1. All team members must commit $5 a month as a website Contributorship (found on the Become a Contributor page of the website) to show commitment and devotion to this movement, as well as maintain that membership. The only exclusions to this is if a member lives in an intentional community that pays a monthly membership to The Transition on behalf of the whole community.

2. Complete all TEAM WORK that was assigned the week before or the due date that was committed to. Your failure to do so affects the whole team’s output and creates confusion.

3. A member who does not show up, nor give notice of their absence, or leaves before the set end time for 3 consecutive meetings (or very frequently) will not be allowed to join or participate in any new projects for a week’s time.  Consistent disregard for this rule may lead to a group vote for removal from the team.

4. Respect each other, and the time and effort they are contributing, by using “Please” & “Thank You” as often as possible.  Use Non-Violence Communication in order to speak and hear only in needs and feelings.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwXH4hNfgPg

5. Always consider if your work and actions are in the best interest of The Transition and not your personal ego. (NOTE: Access to documents and bringing in new members need to follow our Prospective Team Member Protocol)

6. Do not over commit to projects if you do not have the time availability or skill-set to fulfill the needed task. Your having the integrity to be honest leaves room for others to show what they bring to the table and allows the team to develop many leaders who take initiative.

7. If you say you are going to do something, then follow through with that promise. Do not set unrealistic deadlines for yourself.

8. Major Power Point Presentations are not needed as long as you can communicate your vision to the team clearly. The more visuals the better! Keep it short and sweet.

9. For ALL projects, please follow our Branding Guidelines and Best Practices so we send out a consistent message to the public. (under development)

10. Keep our Skype channel as clean as possible so people can see announcements etc. If things get into a debate or long conversation please take it over to a PM (private message) discussion. No one wants to weed through 100+ posts just to find the one valuable piece of  information they are looking for or actually need.

11. We are Doing the work we are doing and seeing results and how it impacts lives should be reward enough. Do not expect teammates to reignite your passion or give you a “Why?” to maintain your level of motivation and commitment.

12. Communicate your needs to the group as they come up. No one is a mind reader here.

13. All teamwork belongs to The Transition and must be kept within an approved The Transition place such as our website or our Google Docs folders.

Creating an Economic Transition 

In episode 76 of The Sustainable Living Podcast Nicole Bienfang Seed Person of The Transition discusses with host Jenise Fryatt how our organization helps people take action.

You may wish to check out the following related links that are mentioned in the interview:

Zeitgeist Addendum

Stone Soup

Your Action Plan

Twin Oaks

Twin Oaks Communities Conference

Show Discussion Chronology

1:00 – Chronic Illness – Binge documentary watching

3:00 – The Venus Project – Resource Based Economy

6:00 – Michael E.V Knight – Build a Resource Based Economy Now Facebook Group

10:00 – Intentional Communities – considered patchwork solution by Venus Project

11:15 –  Identifying common themes within the tribe

13:00 – Decided to create our own website

15:15 – Status of RBE Facebook Group now

16:30 – How the website helps people to take action

18:00 – Pitfalls of too many groups trying to do the same thing

20:45 – Difference between The Transition and Transition Towns

24:15 – Top Down vs Bottom Up Approach

27:45 – Objectives of The Transition and how it takes action to meet them

29:45 – Identifying best ways to start taking action and developing “Your Action Plan”

31:00 – Matching resources to needs

32:45 – The Transition is a reciprocal organization – Stone Soup

36:45 – The powerful hidden fringe benefit of all this

39:30 – “There is no soup unless you put in some potatoes”

41:45 – Making fringe society mainstream

43:30 – Attracting and organizing volunteers and groups

45:00 – Developing a crowd-funding platform for funding member projects

47:30 – Some of the projects that are being helped by the site

49:30 – Site being used as a filter to find serious people for projects

51:00 – How can people make the best use of The Transition website?

54:45 – The importance of non-violent communication

57:30 – The importance of re- assessing the usefulness of our current system

59:00 – Ways to contribute to the Transition community and benefits of contributing

1:02:20 – Yearly conference at Twin Oaks Intentional Community

Listen to the Show

Thursday

At 5:30pm I arrived at Twin Oaks and met up with Hawyna, Sky and Nicole at ZK.  After dinner, Nicole and I found out where I would be staying which was in Tai-Chi and I got myself situated for the evening.  We then had a discussion in Tai-Chi with some of the members and guests who had come for the conference.

