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Alliance for Sustainable Communities

Lehigh Valley PA

Home / Act Locally / Collaborative Efforts & Structures / Transitions U

Transitions U

Transitions U is an essential underpinning of the community building, the community solidarity, and the learning needed to transition to a more sustainable way of living.

Transitions U:

  • can provide workshops, trainings, hands-on learning, strategizing sessions, and think tank sessions for learning, exploring, and mastering both the skills and the thinking needed for getting to a sustainable way of living;
  • takes place in a variety of community venues so as to be accessible to people and organizations throughout the Lehigh Valley;
  • provides a means, through each local venue, for building community solidarity within different communities of the Greater Lehigh Valley; and
  • is one of the collaborative organizational structures that can engage, empower, and enable people, communities, and movement organizations to take action, especially when working synergistically with the other collaborative organizational structures.

Vision

Transitions U will be well-known and well-used throughout the Lehigh Valley as a major educational resource regarding the re-skilling and the re-thinking needed for transitioning to sustainable communities and grounded in the core Transition Initiative thinking that it will be through community initiative that the converging catastrophes of the 21st century (such as the global climate crisis, peak oil, economic collapse, and the population explosion) can be effectively addressed.

Mission

To provide individuals, households, communities, and transition initiatives with educational opportunities at locations throughout the Greater Lehigh Valley for learning about, exploring, and mastering ways to be effective, resilient, and sustainable.

Goals

  1. re: content — Enlist the sustainability community’s help in establishing the content and the sequences of learning sessions needed for transitioning to community sustainability.
  2. re: venues — Inventory and make connection with suitable hosting sites.
  3. re: re-skilling — Recruit people and organizations to be the passers-on of skills.
  4. re: re-thinking — Recruit people and organizations to help in the examination, evaluation, and development of alternative analyses and strategies for the paradigm shifts that can get us from the current dysfunctional systems to the needed sustainable systems.
  5. re: learning styles — Inventory and provide materials on suitable learning environments and techniques, including presentations, demonstrations, hands-on training, the arts, think-pair-share, world café, open space technique, and other cooperative learning approaches.
  6. re: educational institutions — Support/encourage/disseminate information about the transition/sustainability educational programs of schools and colleges and connect their programs to other programs via TU.
  7. re: communities — Support/encourage/disseminate information about the transition/sustainability educational programs of communities and transition initiatives and connect their programs to other programs via TU.
  8. re: organizations — Support/encourage/disseminate information about the transition/sustainability educational programs of non-profit organizations and connect their programs to other programs via TU.
  9. re: communication and information — Keep people and organizations informed of TU programs via postings on Meetup, social media sites, organizational websites, the Sustainability Commons, campus communication systems, the press.