The Transition Town workshop was a wonderfully inspiring afternoon. Thanks to the 40 or so participants who came and joined in on the somewhat chaotic, yet strangely exhilarating meeting of minds. With Morag and Evan's guidance, we have begun to sketch out the path ahead of us, from here to sustainability.

We started with introductions around the circle. Many of us have been moved by the opportunity presented by the crises unfolding on the world stage: climate change, peak oil, and financial breakdown.

Click "read more" to see the rest of this report, including links to pics and a video...

We then had a quick brainstorm to list all the things Maleny has already achieved; our community has already built some wonderful institutions, systems and relationships which put us in great position to start this project. Co-operatives, community organisations, a wealth of volunteers, a long history of successful collaborative action.

Next we passed around slips of paper of different colours. We were asked to visualise walking down the main street of Maleny in 2030, and imagine what it might be like if we continued down this road towards sustainability. On the green paper, we wrote about where Maleny 2030 gets its food. On the blue, we wrote about how we get around. On the yellow, we wrote about where our energy comes from. And on the orange ones, we wrote other 'wild card' ideas.

We then broke into small groups and discussed what we'd wrote. I found this a lot of fun, as people had come up with a remarkable variety of visions, which I enjoyed hearing about. Of course, there were several strong threads of commonality too -- an encouraging sign that there are some strong paths forward.

The results of this brainstorm have been typed up (thanks Franklin!) and you can download them here (257KB Word Doc). The highlighted text was unclear; feel free to send through corrections. Have a look through there and see if it produces more sparks; if it does, then please bring your ideas to the next workshop!

After a break for tea and snacks, we moved into a discussion about how to move the Transition Town project forward. We tried to list the major elements of the project (eg food, water, energy, waste, economy, etc, etc) but this turned out to be quite difficult because there are so many important areas to cover! If we can break things down in some way, we should be able to organise ourselves into sub-groups of 3 or more to focus on a particular topic or project.

Morag and Evan may only be available to help us for these first two workshops, so we need to find a way to organise ourselves to operate without them!

A short video of the day can be viewed on YouTube here:
http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=IR53p5-hy2M

There are also a few pictures here:
http://tinyurl.com/5jv9fe

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If you are interested in coming to the next workshop on November 8th (2-5pm), please contact us to reserve your place.

Thanks everyone who turned up to the first one for a hugely enjoyable and inspiring day!