Share Your Stories of Community-led Change!
Share Your Stories of Community-led Change and Help Spread Resilience and Regeneration!
Transition Network International is excited to invite your participation in a Community Research Project to help the diverse groups and communities doing Transition grow stronger, more effective and more impactful. We know that when we learn from each other’s experiences we can create even greater positive change together.
We’re using an innovative tool called Sensemaker to collect stories, either written or as audio recordings, which also supports you to share your thoughts and insights about your story and what it means in regard to community led change.
Other ways in which we’re also collecting your amazing stories are the People of Transition and Voices of Transition projects.
Why get involved?
Our goal is to provide valuable information and resources for local groups to
- learn best practices from each other,
- raise awareness of their activities,
- support fundraising efforts,
- and demonstrate the wide-reaching impact of our movement.
By gathering and sharing these stories, we can highlight our collective achievements and inspire others through data, learning resources, articles, events, and more.
Deborah Benham shares a bit of the background and the step-by-step of this CRP and tool.
All the stories we collect and the data generated will be accessible to everyone in the Transition movement through a simple login. You'll find summaries, quotes, word clouds, graphs, and more that you can use in your own work.
We’re particularly interested in understanding what specific practices and conditions help foster positive change in communities. In the collector page there are prompts to help you think about the ‘why’ and ‘how’ of your story—what made that project or activity successful in your community?
How do I participate?
Until the end of September 2025, the Sensemaker collector tool will be available online in 8 languages.
- Visit https://tinyurl.com/sensemaker-transition-stories
- Choose the language of your preference
- Share your story, whether in writing or as an audio recording –you choose what works best for you!–, then complete a few questions to add your own insights (the self ‘signification’ - or ‘meaning making’ part).
This tool is a fantastic opportunity, but we only have it for a short time. The more stories we gather, the more valuable insights we can uncover to help our movement navigate current crises and build a more regenerative future.
If you have questions or would like to dive deeper into the Community Research Project and the Sensemaker tool, please join us on Thursday, February the 20th. We will hold a live questions and answers session to make sure you find your participation exciting and smooth, and can benefit from participating in the project.
Community Research Project Q&A live session
Join this session to dive deeper into the Community Research Project TNi is relaunching to collect your stories of change.
Where does this come from?
How does it work?
With whom can I share?
Which kind of stories are being collected?
How to upload my group stories?
We'll go through all of these and more.
We're looking forward to connecting with you for that exciting project!
Why now?
Transition is turning 20! As we reach this milestone we have the opportunity to reflect on the past years of experimenting, innovating, and learning from both successes and failures. Now is a crucial time to share what we've learned and to tackle today’s escalating challenges through the wisdom of our entire community.
From our previous survey in 2020-2021 and countless shared stories, we know that Transition groups and communities are achieving incredible things, locally and sometimes regionally. This looks really different in each place. Every collective excels in different areas, and we want to identify and share these effective practices so that everyone can benefit.
Spread the news!
We need your help to spread the word to as many Transitioners as possible, as well as to other community-led eco-social change groups.
You can copy, paste and adapt this brief call out to share among your contacts and networks:
Transition Network International is gathering stories of change through a Community Research project.
This will provide valuable information and resources for local groups to learn from each other, raise awareness of their activities, support fundraising efforts, and demonstrate the wide-reaching impact of our movement.
Check this out to discover more: https://news.transitionnetwork.org/share-your-stories-of-community-led-change
Join the Q&A session on Thursday, February 20th at 17h UTC: https://tinyurl.com/qa-sensemaker-session
Share your stories of change: https://tinyurl.com/sensemaker-transition-stories
Join us in this exciting project and be part of our shared journey toward resilience and regeneration!
Questions?
Q: What are the advantages of participating in the community research project?
A: By sharing your story and learnings in this survey, you will be helping many other amazing local groups build resilience and improve their places and communities.
In return, you will receive all the information generated - summarised in simple and easily communicated ways. This can be used by your group to help raise awareness about the importance and impact of community-led activities, to demonstrate credibility, attract new members, and apply for funding.
Q: What exactly is Sensemaker?
A: Sensemaker is a new generation data collection and analysis tool. Check this video if you’d like to know more in detail.
Q: Can I share more than one story?
A: Yes, all the registered users can submit as many stories as you like. Thank you!
Q: Could we submit a story as a group?
A: Each person’s experiences are different for each action and event, and we’re interested in your personal perspective and experience. So we encourage as many people in your group who would want to, to submit your stories. It might be fun to talk to each other and explore common points, differences and nuances in how you experienced these stories of change as a group.
Q: How will the data be used and who will have access to it?
A: We will share publicly quotes from written and audio responses, plus general and summary information from your other responses. These will be available to all participants through the Sensemaker shared data portal, in documents or other resources that we publish online, and that we share with the Transition movement or funders. Please do not share any personal or sensitive information that you would not want shared in this way. Your email and any optional demographic data provided i will be held on file and protected under GDPR rules, visible only to selected members of the sTransition Network international team. We will delete contact details and demographic data 12 months after submission. We need to hold the personal information you give us on this form to process the report and to liaise with you about your project. We are collecting this data as it is in our 'legitimate interest' to do so. Cognitive-Edge Ltd is the data processor used in this case (https://thecynefin.co/privacy-policy/). We work with them under these terms (https://thecynefin.co/sensemaker-dpa/). We will also be storing the data on our self-hosted cloud platform under these terms (https://hub.transition-space.org/legal/page/view?pageKey=privacy). Transition Network is the data controller our privacy policy is here: (https://transitionnetwork.org/privacy-policy/). For further information, or to request deletion of your data please contact privacy@transitionnetwork.org
Q: The Submit response button doesn’t seem to be working?
A: Please make sure you’ve entered all the required values (those with a red exclamation mark). If any required question does not apply to your case, please mark the “N/A” box.
Do you have any other questions or concerns about sharing this? Email us at evaluation@transitionnetwork.org
If you need any assistance, we have a small budget available to help cover unavoidable costs.
Thank you so much!
