Developing our potential for leadership

Enhancing the leadership capacity in the movement is one goal of training people in transition. The lessons, ideas and tools that have proven their effectiveness are worthwhile sharing. We are keen to get better at this and want to share with you what is on the cards (beyond the work already well underway) to develop our potential for leadership.

The priorities we have identified moving forward in the short term include:

• Reviving the training calendar: a central place for trainers to publish their upcoming offerings.
• Update the training pages on the Transition Network website: these are currently out of date.
• Establish a file sharing system: enabling trainers to share information resources with each other. For example, trainers could share curricula and other offerings they have developed with their peers for adaptation in different contexts.

When it comes to our medium to long term goals we can speak about widening and deepening our offerings.

Widening our offering

Don, who currently leads our training work at the international level, describes our efforts to widen our offering when stating that,

“soon, I hope, we will begin to collaboratively develop new trainings together that meet the needs of the movement. This means really getting to know what those needs are and prioritizing the development of additional courses that will be most helpful. We also want to offer more trainings in both guided and self-guided online formats. I think that in-person trainings are still essential: they provide an experience that you just can't recreate online. But there are some benefits to online trainings, such as people not having to travel, a lower carbon footprint, and lower costs. We want to do that with some of our more established trainings to make them more widely available and accessible. I think it’s really important to secure funding to provide scholarships for low-income participants and communities to expand access there as well.”

All of this should make transition training accessible to more people from a wider variety of backgrounds. Another critical element to accessibility is translation and interpretation. In line with other work going on at the international level we are also aiming to make more training accessible across languages. We are sure to keep you informed about how this work unfolds.

Deepening our offering

With more people being able to access transition training, we are keen to turn our attention to the learning journeys individuals are on. Currently, the most available training is the two-day, in person, ‘Transition Launch’ course. This is a great course for getting started in Transition. However, there is so much more we could offer to deepen people’s understanding of and engagement with transition. For example, there are plenty of practices, experiences and resources around Effective Groups, Inner Transition, and Economics that we could make accessible via training. Additionally, many transition groups successfully work around food, transportation or energy and we could do much more to support groups via training on those and other topics.

All of this would enable us to accompany and support individuals and groups on their journeys into transition, beyond the launch. To support the deepening of people’s practice we are intending to deepen the training offerings available.

Now over to you. What is it you are looking for in our international training work? You can tell us about the training you are interested in receiving or contact us directly to comment on the work by sending an Email to: training@transitionnetwork.org

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This article is part of the Transition Training series. In June 2023 we are sharing four short pieces that make transparent where Transition Training is at; this is post 4 out of 4. There are many forthcoming developments in Transition Training and many more opportunities to engage with our Training offerings, as participants as well as facilitators. If you are curious about what is going on check out the other posts in the series.

1. Sources of Transition Training: a brief exploration of the origins of Transition Training and its current leadership at the international level.
2. Transition trainers - who are they? An introduction to Transition Trainers and how to find the right trainer for you.
3. Training communities in Transition: an explanation of the work that is underway at the international level to support Transition Trainers.
4. Developing our potential for leadership: considering the way forward for Transition training at the international level