Friday

Early in the morning, I found Pam and worked on the Garden shift.  We picked corn, went on break for 15 minutes and then picked peppers and roma tomatoes.  Afterwards, we went to ZK for lunch where I learned that there was going to be an open community discussion with Reynaldo leading it.  Unfortunately there weren’t very many members that actually attended this one and we just jumped from topic to topic with no real central theme.

The purpose of the meetings was to allow for more face-to-face interaction between community members instead of just relying on responses from people on the O&I board.  The O&I board stands for Opinions and Ideas which has just a number of clipboards with various papers for proposals or information.  For example, one of the proposals was to change the over-quota system to be setup as a percentage refund of the over-quota time spent in each area so that managers wouldn’t need to be so tight with their hour budget with people working over-time.

After the meeting Nicole and I went to the parking area for the conference.  I checked in and setup camp for the weekend.  After I was setup, I went to the main registration tent to sign up for work shifts.  I ended up signing up for the same shifts Nicole did which was MOOP (Matter out of place) patrol.  This task involves picking things up that are left lying around like trash, dirty dishes, clothes etc.  Since I didn’t attend the Twin Oaks tour last year, I made it my first priority this time around. 

The tour walked us through the main areas of Twin Oaks and was led by Adder.  The main areas include the Woodshop and Storage area, the Tupelo music room, ZK, the garden fields, Oneida and Tai-Chi.  The woodshop is where they keep all of the wood working tools and include various saws and drills for cutting lumber and making hammock slats.  The storage area is where they keep all of the supplies for their various businesses such as hammocks and Tofu.  The Tupelo music room is where the members occasionally meetup to play songs and there are a few bands and groups that practice and sometimes go out to perform for money.  ZK is the main dining area which has plenty of tables and a full commercial kitchen.  The garden fields is where all the vegetables are grown which this time of year included corn, okra, peppers, roma tomatoes, squash, cucumbers, beets and romaine lettuce.  Oneida is the main office of Twin Oaks where they handle calls and it also has a kitchen for the residents of the surrounding buildings.  Tai-Chi is one of the residential buildings next to Oneida and also contains the hammock shop.

After dinner Nicole and I attended the evening session.  During this session Paxus led an opening activity which consisted of if you really knew me and declaring what you wished you could be appreciated for and ended with thoughts on how people felt about the things that were mentioned.  Alieda and Liywana gave a talk about the black movement such as black lives matter and what they were doing with it.

Saturday

After introductions at the opening circle, all of the communities were each given a minute or two in order to introduce themselves further to the group for the Meet the Communities session.  Nicole gave the introduction for The Transition, but then she was too busy dealing with the silent auction to actually participate in meet the communities so I had to talk about The Transition by myself. 
There weren’t a lot of people that came by to talk to me about The Transition this year which I suspect was caused by both Nicole not being with me so they may not have known that I am working with Nicole on The Transition and there were a lot of communities that were here this year.  There didn’t seem to be that many people who were looking for a community.  This session continued until lunch.

After lunch, everyone broke out into separate workshops.  I attended Consensus 201: Levels of agreement.  The original person who was supposed to do the workshop did not attend so Marty from Shannon Farms led the workshop instead.  The workshop mostly focused on blocks and how they function in Consensus.  The two main points that I took away were “the sunset clause” and “the continuum”.  The sunset clause is a clause that tells when the proposal must end.  This is really useful in consensus because it allows for bringing forth something that may be unpopular, but if it’s known that the proposal will only be in effect for 2 weeks then those who are opposing it may be willing to try it out for that length of time.  The continuum is an activity to gauge where people currently feel on a proposal so that the participants can see where everyone lies on a line and then try to convince them to go one way or the other.

During the second half of the afternoon new workshops were put on and I decided to attend "Creating a Participatory Culture".  This workshop was put on by a team that was part of Agile Learning Center which is a group of people who run “Free Schools”.  These are schools for children where the children get to decide what they want to learn and how the school should be run while the teachers act more as facilitators to keep everything running smoothly. 

