What If… we could reimagine our future as thriving, fairer, more resilient and more connected? How could that vision help us to move forward and take practical action towards a better future?

Transition Together have just brought out a free step-by-step guide to building a community vision, a great tool for making local change. The guide is designed to help groups and communities open up their imagination and start exploring what a better future could look like in their context. It helps to build a shared vision of what’s possible, a vital starting point to exploring how we can work together to make it a reality.

The guide is for any group that wants to expand their vision of what’s possible in the future and explore how they want to work towards it. It is designed for starting conversations within a local community and to create a space to hear different perspectives and needs. The exercise can also be used to investigate a single theme or issue, like food or transport, or by a group which isn’t place-based but wants to reimagine the future of their area of interest – like the arts or youth provision.

If you are from a community group that wants to invite the wider community into this process you might like to do this exercise within your organisation first. This lets you become really familiar with it before running it with a bigger audience, but also allows your members to fully contribute and explore your priorities and focus in a deeper, richer way.

The guide is based on the experience of the Transition Movement, a network of community groups in 50 countries; people working together locally to address the big, complex problems of our time. They do this by reimagining our local communities, and then taking practical action to help them become thriving, inclusive, more resilient places for everyone. ‘Transition’ simply means change and how we get from one thing to another – from a damaging, polluting, unequal present to a fairer, more resilient, regenerative future for all.

There are some 300 local Transition groups in communities across the UK. They are supported by Transition Together in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, and by Scottish Communities Climate Action Network (SCCAN) in Scotland. This approach to visioning was developed during the global coronavirus pandemic and is inspired by Rob Hopkins’ work around What if, and the 3 horizons framework (https://www.h3uni.org/). This framework was developed to help navigate situations where there is a high level of uncertainty and also a high level of potential for change. It’s an approach that has been tried and tested by many local Transition groups working to take action from the ground up, and helped them go on to make changes in their community.

Find out more: www.transitiontogether.org.uk

You can down the guide HERE