relationships – in the long term. 

Some things we’ve done within Transition Network meetings:

• Start a meeting with a round of appreciations (we do this often at morning meetings at our big conferences – where everyone has been working flat out and there’s lots to get through. It takes a few minutes, and gives everyone a boost as they see the hardworking contribution recognised). They might be general or specific to one person.
• Start a meeting with a go-round of “something you’re grateful for, or enjoying about life at the moment” – which puts us in a mood to notice positive things as we start.
• Appoint a “keeper of the heart” in any kind of meeting to keep an eye on the feeling state of the group (we’ve adopted this after seeing it working at a National Hubs meeting). Part of their job is to notice opportunities to celebrate from the very simple “we’ve made a decision” to the more significant “we ran a wonderful event and had great publicity and 30 new names on the mailing list”.
• End your meetings with a reflection on how the meeting went, starting with what you enjoyed about the meeting, and adding anything to improve for next time. It only need take 5 -10 minutes.
• If the meeting energy is flagging have an “appreciations go round”, or even an “appreciations mingle”

 

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15 Jul 2014

Celebrating Transition at the Transition Northwest Conference

Saturday 12^th July saw the first pilot Transition Roadshow take place, the Transition Northwest Conference.  And if the four subsequent Roadshows are to prove anywhere near as good, then it represents a great new evolution in how to celebrate and support Transition at the local level.  The conference was held at the University of Cumbria in Lancaster, hosted by the Institute for Leadership and Sustainability.  Transition City Lancaster had done wonders in pulling together the event, and their care and attention to detail was clear throughout. 

While in the main the 120 or so participants came from Lancaster or from Transition initiatives local to the area, there were people there from as far afield as the US and Edinburgh.  The day started with Samagita welcoming everyone and outlining the day to come. 

Sarah McAdam from Transition Network then introduced the day in the context of the other forthcoming Roadshows and recognised the amount of work that Transition City Lancaster had put in to making it happen.  We then did some mapping, getting people up and moving, looking at questions such as:

• Where have you travelled here from?  Where is home?
• How long has your Transition initiative been going for?
• Would you say you were thriving or struggling?
• How old are you? (ranking the hall from oldest to youngest)

Then after a short coffee break, we broke up for the first session of workshops.  People could choose between:

• Transition Support – creating and maintaining healthy Transition initiatives
• No to fracking, yes to community energy
• Community currencies and local economies
• How to engage people with Transition
• The Sustainable Communities Act

I went to the one on community energy, facilitated by Kevin Frea, which was an excellent exploration of the issues around community energy schemes, the support available for them, and at which a North West Community Energy Network was formed (these Transition folks don’t hang around).  

Then after lunch there was a second session of workshops.  The choices were: 

• Reconomy Project
• Transition approach to death and dying
• Personal resilience
• Tearing down the fences – retrofitting any street to co-housing: what would it take?
• Local urban food and organic methods.

I went to the workshop on cohousing entitled Tearing Down the Fences – Retroftting Any Street to Co-Housing. What Would it Take?, led by Cliodhna Mulhern of the Lancaster Co-housing project.  They recently built an amazing co-housing project, containing 41 units, to Passivhaus standard.  Here is a short film about it: 

The workshop then focused on what it might take for any street to reinvent itself using elements of the cohousing model.  A very interesting discussion followed, starting with ideas like lowering fences and moving on to more ambitious ideas: buying clubs, car clubs and so on.  

I only made these two workshops, but if you have a look at the conference’s own self-generated blog you will find some reports on other workshops too.  For example, there are write-ups on the Local Urban Agriculture workshop, the Transition approaches to Death and Dying workshop and the Sustainable Communities Act. 

The last session, after a coffee break began with a talk I gave called Transition as a many splendored thing (see right), which gave an overview of what is happening in Transition and why what we are all collectively creating is so important.  

After some discussion and questions, we had a closing session, facilitated by Sarah McAdam, reflecting on how the day was for everyone, before the day was then brought to a close by Kathy from TCL.  

But that wasn’t the end!  That evening, in the View Bar at the University was food, followed by music and dancing from Howard Haigh and the Men of the Hour, getting everyone up and moving around, powered by a pedal-powered generator. A great end to a fantastic day. Here’s a couple of bits of feedback from the conference blog:

• “Intergenerational responses in the opening session were very encouraging”.
• “I’ve really enjoyed the experience today – the workshops were very useful – Wish I could have gone to all of them as was spoilt for choice”. 
• “Have met some very interesting people here today and hope to be able to keep in contact with them and share our successes and refresh ideas”.
• “Of course it’s not really over, as usual for a Transition meet up, it’s another wave beginning its roll towards the shore.  Good to be part of it”.

The next day there was the opportunity for people to immerse themselves more in some of the interesting stuff happening in Lancaster.  The day began with a Universe Walk led by Samagita, and then included a cycling trip to visit Lancaster Co-housing and the community hydro scheme, and also the Claver Hill no-dig community food growing project, or a walk to the Fairfield Flora and Fauna project.  