The main topic was the Community Mastery Board which tracks all of the cultural norms for their schools.  The board is broken into 4 segments: Awareness, Implementation, Practice and Mastery.  The way it works is someone will notice something (could be good or bad), as an example we used “there are ants in the living room”, which was added to the board on a sticky note.  Next during the weekly 15 minute meeting you would quickly go through all the items on the board.  For every item under the Awareness section you would come up with an Implementation that will potentially fix the awareness that was raised.  So for the ants in the living room, the implementation might be to not eat in the living room anymore.  After this is tried for a week or so it would be revisited in the next meeting and if everyone was following it then the sticky note would move under the practice section.  Once the item has been under the practice section for a few months and everyone was following it without really thinking about it then it would move under mastery.  Every new member that joins the school would then agree to follow all the items on the board which would explicitly state the cultural norms.

After the workshops, there was dinner and then the dance party at ZK. 

Sunday

Sunday morning, I attended the Role of IC’s in a New Paradigm.  I was originally considering going to Boundaries: Truth, Needs, Attachment, but I met Jack the previous day during meet the communities and he was running the Role of IC’s in a New Paradigm which seemed related to what we wanted to do with The Transition so I attended this one instead.  The first part of the discussion focused on what we thought the Role of IC’s would be.  The second part of the discussion was broken into groups where we further discussed what IC’s could start to do to bring in the New Paradigm.   The most interesting thing that I got out of this workshop was a lot of websites that are potentially trying to do the same thing as The Transition.

There was then an organization session for the open spaces followed by lunch.  After lunch, I attended the Future is Now workshop which I found wasn’t very useful.  We spent the first 20 minutes of the workshop just waiting for people to show up followed by 10 minutes of meditation and then we went around the whole circle and stated what we thought the keys to the future are.  This was followed by a brief talk about the Peace Pentagon Hub which is fairly similar to The Transition, but with a focus on Activism instead of Intentional Communities.  The discussion then went back around the room where people gave their input about what was said.  Then we broke into groups to answer 3 different questions:

1)      What are you working on now?

2)      How can we support you?

3)      If this group were to start a new project to build a better future, what would it be?

After this open session, we had a meeting between the various projects that we thought were doing similar things such as The Transition, Pentagon Peace Hub, Infinite Trees Project and a virtual currency platform.  The Pentagon Peace Hub is a network of people who are interested in doing Activism.  The Infinite Trees Project is a network of contacts with various people in order to make things happen.  The virtual currency platform is a project that Eric was working on with one of his friends in order to have a platform where people could go to buy and sell mostly artwork, songs and written content.  We agreed to have a meeting later in the month or at the beginning of next month to figure out how we would work together and what could be done.

Monday

Monday was split into two sessions, the first session was about Ecovillages and the second session was about Freedom Songs.  During the first session, we got a briefing on what Ecovillages were and we were shown a short clip that showed how many ecovillages there are across the world.  Ecovillages have a focus on being ecologically sustainable.  After the briefing, they handed out cards with various items that are related to ecovillages such as Systems Design, Recycling Materials and Respecting Elders.  We placed the cards on the ground such that similar items were next to each other and then we placed a brown leaf on the card that we felt we had mastered and we placed a green leaf on the ones we wanted to learn more about.  We had a fairly diverse group so almost every card had a leaf of some kind on it and we discussed a bit about why people chose their cards.  During the second session, Alieda and Liywana talked about the history of the freedom songs and we sang them.

After dinner, Reynaldo invited me to sing karaoke in the Bijou.  So Nicole and I joined them later that evening to do so and there were roughly 12 people there.

Tuesday

Official end of conference was on Monday so this day begins my stay as a guest (not a visitor) at Twin Oaks.  A guest is a person who is temporarily staying at Twin Oaks and that person needs to be hosted by a member of the community.  A visitor is someone who is staying for a three week period in order to become a full member.

In the morning, I helped clean up and organize the conference site such that like objects were put next to each other in the main conference area.  Afterwards, Nicole and I went for lunch.  We then attempted to figure out where I would be staying, but in the meantime we helped Valerie clean up rooms for new members that were just joining this week.  While cleaning up Paxus came by and we eventually sorted out that I would be staying in his room for the duration of my stay.  I then gathered all my belongings and also retrieved some clothes from Commie Clothes.  There wasn’t much of anything else going on for the day so I spent 3 hours or so reading through the issues up on the O&I board.  A lot of the discussion was about the Tofu hut and how people didn’t like working in there due to the dangerous work conditions and the amount of effort involved in the labor.  There was also a discussion about over-quota and how mangers are hoarding their labor hours instead of giving them out to people who want to work over-time in their area.

