Collecting Stories of Community-Led Change
By Elizabeta Jovanovska 4th July 2024
Be Part of Something Bigger: Share Your Stories of Community-led Change for Resilience and Regeneration!
Transition Network International is excited to launch a new Community research project to help the diverse groups and communities doing Transition, and the movement overall, grow stronger, more effective and impactful. We want to learn from each other’s experiences to create even greater positive change together.
We’re using an innovative tool called Sensemaker to collect your stories, either written or as audio recordings. This way, you can share your own thoughts and insights about your story without external interpretations.
Deborah Benham introduces the Community research project (first 5 min. of the video)
Why get involved?
This is your research as well!
Our goal is to provide valuable information and resources for local groups to
- raise awareness,
- 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.
All the stories we collect and 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?
For the next 3 months, until the end of September, the Sensemaker collector tool will be available online in 8 languages.
- Visit https://tinyurl.com/transition-stories-sensemaker
- 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’ – the meaning making part). It takes about 30-40 minutes.
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.
Share your stories of change here
Deborah Benham goes through the details of the data collector and its process (last 5 min. of the video)
Why now?
Transition is turning 18! As we come of age, 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 and be even more inspired.
Spread the news!
We need your help to spread the word to as many Transitioners as possible and other community-led eco-social change groups.
This is your research! Join us in this exciting project and be part of our shared journey toward resilience and regeneration!
Questions?
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.
Sensemaker is a new generation data collection and analysis tool. Check this video if you’d like to know more in detail.
Yes, all the registered users can submit as many stories as you like. Thank you!
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.
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 answers, including your contact email and any optional demographic data you provide in part 4, will be held on file and visible only to selected members of the staff and contractor team at Transition Network. The demographic data collected in part 4 will not be made public. It will only be shared with specific people where it is relevant for their roles. We will delete the 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 are 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://archive25.transitionnetwork.org/privacy-policy/). For further information, or to request deletion of your data please contact privacy@transitionnetwork.org
Please make sure you’ve entered all the required values. 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!