Evergreening Transition Training
Dear friends and fellow Transitioners, I hope you’ll join me today in celebrating the launch of Transition Network International’s first-ever “evergreen” course, Transition Launch Training! This self-paced and self-directed online version of our most popular training is now available for anyone, anywhere, to take for free at any time. It’s the product of 12 experienced Transition Trainers working together across nine countries and three continents over the past eight months, and having coordinated its development, I’m really proud of how it turned out.
The curriculum is broadly organized into eight sessions based on the Seven Essential Ingredients of Transition (Context, Vision, Inner Transition, Healthy Groups, Community Engagement, Practical Projects, and Part of a Movement), plus an Introduction. Each session features an introductory video presentation, links to related resources, interactive discussion forums, and activities you can do on your own or with a group. Although its 55 modules might seem overwhelming at first glance, you’re welcome to engage with as few or as many as you like.
While this course is currently available only in English, our tech team is working hard to make it fully translatable into many more languages in the coming weeks. My hope is that this evergreen version of Transition Launch will eventually reach tens of thousands of regenerative activists around the world and spark hundreds of new initiatives. I believe it has the power to inspire those who are new to Transition, refresh those who could use a refresher, and encourage those who have been sitting on the sidelines to get in the game.
If this experiment proves successful, it has the potential to lead to the development of an online library with dozens of evergreen trainings. Over the past 19 years, many brilliant courses and workshops have been created to offer best practices, replicable examples, and valuable tools, skills, and resources related to various aspects of Transition. However, they haven’t always been widely accessible. Most are only available in some places, at some times, in some languages. By adapting more and more of these trainings into an evergreen format, we can spread this knowledge further and wider than ever before.
This isn’t to say that in-person and guided online trainings aren’t important. In fact, they tend to more enjoyable and impactful than evergreen courses, and will continue to be offered by our community of internationally-certified trainers and many regional and national Transition hubs. Nevertheless, developing a library of evergreen trainings has many potential benefits and is something Transition Network is uniquely positioned to do. I even suspect these evergreen trainings will generate more demand for in-person and guided online courses, as more people in more places experience just how much Transition Training has to offer.
When I shared this vision with a friend recently on a hike in the mountains above Boulder, Colorado where I live, he cautioned that “the era of the grand plan is over.” Personally, I believe we can still do big things and that we need to dream bigger. If you’d like to support this vision, please take the course yourself, give us your feedback, spread the word, and make a donation to help fund the future of Transition Training. If you haven’t already, I also recommend signing up for the Transition Network’s monthly newsletter. More is coming soon, and you won’t want to miss it!
In Community,
Don Hall