This is a CTP of initiative: Omstilling Ry (Transition Ry - Denmark)
This CTP comprises of the first three public meetings of the Omstilling Ry Transition initiative, held in quick succession in the autumn of 2010 over a period of around three months. The interviewee considered these to be a collective CTP because they laid the groundwork for the initiative:
The meetings led to the development of a mailing list of 130 people. Furthermore, a number of sub-groups formed around a range of different topics, projects and themes which led to all further CTPs (e.g. an Energy Expo – see CTP 98).
The three meetings resulted in things really “getting started”. It felt like they were “on a wave": the momentum carried on from one meeting to the next – as exemplified by the fact that there were similar numbers of attendees in each meeting. At this stage, organizers thought they would continue to have regular public meetings. It gave them the “courage to continue.”
The first meeting, held in November 2010, focused on issues of food sovereignty, the environment, and the relationship between food and climate change. 80 people turned up. There was a speaker from the organization Via Campesina. A theme of the meeting was the development of farming and agriculture. The meeting attracted small farmers from the area (both current and former) who were not part of the immediate social network or social circle of the organisers – something the organizers themselves thought was very exciting.
The second meeting was the official launch meeting of Omstilling Ry. Again, this attracted around 80 people – although some of them were different from the first meeting. A film was screened, and there was an external speaker who came from Copenhagen (Niels Johan Juhl-Nielsen) and spoke about the principles of the Transition movement. Some thematic groups emerged - e.g. on energy, food, and buildings. An email list was also created. People began to get to know each other, and what their interests were.
The third meeting was an exercise of envisioning a desirable future. This "vision meeting" was held on a Sunday, and it involved a range of different activities. It involved playing some games, doing some “dream travel” and some drawings of the future using crayons. Questions including “What do we want our town to be in 30 years?” guided these activities. It was a more creative kind of meeting. Some of the groups that formed at the previous meeting continued and some new ones were formed too such as a group who wanted a bicycle party. The most active of these were the Energy Expo group and the culture group who arranged some events in the summer of 2011 as well as the core group, which continues to be active.
A number of organisational meetings were held to plan the public events of Omstilling Ry. Two of the meetings were held in the common house of the co-housing development where some of the organisers lived at time. The third was held at a nearby [private] school.
A considerable amount of groundwork had been put in before the first public meeting. The founding members had been talking to people for over a year before the first event (e.g. talking to people in the supermarket, talking to people in the street and at the market etc.). They also handed out flyers and, consequently, there were high levels of awareness and lots of people knew about the meetings.
It was a new form of movement and approach - the kind of which hadn’t been seen in the national context for several years. The last time there was a really big social movement in Denmark was in the 1970s when there was the anti-nuclear power movement. Nuclear power was never started in Denmark because of that movement. During the 80s, 90s and 00s there were fewer movements and people were less involved in politics. When Transition came along, it seemed like a new type of collective activism – unlike older movements such as the pro-bike one, Friends of the Earth and other big and formally organised movements like Greenpeace that did not appear particularly inclusive. The Transition movement seemed to be a completely new approach:
“The combination of doing something, as a person - doing something in your community and thinking about, working actually for the global good, was really new to people, that we can do something together.”
The proximity (both in time and distance) of the COP 15 climate conference held in Copenhagen in December 2009 and, particularly, the failure to reach an agreement influenced people and provided the momentum necessary to start Omstilling Ry. Specifically, it justified the need for a citizen led process:
“We can’t wait for the politicians, look, they’re not doing anything, they can’t do anything about the climate; we have to do it together”.
Indeed, the article which first mentioned Transition took this angle - highlighting that it was important not to wait for politicians to do things.
Important preceding events:
The formation of the core group of organisers who put on the first meetings:
The formation of Transition Denmark: This happened between the first meeting and the official launch which was the launch meeting. Maria attended and met some of the people involved including a “Transition Trainer”. It gave them ideas of where to go and how to do it. They also invited one of the people to speak at their launch meeting so it was also important for that. They thought that the model would spread but they are still the only real established group.
Events that followed:
Effectively all of the activity that Omstilling Ry undertook after this CTP was a result of it, including all the subsequent CTPs. Without the support that was generated, the whole initiative might have just died. MT gave the contrasting example of Agenda 21 which was established in the 1990s but then petered out. Six dance workshops were held in the Summer of 2011 that came out of the Transition meeting. They also wanted to develop a garden and common house and that project is still going on in partnership with Omstilling Ry.
As the interviewee claims succinctly:
“This is what set us on, okay, so we got the people and the ideas and the support that we could go on … the next one, the energy expo or fair, that group that made that was formed I think in the second of our big meetings”
Resistance to Open Space at the Vision meeting:
At the launch meeting, one particular participant got frustrated with the format. In hindsight, the organisers came to understand that this was because he was passionate about achieving a Transition but was not convinced that the approach would succeed. He wanted them to explain how they were going to change people’s habits etc, and they couldn’t. They decided to use open space at the visions meeting to structure some of the time and activities rather than have a big open discussion. Some people weren’t familiar with the approach and found it rigid. They didn’t want to follow the structure and wanted to talk about things when they wanted.
The two interviewees disagreed on whether they realized this was a CTP at the time. They were not necessarily thinking about it in this way at the time.
They were thrilled with the level of interest that it generated. They were really happy that it was going to happen in the way that they had imagined it. It was, therefore, seen as an important step in the development of the initiative. However, whilst they thought that this level of interest was going to be maintained throughout the lifespan of the project in the following months and years, they came to realize that it wasn’t very easy to really engage with people and get them involved on a regular basis, more than just coming and listening at a meeting.
In relation to their overall objectives, it gave them a lot of hope that they could achieve something rigid - that this was a good model. They became very optimistic and positive about the change that they could create.
They learned that the community has lots of ideas. They didn’t expect this, so they had prepared some ideas of things that could be done in the town and what people could talk about. However, people had lots of ideas so this surprised them.
In relation to the previous point, they developed an understanding of the difficulty of engaging with the public and of involving them in projects. They continued to have monthly open meetings after these three launch events, but they found that this wasn’t a very good way of engaging with the public and getting them involved in project activity. This led to the cancellation of a summer party due to lack of interest (perhaps partly due to the proximity of the summer holidays) and led to a reassessment of the organisitional processes of the initiative [see CTP 97].
They learned that it was easier to get people to come to one-off talks and meetings than to contribute to projects in more substantive ways. However, they also learned to be pragmatic about their events and what could be achieved. Therefore, it was a balance between doing something that went beyond just talking, but also that was achievable. An early project idea of the food group was to purchase a ‘cultural house’ within the town but this was too big a project at that point.
They also learned that they needed to collect all the email addresses of interested people. At the visions meeting they had relied on some of the groups self-organizing but they later found out that some of the people had never been contacted by the group leaders.
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