It's the economy that must change. Where Living Communities differs.

Isn’t it funny that at various times in history it just seems like the perfect moment for certain things to happen, no matter what? If you look throughout history and wonder, what would life had been like if Lenin hadn’t led the Russian revolution or if Stephenson hadn’t invented the locomotive or Henry Ford just remained happy tinkering in his shed or indeed, Adolf Hitler had been killed in a first world war battle…  

No matter who is born into this world, I believe circumstances make certain solutions inevitable. If Stephenson died from some 18^th century childhood disease, two contemporaries, William Hedley and Timothy Hackworth would have perhaps designed the first railway locomotives instead.   It’s very hard to be totally original. So I’m also fully certain that the locomotive they would have designed would have had many similarities as well as many differences to the one that Stephenson developed.  

So too I believe it is with many other things. Lets look at the idea of resilience that is really starting to sweep the world and almost poke its head up into the mainstream consciousness.

The Transition Town movement is perhaps the most successful idea on community resilience that has spread throughout the world. The last figure I read said there were some 250 certified towns in transition throughout the UK, Ireland, North America and Australasia and perhaps a total of 1500 unofficially.   Yet there are also many other different approaches to relocalisation that haven’t spread as rapidly but can offer equally important and in many cases, better solutions. I believe Living Communities is one of those along with others, like the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies in the US.  

Living Communities™ gets compared to Transition Towns often. However, as I described earlier, although similar ideas can evolve from a common moment in history, Living Communities has a different focus than Transition Towns.  

LC and TT have similarities. Both methods require bottom up community driven initiative and both aim to improve the outcomes for communities.   I guess the main differences between Living Communities and Transition Towns is what we believe the focus and method should be to achieve better outcomes in all our communities.   I’ve put together a brief summary below, which hopefully gives you a snapshot of the main differences as well as some similarities.

 

Living Communities	Transition Towns
Economic change driver	Peak Oil and Climate Change resilience drivers
Aims to set up local businesses that ‘plug leaks’ in the local economy.	Aims to reduce community dependence on fossil fuel and reduce carbon footprint
Builds awareness around the need for an alternative economic model and how that model can contribute to dealing with environmental and social issues.	Builds awareness around peak oil and climate change and the need to undertake a community lead process to rebuild resilience and reduce carbon
Connects groups in the local community	Connects groups in the local community
Builds bridges to local government	Builds bridges to local government
Connects other Living Communities	Connects other Transition Towns
Presents entrepreneurial opportunities and assistance for local entrepreneurs in all areas of the local economy such as; food, energy, transport, finance, health, education, arts, tourism, manufacturing, communications, retail etc.	Forms groups to look at all the key areas of life (food, energy, transport, health, heart & soul, economics & livelihoods, etc) in a community and sets up projects based on these.
Delivers business opportunities to strengthen the local economy based on community visioning and research. Provides ongoing support to enterprises and advocacy for change at policy level	Launches a community defined, community implemented "Energy Descent Action Plan" over a 15 to 20 year timescale
Produces a range of locally owned community specific enterprises that strives to rebuild the economic resilience lost at community level as a result of neo-classical economic approach.	Produces a coordinated range of projects across all these areas of life that strives to rebuild the resilience lost as a result of cheap oil and reduce the community's carbon emissions drastically
Uses local knowledge and creativity to create solutions supported by professional facilitation, coaching and resources	Uses local knowledge and creativity to generate solutions supported by Transition Town resources
7 step process driven by a local community group	12 step process driven by a local community group
Requires start-up funding	Requires no start-up funding to begin

While peak oil and climate change may be a concern to a Living Community, it is not the primary driver for change and motivation in the Living Communities™ process. The focus for Living Communities™ is to help reform the economic system at a community level.  

By focusing on developing an alternative value system for trade and business (two activities people already do with enthusiasm) profound solutions to energy scarcity and carbon pollution can be achieved as a result, along with other issues affecting communities. For example, changing the way we place value on an economic transaction, we believe, encourages economic development thinking rather than economic growth thinking to improve our lives and our communities.  

Economic ‘development’ should take into account the quality of economic transactions and include interactions other than financial - such as human relationships - rather than simply requiring a greater quantity of financial transactions as per the traditional economic growth model.  

In the transaction value example, a purchase from a locally owned enterprise (held privately or by the community) is a higher quality transaction than one from a non-locally owned enterprise because the dollar spent in the locally owned business will circulate in the local economy longer. There may also be added benefits of community relationships forged with the locally owned business you purchase from.

To obtain the same local economic benefit when doing business with a non-locally owned enterprise, a greater quantity of transactions would have to be made. At least 3 and sometimes more, for every one locally owned transaction in actual fact. It is also quite likely that you would never form a relationship with an owner who may live in another state or even another country.  

And because we require increasing quantities of transactions to keep our economy in ‘positive growth’, we are placing enormous pressure on our finite resources.  

However, this doesn’t mean we should put a halt to enterprise because it has been used up until now to increase the quantity of transactions.   Enterprise is embedded in our society and has enormous positive effects on our well-being, our communities and our general development. We need to realise that it is only by improving the way enterprise functions and the values it displays that we can ever hope to become more resilient and sustainable.  

Local entrepreneurs, networked and working together for their common benefit are also a benefit to the whole community.

The recently awarded Nobel Prize in Economics to Elinor Ostrom dispels the myth of the tragedy of the commons and demonstrated that local decision making about resource allocation is more effective than big business or big government.

The co-founder of the cradle-to-cradle design movement Bill McDonough suggests, “commerce is relatively quick, essentially creative, highly effective and efficient and fundamentally honest because we can’t exchange value with one another for very long if we don’t trust each other.”  

We agree. This is why local community level entrepreneurs are so important.

Our focus on the local economy ensures that the needed change can come quicker, be just as "creative, highly effective, efficient and fundamentally honest". 

Perhaps this is the most important difference between Living Communities™ and Transition Towns. The Living Communities™ process focuses on the immediate development of the local economy via discovering tangible local business opportunities for local entrepreneurs. We believe we can tap into community initiative far quicker by starting the focus on the economy rather than peak oil or climate change.  

Put simply, why spend time telling people about peak oil and climate change and how it will harm their community and why they need to do something about it THEN try and get them to take action to build resilience?

Living Communities™ seeks to take action to build resilience by improving on something communities actually are already doing anyway – local business, local trade and local enterprise.  

The Transition Town model is a positive step to help empower local people who feel frustrated at a lack of action about the issues of Peak Oil and Climate Change. It is fantastic for raising awareness and increasing community participation. However, despite some transition initiatives having been operating for nearly 5 years, they are still only just beginning to plan business enterprises for their communities.

Living Communities aims to have communities able to start-up enterprises in less than half this time.  

My feeling is that a focus on surviving peak oil, climate change and economic collapse doesn’t necessarily attract the best entrepreneurs in the community. Given that, perhaps the TT model role is of an important awareness raiser and educational tool that has a naturally low barrier to initiation - hence the take-up rate.  

Living Communities™ role therefore, along with more established organisations like Business Alliance for Local Living Economies and the New Economics Foundation, might be to engage with energetic TTs and help them along to the next level.