A guide to Transition for RBE supporters: Page 2

Creating Your Local Assembly: Get Your Dream Team.

Before you do anything, make sure you have a core team of committed and highly-motivated people who understand the vision. One person is not enough: 5-10 is the best place to start, but getting a team of 12 on board is the end goal. If you haven’t already, create a local assembly on Facebook (Click here for more info). You’ll organize efforts, events and projects from the Facebook group while trading services on Reddit. Each assembly member has a unique role to fill- it’s here that you’ll choose which projects you want to work on first and who will do them.

Roles

Each team member focuses on a specific aspect of transition and develops a small satellite team around their efforts. These new members should come from outside the seed group so everyone has time to devote all their attention to one particular area. It’s every member’s responsibility to network with other residents and organizations to spread the word, although the group as a whole can get together when necessary.

- Business: Gets local businesses on board with the time credit program described below.

- Food: Works on food security: This member creates a buyer’s club for the assembly or otherwise approaches landowners to do landsharing- where a landowner allows a gardener to farm on their property in exchange for a share of the crops. Local schools, churches and next door neighbors are good places to start. A natural extension of the buyer’s club is a supper club- where members of the group rotate meal preparation to save time and money. This can only work if people live close together.

Food buying club: http://www.foodclub.org/

Land Sharing: http://www.landshare.net/

- Energy: The goal of the energy transition manager is to work on energy independence in the form of a neighborhood solar co-op. You can save up to 30% if you buy solar power in bulk, and canvassing the neighborhood is a great way to get the word out. Partnering with existing organizations is the best bet here. We want to add a twist to our solar panels: The panels will be collectively owned, with a requirement to perform three hours of community service weekly (on a sustainability project) to retain them.

- Education: Builds relationships with local schools to help make open schooling a reality. These relationships can then be used to get the principals on board with the community credit program. “Open schooling” means that schools are free and open for 2 hours after classes to anyone who wants to teach a class/share a skill.

- Recruitment: Creates advertising, passes out flyers, builds buzz, with a goal to sign up as many for the global assembly’s projects (listed below) as possible. An initial goal is to grow your seed groups on Facebook and Reddit to at least 100 people so real expansion can begin.

- Project Manager: Someone who creates community projects, vets them and distributes time credits to team leaders to pay volunteers. 

- Legal: A person who has legal knowledge and has preferably worked with nonprofits before.

- Social Media: Social Media managers manage the local assembly’s facebook and reddit pages, with the goal of building an active group.  

- Government:  Builds relationships with local government officials and works to slowly introduce them to the vision.

 - Transportation: Arranges carpools.

- Media: Works on public image and news stories, actively carries out the media plan to build robust assembly-managed local alternatives. Controlling the message is essential.

- Housing: The housing manger looks for ways to save money on housing costs- and the main way (other than cutting work-for-shelter deals with landlords) is sharing a home with 1 or 2 other group members while splitting the expenses.

If you have more people, you can add positions like: 

- Accountant: Keeps track of the inflow/outflow of time credits, monies and deals with whatever taxes should they be necessary.

- Property: This member creates a local community land trust to begin accepting land donations.

These are only examples, and it’s okay to start small. The important thing is to get started. Pick the roles you feel are most essential and expand later. This is just a core list of skills that are helpful for most transition teams.

Making Decisions

Stay away from consensus-based decision-making like the plague! It’s slow, crippling and has paralyzed far too many activist groups (poor decision-making is why Occupy failed). Instead, if you want to make sure you’re making the right choice, use 66% or 75% supermajorities. Create a group constitution to spell out how you will operate, your core values, aims and goals.

Our Value Proposition

We can't succeed without buy-in from the larger community. "Selling" our vision won't be hard as long as we stay reasonable. It’s not unattainable or out-of-reach: We want to build stronger neighborhoods that save money. Our goal is to create abundant, prosperous communities where everyone’s basic needs can be met if we all pitch in 10 hours of community service per week (Contributism). Avoid talking about a moneyless economy or eliminating money in this early phase- that will only scare people away. Keep the conversation directed towards working less and having more while preparing your community in case the food or energy supply is ever disrupted. All we need is 5% of the local population to participate, before the rest are forced to join.

That’s really all we can ask for. From there, we can work on automation to eliminate most of those hours. 

Next Page: http://globalassembly.blogspot.com/2015/09/page-3-stages-of-transition.html

Previous Page: http://globalassembly.blogspot.com/2015/09/a-guide-to-global-assembly-and.html