Developing Practical Projects Guide

Prepared by: Transition Network 2016, updated by Vesna llievska 2025.

Creative Commons 4.0 BY-SA

Practical projects are the hands-on activities you do together with your Transition Initiative. They can bring many benefits, and can help you to:

• Strengthen your group and learn more about how you work together.
• Undertake practical actions that can get you publicity in the local media and familiarity with the local community.
• Partner with other local organisations, and involve new people.
• Have fun and share or learn new skkills.
• Get the satisfaction and sense of empowerment from building a part of your vision of the future!

To support your group during the process of turning your ideas into real action, this guide offers clear and practical approaches to coming up with ideas, implementing, and managing projects that can help youur community become more resilient and connected (see Working Together Well, see Building Bridges, see How to Create Partnerships, see How to Get and Keep People Involved, see Visioning a Post-Transition Future). It may be useful to print out this guide, so you can give it to anyone involved, and refer back to it as your group develops.

Project Stages

Starting and managing any kind of project tends to follow a number of stages. Usually, most Transition projects follow the following stages:

• ·Visioning- What is the idea? What do you want to happen?
• · Planning-Who, what, when, where, how?
• ·Doing- This is the action stage.
• Celebrating -You celebrate together and share your story more widely.
• ·Reflecting You reflect on what you learned, what went well or could be better, and what is next.

Something to consider: people who like to vision, celebrate, and reflect are often not the people who like to plan and do - and vice versa. See if you can find each other's strengths and welcome them all at the appropriate time!

Visioning

1. Follow the energy

Start by coming up with and collecting ideas from your group. See which ideas generate the most enthusiasm and energy. These are the likely good ideas to pursue first. If you are part of an Initiating group please remember that its role can be to support what others want to happen, rather than being the source of all ideas and energy.

2. Create a space for exchange

Use Open Space (and similar event formats) to create a space where people with energy and different ideas can find each other and decide to make something happen (see How to Run an Open Space Event).

3. Start with simple things that give lots of benefits

Doing small things and being successful will bring greater benefits than attempting something ambitious and risky (see Small Practical Project Ideas). If you can't all agree on what should happen, see if you can agree to support one idea now, and another later; or see if you can find another good way forward (see Re-Framing Conflict). Don't do anything that is too controversial, or that is likely to stir up opposition. You can also run your ideas by anyone working in a similar area. For example, if you're going to offer bike maintenance workshops, talk to the local bike shop first and see how you can help them rather than undermine them (see Building Bridges, see Respect for Diversity, see Enhancing Cultural Competence).

4. Make it realistic

Consider the following things to make sure your project is realistic:

• Do you have the skills needed?
• Do you have the capacity in terms of people and resources?
• Once set up, will you need to continue running the project, or will other people take on this role?

If you have a list of several projects then choose a process to help you decide on which ones to begin with. Consent decision making might be a good one (see Decision Making, see Decision by Consent).

5. Imagine the project

Try to get an idea of what the project will look like once it is developed and implemented.Find a time and space to discuss this with your group (see Visioning a Post-Transition Future).

Planning

Once you finish the visioning stage you will have a much better idea of your end goal. Then you can move to the planning stage: starting with your end goal and working backwards to build a timeline of activities and things you need to do. Try to consider all aspects of your project, for all of its stages, such as the effort needed, resources, venues, volunteers, and so on (see Producing a Timeline).

1. Develop a project plan

Thnis will include planning out what happens in each stage; what resources you need; how you will involve more people if needed; the start and end dates of the project; and so on (see How to write a project plan). Also consider if you will have an official project launch and use it to promote your Transition group; how you will document the activities; and how you will measure if your project is successful (see Events to Help Promote Your Project, see Monitoring and Evaluation).

