Transition Towns Maroondah

Hi - Transition Towns Maroondah started about 3 years ago. Maroondah is a large municipality in Melbourne's outer eastern suburbs, with a population of over 100,000. The opposite problem from Bruny Island! (A place I can just remember from early childhood. Hi Bruny Is people!)

TTM grew out of a climate action group, which was before my time. In November 2009, we held an information night in a hall provided by Council, and had about 70 people turn up, which was great. We've had more success at running awareness-raising events (film nights or speakers) than at attracting people to do stuff, and to be committed, but there is a small body of willing workers - maybe up to 30 people who are involved, at least on and off. We have a core group of 5, with the membership having changed quite a lot in the 3 years, but there are still 2 of us from the original group, which does provide continuity.

We tried having Special Interest Groups, but this did not work well, with the possible exception of the transport group. It makes sense for this group to be Maroondah-wide. (The transport group are not meeting at the moment, but there are rumours of a revival.) We are beginning to find that setting up projects in different suburbs seems to be a more successful way of working.
 
This year we've had a great partnership with Council, particularly through the WasteLess Household Challenge, which was a series of workshops where households learned how to drastically reduce our waste to landfill. At the end of the workshops, the group overall had reduced their waste by 80%, just be learning the finer points of recycling (so much more can be recycled than is generally known!) and how to avoid packaging, or re-use it and so on. It was a really enjoyable set of workshops, run by a combined team of council workers and TTM volunteers - a very successful venture, barring the fact that it was such a small group. Which is daunting when you think of the size of Maroondah!

The other two significant projects this year have been firstly Ground to Ground - in partnership with Transition Mooky, a neighbouring group. G2G is collecting coffee grounds from cafes to use as fertiliser or in the compost or worm farm, and to keep them out of landfill. This one has caught on and there are about 10 people collecting.

The last one is the Croydon Food Swap, which is attracting about 20 people once a month to swap home grown produce. We meet in the gazebo at a lovely primary school, and people really enjoy coming and chatting - such a great way to build community and resilience. It is also proving a good way to collect email. We have a list now of over 200 people.

We changed our name this year - by adding an S to Town. This reflects better the reality that Maroondah is made up of about 10 different suburbs. We have a Strategic Plan and an Action Plan - which took months to write, but was a worthwhile process and has helped us see better where we are heading. Making the Transition model work in a huge city is an interesting challenge, (and I do mean interesting - I find it quite fascinating) and I hope we will all be able to exchange some helpful ideas on the blog.Thanks Lisa for setting it up. Happy transitioning to all!

Jan