Growing the Capacity of Your Local Group

Come learn best practices for growing an effective and well-resourced local group! In this workshop, we will explore “The Five Stages of Transition” and provide other practical tools to help you along your path:

• Tobin McKee will share Cooperation Humboldt’s innovative approach to organizational structure and how they have cultivated distributed leadership throughout their initiative.
• Transition Berkeley Co-Directors, Bonnie Borucki and Linda Currie, will explain how they have built successful partnerships with their local government, schools, and other nonprofits to create and fund community-based projects.
• Sari Steuber and Martin Pepper of Transition Town Media will describe their formula for running effective annual planning sessions, which engage groups in visioning, deepening connections, and committing to projects for the coming year.

This workshop is being offered as part of the 2021 Regenerative Communities Summit. Please click here to learn more and register using our pay-what-you-can donation-based system to participate.

REGISTER FOR THE SUMMIT!

Presenters

Bonnie Borucki is an artist, gardener and activist. After almost 18 years working as a digital artist on games, including SimCity 2000 and several other games, she escaped back into non-virtual world activities, including permaculture design, painting murals, raising her daughter, Celina, and joining Transition Berkeley in 2011. Bonnie is a founding member of the non-profit, We Bee Gardeners and the garden coordinator at Ashby Community Garden in Berkeley. She coordinates Bee Friendly Berkeley, helping to plant native plant pollinator gardens in public spaces. Bonnie is passionate about connecting children and adults with the natural environment and stressing the importance of growing food locally, supporting pollinating insects and birds in our urban environment, and creative community engagement.

Linda Currie is a Co-Founder and Co-Director of Transition Berkeley, the 110th Initiative of the Transition US network. She coordinates Repair Café events and the Essential Skills Repair Training course for high school students. Linda designed and edited the Transition US Water-Saving Edition workbook in 2019 and piloted the Transition Streets program with a group of neighbors in 2015. She is a member the 350 East Bay Berkeley Hub and has served on the Berkeley Climate Action Coalition steering committee and the board of Green Sangha. Linda believes we have the imagination and power in our communities to create a more just and healthy world, starting with ourselves in our neighborhoods and towns.

Don Hall has had the good fortune to participate in the international Transition Towns Movement in a variety of capacities over the past 12 years. Initially serving for two years as the Education and Outreach Coordinator for Transition Colorado, he went on to found and direct Transition Sarasota (Florida) from 2010 to 2016. A certified Transition Trainer and experienced facilitator, Don was named Co-Director of Transition US in 2017 and became its Interim Executive Director in 2020. Don holds a Master’s degree in Environmental Leadership from Naropa University, a certification in Permaculture Design from the Central Rocky Mountain Permaculture Institute, and currently lives in a multigenerational housing cooperative in Boulder, Colorado.

Tobin McKee (they/them) is grant writer and Program Administrator at Cooperation Humboldt. Tobin is a founding member of Worker Owned Humboldt, the Community Health Worker Collaborative, the Cooperative Cannabis Economy Group, and the Jardin Santuario community garden with Centro del Pueblo. Tobin is also a worker-owner at Full Cycle Compost and the Co-Director at Middleway Network, a project of the Ink People Center for the Arts, fostering the development of free wellness education and services for underserved populations.

Martin Pepper is originally from England and has been involved with Transition Town Media since 2011. He has supported numerous Transition initiatives over the years and spoke at the 2017 US National Gathering. In his professional career, he manages a team of IT Professionals at a leading energy services company. He is actively involved with a number of other non-Profits, and regularly serves as a trustee or board member with them. His hobbies and other interests include game and toy design, and he is a keen sportsman. He holds a Bachelor of Science Degree in Chemical Physics and Computer Science, and lives in Media, Pennsylvania with his wife and two children.

Sari Steuber is a member of the initiating group of Transition Town Media (TTM), which started in 2009, and has been part of the core group ever since. She was the team manager of a software development team at a firm in Philadelphia before retiring in January 2008. Sari has been involved in many aspects of TTM since then, both administrative and project-oriented, including a Solarize campaign, a town-wide composting program, a low-interest loan program for small businesses, a FreeStore, and Zero Waste and Inner Transition groups. Starting in 2011, she was an initiating member of the regional hub of Mid-Atlantic Transition Towns, MAST (Mid-Atlantic States Transitioners). Sari finds Transition work enlivening on many levels: intellectually, practically, and spiritually.