Transition Culture

How to Make the Most of your ‘In Transition’ Screening

Here are some suggestions from the Transition Initiative Primer:

1. Introduce the film personally by putting it into the context of your overall hopes for your community
2. Have everyone turn to someone they don’t know and, in turns, introduce themselves and explain what brought them to the event that night
3. Show the movie
4. Have everyone pair up (preferably with someone they don’t know) and do an active talking/listening exercise about their impressions of the movie (ie one talks for 3 minutes while the other listens, then they switch over). You can give direction with something like “Say what gives you cause for concern and then what gives you cause for hope about the movie”
5. Run a Q&A on Peak Oil and/or Climate Change. Make sure you have someone there who knows what he/she is talking about – though it’s no shame to say “I don’t know, but I can find out and get back to you”.
6. Watch out for the “I’m alone in the depths of my fear” type questions – they’re typically a cry out for counselling or connection and can paralyse a room. What can work in that situation is to acknowledge the person’s fear and then to ask in the room “if there’s anyone here who has a part of themselves that is full of fear around this, please put up your hand”. Put yours up first… and hope! Unless you’re sitting in a room full of denial, you’ll see a lot of hands shoot up. You can then explain that the Transition model has a place where people can move through their fears and into a place of action (usually handled by the “Heart and Soul” group, once it’s formed).