Twenty-six people interested in organizing a Transition Initiative for Kamloops met on Wednesday, February 12, after a public meeting two and a half weeks before attended by 140 people. We went through a preliminary “Why are we here” exercise, and came up with our official name, “Transition Kamloops”. The name is not particularly original, but it serves our purpose well.

What is a Transition Town, you ask? Since 2006, there has been a growing Transition Town movement, which began in the UK and has since spread around the world. The idea is simple. Communities world-wide, due to their increasing dependence on resources coming from faraway, on increasingly expensive and environmentally damaging fossil fuels, and on an increasingly unstable and unfair economic system are in need of major change. The changes needed include a shift to much greater local self-reliance for food, energy, and our economic system. The change will come whether we want it to, whether we plan on it, or not. If we are pro-active, the change is likely to have a much happier outcome. . To learn more, go the international website: www.transitionnetwork.org.

We have not yet got a mission statement but the following five statements gives an idea of where we hope to go.

• Empowering our community through sustainability, food, energy and culture.
• Attract people to act together toward a sustainable life.
• A hub that connects positive things already happening and identifies gaps, raises awareness, creates space for discussion, …
• Will provide a flexible infrastructure to support initiatives in Kamloops to make peoples’ lives better.
• Will interconnect and support sustainable projects, reach out to new initiatives that contribute to greater community resilience while healing our dysfunctional relationship with the Earth.

Transition Launch Workshop
We will be organizing a Transition Launch Workshop offered by Michelle Colussi, a co-founder of Transition Victoria (second transition town in Canada), and the first and current lead Transition Trainer in Canada (since 2009) on March 14-15 which will be an event with a modest fee, open to the public on a first come-first serve basis.

For further information, our email address is: transitionkamloops(at)gmail.com.