Our Values

We respect resource limits and create resilience
The urgent need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, greatly reduce our reliance on fossil fuels and make wise use of precious resources is at the forefront of everything we do.

We promote inclusivity and social justice
The most disadvantaged and powerless people in our societies are likely to be worst affected by rising fuel and food prices, resource shortages and extreme weather events. We want to increase the chances of all groups in society to live well, healthily and with sustainable livelihoods. We explore rank and privilege and practice overcoming domination in groups.

We adopt self-organisation and participatory processes of decision making
Rather than centralising or controlling decision making we prefer to work with everyone so that it is practiced at the most appropriate, practical and empowering level

We pay attention to balance
We create space for reflection, celebration and rest to balance the times when we're busily getting things done. We explore different ways of working which engage our heads, hands and hearts and enable us to develop collaborative and trusting relationships.

We are part of an experimental, learning network
Transition is a real-life, real-time global social experiment. Being part of a network means we can create change more quickly and more effectively, drawing on each other's experiences and insights. We want to acknowledge and learn from failure as well as success.

We freely share ideas and power
Transition is a grassroots movement, where ideas can be taken up rapidly, widely and effectively because each community takes ownership of the process themselves. Transition looks different in different places and we want to encourage rather than unhelpfully constrain that diversity.

We collaborate and look for synergies
The Transition approach is to work together as a community. We will look for opportunities to build creative and powerful partnerships across and beyond the Transition movement and develop a collaborative culture, creating open decision-making processes and facilitating connections between groups and people..

We encourage positive visioning and creativity
Our primary focus on developing and promoting positive possibilities. We believe in using creative ways to engage people to imagine the future they want to inhabit through the generation of new stories, whilst having fun and celebrating success along the way.

Social Justice

We are in the middle of two interconnected and overlapping emergencies. On the one hand we face the twinned climate and ecological breakdown, and on the other hand a crisis of growing inequality and social injustice within local, national, and global societies. In the absence or failure of government to deal with these complex issues, community-based groups such as ourselves, TTB, assume an important role in ensuring community sustainability and resilience.

As one of the first inner-city 'Transition Towns', formed in one of the most renowned multicultural districts of London, TTB has always aimed to be an inclusive group that, at the very least, represents the broad demographic spectrum that makes Brixton such a uniquely vibrant and wonderful place to live, work, socialise, shop, visit and/or just be in. With that in mind, our approach to developing or supporting any community-based initiative over the years has been to first ask how the initiative addresses a particular need or needs within the local community, and to also assess the different ways in which it might enhance social inclusion. That approach is driven by recognising the long dark shadow of historical issues of social injustice that have shaped and continue to influence the emergence of Brixton today.

Despite our best intentions and efforts, we are first to acknowledge that, similar to many groups in the Transition Network and indeed the environmental movement as a whole, our ambition to be a more diverse and inclusive group have not been altogether as successful as we would like. In other words, our core participants and active supporters do not reflect the socio-economic mix of people who make Brixton such a fantastic place. We can and must do better in our efforts to engage all stakeholders in the community.

Whilst recognising those shortcomings in our core group of active participants, we should also highlight and celebrate some of our successes. From local solar energy production schemes, to numerous food-growing and food-related initiatives, as well as social innovations and social enterprises that focus on revitalising the local economy, many of our main projects and affiliated off-shoots have been effective in supporting different sections of the Brixton community. These include apprenticeships for local young people, addressing some of the basic food needs of marginalised and socially excluded groups such as low-income families and refugees and asylum seekers, and offering energy advice surgeries to vulnerable members of the community, with a particular focus on the needs of migrant communities and people from various religious and ethnic backgrounds.

Our most recent initiative, Vision Brixton 2030, has been enabled by a funding award from the National Lottery-supported 'Transition: Bounce Forward' project. The aim of this initiative is to facilitate and synthesise collective visioning exercises that reflect the common interests and hopes for Brixton by all sections of the community. It is our added hope that this initiative will bring together various community-based organisations and interest groups, and the results will help inform and augment Lambeth Council's Citizens' Assembly-guided strategy, which we hope will be expansive enough to deal not just with the climate and ecological emergency, but also the interrelated issues such as food and fuel poverty that drive social injustices which threaten various aspects of community cohesion, sustainability and resilience.

In our position as one of Brixton's longest-running community-based groups, we acknowledge our responsibility to always highlight and speak out against matters of inequality and social injustice, and actively work to dismantle them, all of the time.

- transitionnetwork.org/news-and-blog/black-lives-matter

Worldwide

There is an urgent need to transition to a more sustainable, low carbon, socially just, future.  The Transition movement is about equipping communities to address the big challenges of climate change, environmental destruction and social injustice. It seeks to imagine and create a better future, inspiring people to work together within local communities to make this future happen. 

The world cannot sustain an economy based on fossil fuels and inequality, and central to the Transition movement is the idea that an environmentally sustainable society is not just about climate and ecological sustainability, but also encompasses social considerations of inclusion and equity.  

Localisation is key and communities are encouraged to find ways of reclaiming the economy, sparking entrepreneurship, reskilling local people, increasing self reliance and weaving webs of connection and support.

The Transition movement has been growing since 2005 and there are thousands of groups spanning across more than 50 countries.

Learn about Who We Are here
and Our Story here