Transition Towns are grassroots community projects that aim to increase self-sufficiency and build local resilience to global challenges such as climate change, peak oil, and socioeconomic instability.
The movement began at Kinsale Further Education College in Ireland, where permaculture teacher Rob Hopkins and his students developed an Energy Descent Action Plan to respond to peak oil. Hopkins later moved to Totnes, England, in 2006, where he helped found the first Transition Town– a community-led initiative to foster local resilience through projects focused on energy, food, and economy.
Since then, the Transition Network has expanded internationally to over 60 countries. Unique among environmental movements, Transition Towns emphasize not only practical solutions but also psychological and social change, nurturing skill development, connection, and collective action.
Skill Development and Behavioral Change: Building Lasting Climate Resilience
Central to the Transition movement is the facilitation of skill development as a key climate solution and resilience tool.
This process addresses the fact that many practical skills crucial for sustainability—such as food growing, clothing repair, and resource efficiency– have been lost over time as convenience culture has taken precedence over longevity.
Transition initiatives create hands-on workshops, courses, and community projects that revive these essential skills, enabling people not only to become more self-sufficient but also to share and pass these skills through families and neighbors.
For instance, in Totnes, the original Transition Town, a popular 10-week evening course called “Skilling Up for Powerdown” teaches participants about food, energy, water, and economics, all through the lens of enhancing local resilience.
An incredibly useful training for starting a Transition Initiative is Transition Launch, which teaches people how to set up and run a community-based change-making initiative right where they live.
Practical Workshops and Community Learning
There are also numerous smaller practical workshops, such as herbal walks, natural building, cooking, and cycle maintenance. These workshops are designed to be engaging and inclusive, drawing on the expertise of local elders, experts and practitioners to bridge knowledge gaps.
Through herbal walks, participants not only gain knowledge of local plants and wildlife but also strengthen their bonds with both their community and natural environment.
Natural building workshops teach participants how to construct buildings using sustainable, natural, and locally sourced materials like earth, straw, timber, and stone. These workshops emphasize eco-friendly techniques to build environmentally conscious structures that are energy-efficient, and healthy for people and the planet.
Meanwhile, cycle maintenance courses not only provide instruction on how to perform essential bicycle repairs and upkeep, but also help cyclists gain confidence and practical skills to be a safe cyclist on the road.
Skill-sharing fosters behavioral change by transforming abstract concerns about climate and energy into practical, achievable actions. Learning by doing builds a fundamental sense of “can do” and empowerment, replacing feelings of helplessness with tangible capabilities. These shared learning experiences help build adaptable, supportive networks essential for collective problem-solving and long-term sustainability.
By nurturing both individual skills and community connections, Transition Towns not only reduce ecological footprints but also strengthen the social fabric necessary to sustain environmental efforts over time. Furthermore, as skills are passed on within communities, they create a multiplying effect—giving the Transition Town movement a legacy of resilience that extends beyond any one person, project or generation.
Expanding Skill-Sharing Across the Network
Transition hubs across the transition network have run repair cafés, gardening courses, energy-saving workshops, local currency initiatives, and numerous practical projects that bring learning and action together. These efforts contribute to a culture shift where sustainability becomes normalized, encouraging ongoing participation and deeper engagement.
Repair Cafés: Repair Cafés allow community members to bring broken household items (clothes, small appliances, bikes) for free repair by skilled volunteers. The goal is to reduce waste, save money, and share repair skills. This promotes a culture of fixing rather than discarding, reducing landfill waste and fostering community sharing. Combined with the transition network’s focus on skill sharing, the number of skilled volunteers grows over time so no community member is overly relied upon to perform repairs. Transition Pasadena has run Repair Cafés in California since 2013, involving city staff and volunteers, and offering extensive repair activities for electronics, clothing, and household items.
Gardening Courses: Community gardening and food-growing courses equip participants with skills in organic cultivation, composting, seed saving, and sustainable garden design. In Transition Town Lewes, regular gardening workshops and community orchards help restore local food sovereignty while strengthening neighborhood ties through shared green spaces.
Crystal Palace Transition Town’s Community Garden offers another inspiring example. What began as a small local food-growing project has evolved into a thriving hub for gardening and food-related initiatives. Today, it regularly hosts events and workshops on composting, foraging, and permaculture, providing a space where residents can both learn and connect.
Energy Savings Workshops: Transition groups across the network have implemented hands-on energy projects that reduce emissions while empowering households and communities to take action. For example, Totnes, UK facilitated a street-by-street program where neighbors met in small groups to learn about energy, water, food, and transport. In its first year, around 550 households cut an average of 1.3 tonnes of CO₂ per year each (saving ~£570 per household).
Community Energy Cooperatives: Transition members in Lewes, UK helped establish OVESCO, a community energy co-op. Together they’ve installed around 6 MW of local solar power, and offer free energy-advice workshops and drop-in sessions on bills, home efficiency, and renewables.
Global Diffusion and Local Adaptation
From its UK origins, the Transition Towns model has spread to over 60 countries worldwide, including diverse contexts in Europe, North America, Australia, Latin America, and Asia. Each community adapts the core principles to its unique social, cultural, and environmental setting.
For example, in the US Southwest, initiatives in places like Joshua Tree, California focus on desert-appropriate permaculture and water conservation, while community efforts in Toulouse, France established “micro-forests” through the Miyawaki method to rapidly create dense, biodiverse urban ecosystems. The creation of these micro-forests expands on the city’s already established connection to Japanese landscaping as Toulouse is home to the remarkable Jardin japaonais Pierre-Baudis.
This flexibility allows the movement to thrive globally, making sustainability locally relevant while demonstrating how local priorities, cultures, and resources shape diverse transition projects worldwide.
Inner Transition: Emotional Processing for Collective Resilience
Transition Towns highlight that sustainable change requires transforming not only infrastructure and behavior but also values, emotions, and relationships.
“Inner Transition” is a concept and movement, often associated with the global Transition Network, that focuses on the psychological, emotional, spiritual, and relational changes necessary for people and communities to shift from unsustainable ways of living to more resilient, connected, and meaningful ones.
It emphasizes personal and collective well-being and aims to integrate inner work with external practical projects, ensuring the “head, heart, and hands” are aligned to foster sustainable change.
By integrating practices from psychology and social change with community action, they offer a holistic model of resilience. This approach unleashes collective genius, turning fear and uncertainty into hope and empowerment—a powerful narrative as communities worldwide adapt to global environmental challenges.
Confronting emotions directly helps participants build personal resilience, preventing burnout and sustaining long-term engagement. In this way, hope and imagination are cultivated as practical tools, inspiring members to envision and work toward a positive, sustainable future.
This emotional work transforms despair into “applied optimism,” motivating collective action.
How Transition Towns Foster Hope and Agency
Transition Towns empower citizens by fostering a sense of ownership over their community’s future and encouraging proactive, pragmatic solutions.
Participants develop new skills, launch local enterprises, and collaborate with community members to integrate resilience into local planning.
The movement encourages “doing stuff” and learning by experimentation, making resilience a learned skill.
The transition network offers online courses and events which can be found here with 2 upcoming webinars in October 2025.
Additionally, you can view where there may be transition groups, trainers and hubs near you with this map on the transition network website.