Wednesday

I was up early today in order to attend the morning garden shift.  We started by picking corn, removing row covers, harvesting tomatoes and then finished with weeding beets and hoeing beds.  During lunch, there was another Open Community Discussion where the discussion focused on the over-quota system and how it was preventing people from doing work in the community.  The main issue seemed to be that there were people who wanted to work over-quota, but couldn’t do so because managers were not allowing their hours to be used.  Managers have only so many hours that they can give out for the entire year so they need to use them wisely so as to not run out before the year ends.  The proposal was to allow a refund based on a percentage of the time that was over-quota from each area the person worked in during the week so that managers could more freely give out those hours as they would receive some of those hours back at the week’s end.

After lunch, I met up with Pam and discussed the issue she was having with her computer and offered to assist her later that night.  I then attended an afternoon garden shift where we continued to clear weeds from the beets and I also stayed a bit extra with Finch in order to continue our discussion from lunch about the over-quota system.  After dinner, I met back up with Pam and went through some of the issues she was mentioning and offered her my advice.  Unfortunately the internet went down while I was helping her so I didn’t get a chance to download and install all the items I had suggested.  The rest of the evening was spent reading books up in Tai-Chi.

Thursday

Today was the day we decided to head over to Shannon Farms for the day.  When we arrived, we met up with Marty and he gave us a tour of Shannon Farms and he talked about how the farm is setup into clusters of buildings.  There are 3-9 houses in each cluster and currently 8 clusters in total.  Membership seemed to be fairly fluid where you visit and need to get 1/3 of the group to agree to let you join.  From there, you can stay as a provisional member for 6 months and afterwards, you need to get 2/3 of the group to agree to let you stay as a full member.  The land is made of mostly wooded area on steep slopes, but there were some open spaces for grazing as well as a community garden.  Marty continued the tour and showed us the small lake they had as well as some of the more interesting buildings like a geodesic dome.  We then met up with Virginia and we had lunch and talked about The Transition and asked them a number of questions from our supporters.  After lunch, Marty took us to see Dan and he talked about all of the passive solar heating that he had created in order to keep his house warm in the winter.  He discussed various items such as solar greenhouse areas where the hot air was then pushed in-ward, adobe bricks and straw/clay mixed insulation.  Dan then took us around to some of the other houses where they were doing similar things and also showed us one place that was built of stone and was set into the ground.  After, Dan finished his little tour we walked back over to Marty’s house and we said goodbye and left.  We then went to Charlottesville and ate at Taste of India for the evening.

Friday

In the morning, I worked the garden shift again and during lunch, there was another Open Community Discussion to which I only attended half of because I wasn’t aware until later that they moved it over to apple tree in order for it to be a bit more of a private discussion.  This discussion focused on how to handle inter-personal issues.  After lunch, I found out that Paxus had signed me up for work shifts without telling me.  Luckily Brenda found me in ZK and took me down to the hammocks shop where we loaded hammocks into a van and took them over to the warehouse and unloaded them.  We then took some items out of the warehouse and loaded those into the van and Brenda had me put hooks into bags which they use for their hammocks.  After working on that for a while, a man named Wizard came by and asked me to start the Tofu Box Making shift early.  During this shift we stamped cardboard tofu boxes with the sell by date and added stickers for the type of tofu that would be in each one.  We then built the boxes and stacked them together.  They would later be filled with tofu and sent out to their customers.  After that shift, I went back to ZK and played Magic with Gloria and she invited me to play magic with them later that evening.  After dinner, we met back up in ZK and I played a free for all game with Rowen, Willow, Gloria and Sky.  The game was fantastic and at one point I had a 50/50 shot at winning, but unfortunately the wrong card was selected and Rowen ended up winning instead, though it was very close as Rowen only had 2 life left.