2. Developing your project group

Unless your group is very small, or it is a small one-off project at the very start of Transition,then it usually makes sense to set up a sub-group to focus on this project. If you don't do this, and you focus all your energy on the project, you might risk your core group falling apart. Projects can run alongside the core group without becoming a replacement for it.When this does happen, it is called 'the donut effect', where projects are happening without any core group holding everything together. When this happens, you can lose the more holistic vision of the Transition movement. To avoid this, think about how to connect the project with the core group at the beginning. One of the easiest ways to do this is to have a representative from the project group also involved in the core group.

A project group has many of the same dynamics as a core group, since it's really a slightly different version of the same model. You may benefit from going over with your group some of the aspects of how to co-create an effective group from the beginning (see Effective Groups, see Working Together Well, see Transition in Group Culture, see Feedback Culture,see Building Trust, see How Groups Develop, see How to Deal with Stress in Teams, see Group and Personal Sustainability, see How to Get and Keep People Involved).

3. Think about how the practical activity will go

Some groups actually act it out, so they can see what they haven't thought of! Discuss how you will manage the project. Don't be afraid to have a project coordinator as it can be useful for someone to have an overview of the project. There may be people with project management skills in your group.

A successful practical project involves meeting to decide and plan what you are going to do throughout the life of the project, so consider the following:

• How to run meetings and make decisions (see How to Run Effective Meetings, see Decision Making, see Connective Activities for Meetings).
• Only meet when you need to, this will be mainly for planning activities and making decisions, don't meet for the sake of it.
• At the first meeting decide together how you will make decisions as a group, as there is nothing more likely to cause conflict than people making decisions that have not been agreed (see Re-Framing Conflict, see Sharing and Celebrating Failings).

4. Promotion and sharing

Consider how to promote all the benefits from your project. How might you involve people that are interested in the project? How can you get positive media attention and share your story? Who can you invite to your events? What would add more colour, fun, or depth to the activities you are organizing? (see Building Bridges, see Enhancing Cultural Competence).

5.Who is helping you?

Think about all the potential partners or networks who could help you. This can be relevant,even for small projects, since it can identify people who you may have not thought of as being supportive. It is also a great opportunity to contact people to tell them what you are doing and build an inclusive culture where you share ideas (see Identifying People and Groups to Help You, see Building Bridges, see How to Create Partnerships, see How to Build Networks).

6.Engage your community

Consider how to engage different parts of your community. Getting support from them can really help your project to be successful. It could be as simple as getting the local newspaper to publicise what you are doing, or you could run a launch event for the project.

• Don't forget that your project is an opportunity to get people involved in Transition and it is worth thinking about how that could happen.
• You could even put a call out for volunteers to help. Try to have some really easy things that people can do as well as more involved tasks.

Once your project is ready to go, you have a great opportunity to announce yourself to the wider community through a launch event. It doesn't have to be anything too demanding. It might simply be an open invitation to where the project is based, or something larger if you feel like it.

Doing

This is the phase when you implement all of the planning. Try to stay flexible, share leadership roles, and create a positive group culture. Plan your meetings intentionally so that you will have enough time. Assign clear responsibilities, and consider having a project coordinator to oversee activities (see Leaderfull Groups, see Transition in Group Culture).

Celebrating

Celebrate your efforts with your team and community. Share your success through media,social platforms, and events. Share your learning on the Transition Network or other national websites. Highlight the learning and include creative, fun elements that attract attention and deepen engagement.

Reflecting

Look back on the process to understand what worked, what didn't, and what could be done better.Recognize each person's contributions to boost morale and group sustainability. Use these insights to inform future projects (see Action-Reflection Cycle, see Offering Appreciation and Gratitude).

Helpful questions you can ask:

• What went well?
• What did you learn about your group and how you work together?
• What could you do better next time?
• Is there something else which needs to happen now, to help the project be more effective in the long term?

References

How to write a project plan-Asana

This document, prepared by Transition Network 2016, updated by Vesna llievska 2025,

is released under Creative Commons 4.0 BY-SA license.