The great thing about this Roadshow approach is that it is infused with the experience and enthusiasm of the host initiative.  While on reflection there are some learnings for the subsequent Roadshows, especially in relation to the running order and content of the day, it felt me like there is something very dynamic about this way of doing things.  It was certainly an event that left me renergised in the way that only spending a day with other active Transitioners can.  Our deepest thanks to the folks at TCL for all their hard work in pulling it together, and to IFLS and the University of Cumbria for hosting us.  

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15 Jul 2014

Chris Johnstone: "Without celebration, we wither away"

Chris Johnstone works in the area of the psychology of resilience, sustainable happiness and is co-author, with Joanna Macy, of Active Hope: how to face the mess we’re in without going crazy. Chris appeared at both the Unleashing of Transition Town’s Totnes and Lewes, and has interacted with different Transition groups ever since. He’s also an accomplished musician (you can hear him playing briefly at the end of the podcast of our interview).  I started by asking him why celebration matters:

“I’m just thinking about how important food is. Without food, we wither away. Food is nourishment. We also have needs for psychological nourishment or psycho-spiritual nourishment, emotional nourishment. I see celebration as one of those things that nourishes us psychologically, emotionally, spiritually. I was thinking about this also in terms of how important celebration is in keeping us going.

One of the thought blocks that people bump into sometimes is the voice that says “well what’s the point of doing this?” What celebration does is it gives us an answer to that. I think of it as helping shifting us from a going nowhere story where we feel we’re making no progress and have no direction to what I think of as a going somewhere story, where we feel that we’re on the way somewhere because we’re celebrating and marking important steps along the way.

What are the risks of not pausing to celebrate, do you think?

If you don’t pause to first of all notice that you’ve made any progress, it’s very easy to feel that you’re not making any progress. If you’re not making any progress, one of the risks for burnout is that loss of meaning where you lose the sense that there’s a point to what you do. Basically you run dry.

I see one of the parallels here as sustainable agriculture. One of the keys of sustainable agriculture is to nourish the soil. If you look after the soil, you get good crops. In terms of personal productivity, I think it would be to have sustainable activism. The parallel to topsoil is, I guess, our enthusiasm. We need to look after our enthusiasm for something. If we don’t, our enthusiasm gets thin like thin topsoil and you can get to a point where there’s no enthusiasm left and you just have that sense of, well what’s the point. You lose the oomph, you lose the energy, and you lose the plot.

What does good celebration look like? What for you would be the ingredients of a good celebration?

You can do it alone. It’s good to have ways where we notice the steps that we’re taking by ourselves and find some way of marking those and reinforcing those, but I’d say that celebration generally is much better in company. It’s also socially bonding and there’s very interesting research here about what really makes a difference in relationships.

There’s a psychologist called Shelley Gable who worked at the University of California Los Angeles, and she was trying to work out what are the vital things that really make a difference and she recorded lots and lots of relationships. One area of communication that seemed to make a key difference in relationships was the response to good news.

If one person had good news and shared it with the other and the other person responded to the good news by being ‘joy in the joy of another’, by celebrating the good news, that deepened trust, that deepened the sense of satisfaction in the relationship. But if somebody shared good news and it passed by without notice or even worse, the person tried to persuade them that really it was bad news, that led to a drop in the level of satisfaction in the relationship that was so strong that Shelley Gable found that she could work who was at higher risk of breaking up over the next 12 months just by looking at their response to good news, whether somebody celebrated the good news when it was shared, or whether somebody passed it by or poured cold water on it.

There was a thing that I wrote for this month’s framing editorial that was my attempt at what some of the ingredients of good group celebrations might look like. What does celebration on a more day to day basis in a group like a Transition group – how can we design it into our meetings, our everyday rather than having something we just do once a year?

I’d say there’s something here about celebration needing to be meaningful. It’s asking yourself “what exactly is it that we are celebrating?” What we’re doing with celebration is celebrating the things we appreciate, the things that we value. By having a shared celebration, what you’re doing is reinforcing the system of values, the shared system of values within that group. In terms of what keeps us going, it’s really important to celebrate success. So what comes up there is we need to look at how do we notice success, how do we notice progress and how do we define that?

It’s particularly important when working for social change, for social and ecological justice, that we can often have a lot of disappointment and frustration along the way. If we only celebrate the really big things, the really big victories, we can have long gaps between the celebrations which makes us feel that we’re losing, that we’re not making progress. And so therefore I think what’s really important is to look at the mini victories along the way, and to both celebrate the positive outcomes that happen, but also to celebrate the effort put in, and one way of doing that is just to find some way of appreciating what has been done, so for example research on our mood shows that one of the things that improves mood is both the experience and also the expression of gratitude.

One of the ways that you can build celebration into everyday meetings and things is just finding some way to appreciate each other, appreciate the steps that we’ve been taking. If you’ve notice that someone’s worked really hard on something, to have some gap in a meeting, some agenda item in the meeting where you just notice the things that have been done and the effort put in, and find some way of valuing them, marking them, noting them.