Saturday

Nicole and I were up early along with Bill in order to attend the Heritage Harvest Festival which was a fair that was going on near the Piedmont Community College on top of Monticello.  I spent the morning assisting in running the Southern Exposure Seed Exchange booth which is the full name of the business that Acorn runs.  The booth allowed people to sample a number of different tomatoes and peppers so I spent most of my time stabbing pieces of peppers with toothpicks for everyone to sample.  Around lunch time, I was able to walk around and check out the other booths which were selling various products like granolas, chocolate, cheeses, ciders, salsa, alcohol, seeds and farming items.  As we were at Monticello, I took some time to listen to the men who recounted what it was like for the slaves that were living there.

After dinner, I tried to find some people who were going to play Ultimate Frisbee as listed on their board, but unfortunately when I went out to the field there wasn’t anyone there so I spent some time hanging outside of Tai-Chi and eventually entered the visitor’s social gathering.  Afterwards, we went down to ZK where Sky put on another dance party.

Sunday

 I departed from Twin Oaks early in the morning for my long drive back home.

The Transition (www.thetransition.org) is an organization that was formed in part to better serve the intentional community and  
co-op business community, to help make their impact on cultural shift have even more of an impact. We are interested in learning more about the budgets and platforms you work with in order to spread awareness about your intentional communities and community owned or related businesses, so that we might serve you and your needs better. So, that we can better serve you please answer the following questions and send your responses to Contact Us:

1. Do you have an advertising and or marketing budget? (If so how much per month/year?)

2. Through what mediums do you promote? -Dedicated Website, SEO, Search Engine Ads, Television Ads, Radio Ads, Magazine Ads, Website Banner Ads, Classified Ads (Print/Online), Newsletters (Print/E-mail), Directory Listings(Print/Online), Social Network Pages (Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Pinterest etc), Social Network Ad Space, Blog(s), Trade Shows, Conferences (Tabling/Sponsorship), Brochures/Flyers, Earned Media-

3. With whom do you promote? Please specify the specific names of those you buy advertising space or marketing services from regarding your answers to #2.

4. Do you currently participate in holidays promotions or co-op media buys?

5. Do you partner with any other nearby or similar intentional communities or organizations for advertising or marketing purposes?

6. Do you currently cross promote via web presence on related websites that target the same niche demographic?

7. What is the ROI (return on investment) you are seeing with the budget and platforms you are currently using?

8. Would you promote more aspects of your group or organization if it was bundled or tied in with the fees you are already paying for advertising and marketing( i.e. speaking engagements, blogs, books written by community members or about community, numerous community owned businesses instead of just one etc.)?

9. Is your current advertising and or marketing strategy meeting the needs or expectations of the group or organization you serve?

10. Are you attracting quality and qualified leads from your current advertising and marketing methods?

11. Do you have a dedicated staff that works exclusively on your advertising or marketing needs?

12. What would be ideal for your group or organization in regards to the work you do regarding advertising and marketing and the results you get?

13. How do you feel those that provide advertising and marketing to you currently could improve?

We appreciate your time and feedback and look forward to serving the needs you you bring up in this questionnaire.

Our team has members in multiple US states, we have formed an organization to better serve the intentional community and co-op business community, to help make their impact on cultural shift have even more of an impact.

Our team belongs to a larger online group that has over 9,000 members and growing with a reach of well over a million (that we are currently in the process of migrating to our website now that it is officially launched). We know our work could be more effective if we our core team lived closer together, or better yet under one roof! The faster we get an actual tangible location for our organization THE MORE WILLING our supporters will be to help out whether it is volunteering their skills,resources or funds in order to propel our organization. Wherever we reside our supporters and their efforts come with us. Do you have developed land or a building we can use for our headquarters (to live and work) to start our organization? 

My background is marketing, merchandising, small business, and high-end retail and I am happy to lend those skill-sets to the community I reside in. My peers often choose me for leadership, organizing, or planning type roles because they know I get results and things are done in a timely manner. I have founded and been president of social justice related organizations throughout my life. I have no children, I do not do drugs and drink occasionally.

Our core team and supporter base have varied skills as well, ranging from hydroponics, public speaking, and writing code etc. The Transition Team uses Formal Consensus to run our meetings and decision making and have found it to be effective. We also have a list of over 50 key people from our supporter base who could start our headquarters with us, but due to home insecurity or other personal reasons are not current members of our team as they are unable to consistently attend meetings.

