Transition Southampton

Thanks to all of you who came to our 2013 AGM on 5th March

We began with a review of events and projects, including the heart and sould group (organisers of the AGM), food workshops, transition talks, books for free TREEmendous, bike to basics, carbon footprinting, sustainable homes, water group and 3 rivers rail partnership, grow your community, and Green Hampshire. Each group had also produced a poster to be viewed during the breaks.

After a fun game based around Transition-related things we had done during the year we broke for some yummy food followed by small group discussions.

Everyone attending had put a pin in our map to show where they lived, and we based the small groups around the areas where people seemed to cluster - lordswood, shirley, freemantle, inner avenue, bitterne/bitterne park and st denys/portswood/swaythling/bassett.

Discussion was loosely around the idea of  what helps us feel we "belong" to groups such as Transition, and the resulting written feedback will be discussed by the heart & soul group at their next meeting. A quick round up of responses at the meeting resulted in: shared values, shared food,  socials, projects, support and encouragement, and daft games! A final suggestion raised was that we should meet sometimes as a big group but with space for people to work on individual or group projects. This idea was warmly welcomed - hence our first "drop in" meeting at the 3rd age centre, 7-9pm on Monday 11th.

We concluded with "business", electing our chair, co-chairs, membership secretary and treasurer, along with volunteers for publicity, web help and new co-ordinators for the energy and transport groups. We thanked the outgoing chair (Megan) and outgoing Transport co-ordinator (Chris) for all their hard work.

For more info on any of the projects mentioned above, or too get involved, contact us at info@transitionsouthampton for more information.

We've sold 86 fruit trees and bushes through our TREEmendous Southampton project this year, which pushes our 3 year tree total to 280 new trees for the Southampton area! This year 22 trees are destined for schools and community projects.

The deadline for fruit tree orders for this year has now passed. If you'd be interested in the offer next year, please let us know.
Find out more information about the scheme and some photos from the pick up event of our 'virtual orchard'.

Transition Southampton ran a series of talks held at The Art House that focused on practical actions that we can all take. For more information about the series of talks, please see here.

From a "Buy Nothing New" year to retrofitting your home, green parenting to easy draught proofing, sourdough to seed saving, we had a range of talks covering topics that you could take home and immediately put into use. These were mostly presented by other Transition Southampton members--showing that it's steps that ordinary people can take.

Our members also were kind enough in previous years to open up their homes and gardens--from organic garden workshops to making marmalade, seeing a rainwater harvesting system up close in the loo, or learning how to keep chickens, Transition Southampton members across the city are getting involved in skill-sharing.