It might be first of all there’s a slot for anyone who’s got any good news to share and then to celebrate that, but also has anyone got any appreciations of gratitude to express. To actually build that into part of a group culture that we take time to notice and celebrate the steps we notice each other taking, and also if somebody has noticed a step that we’ve taken, for it to be completely more than fine, I’d say brilliant, for us to step forward and say – one thing I’m pleased about, you may not have seen this but one thing I’ve done is… where we take time to notice and to celebrate the steps we’ve taken ourselves.

It’s great when other people can notice it, but we don’t want to end up feeling resentful because no one cheered for this hard piece of work I did. We actually get better at stepping out there and saying – yes, I’m really pleased that I did this, I’m really pleased that I did that, because when we mark the steps that we’re taking, we reinforce that in a way that helps us keep taking those steps.

The environmental movement, in as much as I’ve been around it for the last 25 years or so, feels to be fairly spectacularly bad at stopping and celebrating. The culture is like a marathon, “got to keep going, got to keep going”, so there’s lots of burnout. Why do you think the environmental movement has been so poor at that?

Partly it’s the scale of the tasks that we face. We can’t have a party to celebrate climate change being sorted out, because that’s probably not going to happen in our lifetime. There’s already problems in the post, as it were, from the carbon that’s already been released into the atmosphere. The task is so huge that we could be working, well, there’s 168 hours in the week and we could be working all of those for a whole year and still feel that there’s more and more to do. There’s two things here.

There’s the to-date thinking which is where we look at what we’ve done so far, but there’s also to-go thinking where we look at what we’ve still got to go, the distance we’ve still got to cover. When we look at the distance we’ve still got to cover, it’s further than we can get in our lifetime, so that’s the trouble as I see it. We can just be working, working, working, and feel that there’s always more to go.

But also if we only focus on the work that’s still to be done, the danger is we just get exhausted. We become like what we’re doing to the fields of wheat around the world – we harvest them unsustainably and end up depleting the soil. I’d say that activist enthusiasm is a vital renewable resource, and we need to get much more skilful about how we treasure it. How we look after it in a way that can help it grow.

My last question is, can you think of one celebratory event that you were particularly moved by or inspired by which could be a story that might be useful for Transition groups to hear?

I’ve shared a number with you that I really delight in. One that comes to mind is when the two of us spoke together at the launch of Transition Town Totnes. It was the official unleashing of Transition Town Totnes and that was years ago now. But I think that was in 2006, so eight years ago now. What we do is celebrate launches of things in a way that we’re marking them and saying – hey, this is the beginning of something. We don’t know what will happen, but we’re marking our very clear intention.

There’s a form of energy, I call it ACACI which means A Clear and Committed Intention. It’s like a form of psychological energy. When you have strong, clear and committed intention, it drives you on. One of the ways of building that up is to have a launching celebration. I really enjoyed that event with you. We spoke together at the unleashing of Transition Town Lewes as well and we’ve both been back there since then. You wrote recently in your July 1^st blog about being at their 7 year celebration and I was there at their 5 year celebration.

If you have a party to begin something, then you can also revisit that point some years on. So they become markers in time. We can say yes, we were here when this began, we celebrated the launch of this. And now here we are meeting again, this number of years later and we also celebrate the effort put in and the steps taken and the distance covered in that between time.

What you do there is build in the journey approach to change. This sense that we’re on a cultural migration. That’s why I love the term Transition. Transition is about moving from one place to another and we mark the steps along the way. So we celebrate when we begin this journey with the unleashing, the launch, but we keep coming back to that at periodic intervals and say – hey, we’re still on this journey. It’s still important to us.

While there might be some steps forward and some steps back and frustrations and disappointments along the way, there will always be things that we can look at and say yeah, that’s what we did and I feel really good about that.

When you mark the things that you feel good about, you get something which I call afterglow. This is the warm feeling of satisfaction after you’ve done something or noticed something that you feel good about. That’s what keeps us going, it’s fuel for the journey. So back to that original idea that celebration is a form of psychological nourishment and it’s absolutely vital to keep ourselves going.

You’re a very gifted musician and you managed to weave music and getting everybody moving and joining in as well. What’s the role of music in that, do you think?

It’s so interesting, because they’ve found bits of bone that have been turned into flutes that are 20,000 years old. I see music as a form of social glue. It draws people together. There’s something very remarkable that can happen when people move rhythmically together. It’s where we shift out of just seeing ourselves as separate individuals to where we sing and dance together it reinforces our connectivity, our sense of being part of something larger.

That’s great – actually ‘great’ is an understatement. I talked about psychological nourishment, also how do we reinforce and grow social capital? Social capital is the wealth that comes out of relationships. Shared music and dance is one of the ways that happens. 

Here is the podcast of our interview with Chris.  

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10 Jul 2014

Dave Pollard: Celebration: nodding with a smile to the Sacred

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