Here are some key things to know about us:
OUR MISSION: "We unite people who are willing to take action towards enhancing and protecting all life and our environment for future generations. Our purpose is to construct real solutions by providing the support, space, and resources to do so via our collective knowledge and common heritage of the Earth's resources."

Our Values
Collaboration
Cooperation
Community
Compassion

We are preferably looking for warm climate locations, anyone who is interested should Contact Us. If you would like to stay in the loop of our progress please register on our site and begin Your Action Plan to get the ball rolling.

The Fellowship for Intentional Community is immensely grateful for our supporters, members, donors, and bookstore customers. Your support keeps us going, both emotionally and financially. We strive to return the support with content and resources useful to you in community and cooperation. Thank you!

In appreciation, we are offering over half-off for 35 books and DVD's, and on nearly all Communities magazine back issues! You'll find a variety of titles that focus on the topics we care about most: sustainability, climate change, group dynamics, communication, stories of building community and so much more!

See the entire sale lineup at the Holiday Half-Off Sale page and peruse the back-issues here.

If co-operation is a duty, I hold that non-co-operation also under certain conditions is equally a duty.

~ M.K. Gandhi

Much has been learned since the days of Gandhi and King about how to carry out nonviolence resistance more safely and effectively. We know that is cannot rely too much on mere symbols or empty protest, that a successful nonviolent campaign needs courage and strategy no less than a conflict waged with conventional means. We hold, as Gandhi did, that nonviolence is not the best way to overcome the reluctance to compassionate and rational change: it’s the only way. And it will not fail us in this great struggle.  

Truth: The Backbone of Nonviolence

“The world rests upon the bedrock of satya, or truth. Asatya meaning untruth also means non-existent, and satya, or truth, also means that which is. If untruth does not so much as exist, its victory is out of the question. And truth being that which is can never be destroyed. This is the doctrine of Satyagraha in a nutshell.” 

~ M.K. Gandhi

By the year 1908, Gandhi realized that he needed a new term for the transformative force he was introducing into politics. “Passive resistance” was misleading and nonviolence, the direct translation of the ancient Sanskrit term ahimsa, was not yet in vogue (that would come some 20 years later). He held a contest and sadagraha or “clinging to the Real” was selected, but then modified for grammatical reasons to Satyagraha. The great benefit of this term lay in the deep meaning of satya in Indian languages: not just “true” as opposed to false, but also “real” as opposed to unreal, and “good” as opposed to harmful.

The term Satyagraha is used in two senses. For one, it can stand for the entire principle of nonviolence, or the active and resistant dimension of it, as opposed to mere petitioning or constructive program. Secondly, we speak of individual campaigns such as the Salt Satyagraha, the Temple Road Satyagraha or we could coin the Budrus Satyagraha in Palestine today. The struggle for civil rights by various groups, from the GBLTQ community to women’s rights and indigenous autonomy, all contain essential elements of Satyagraha in so far as they are nonviolent and attempt to “speak truth to power.”

Satyagraha is sometimes contrasted with its opposite, duragraha, or “clinging to the bad,” which implies the use of coercion. The ultimate aim of Satyagraha is always to bring parties closer together, and so in “clinging to truth” one prefers persuasion to coercion wherever possible. (If you haven’t yet read it, see Introduction for a story about the power of persuasion).

Satyagraha is sometimes contrasted with its opposite duragraha “clinging to the bad,” which implies the use of coercion or force. The ultimate aim of Satyagraha is always to bring parties closer together, and so in one’s “clinging to truth” one prefers persuasion to coercion wherever possible.

We have built The Transition website on Nationbuilder and although it is feature rich there are some features we feel we need, but that they do not offer at this time. In order for their staff to work on these developments they need to see how serious we are about needing them. 

Feedback from the Nationbuilder community drives what features they build and what issues they fix right away. Nationbuilder can't fix or do everything (although they really want to!), so encouraging other people to also give their feedback is very helpful. Here's the link to one of the feature requests we have asked them for in order to help us serve all of you better. Please go to the following feature request page listed below and check the box that says "Important" and leave a comment if you like!

Automatic PATH Set-up

Once you have checked the box "Important" and or left a comment. Please let us know you did so at the Report Portal so we can give you Buzz Bucks for your time.