REconomy Project update, January 2013

We’re going to do a monthly or bi-monthly update with important project news. This might at some stage morph into a newsletter, but for now this is also featured in the monthly round-up over on Transition Culture, and also in the Transition Newsletter.

This month has seen a flurry of activity in the REconomy team with a surge of new year energy…

Front cover of soon to be released summary report

We have just started a new Economic Evaluation project with Transition Town Brixton, and we’re looking forward to seeing how this process works in a city setting. This will build on the learnings from the work in Totnes and also Hereford. We’re excited about the soon to be released final report for Totnes, and the high level of ownership from our local councils, colleges, community orgs and business groups for the resulting 3 year plan to transform our local economy. Here’s more info about that work and the reports released so far.

There seems to be a lot of interest around the network about this process, and so we have decided that ‘How to do an Economic Evaluation’ will be the pilot for our first online training offer. We hope to have this available by around May, and will be looking for places that want to try this out and give us feedback – more info soon.

You tell us that meeting face to face is a great way to connect with other REconomists, so one of our aims for this year is to help regional and local REconomy events to take place. We’re developing an ‘event in a box’ that can be used to design and deliver your own event, with our support if needed, and we’re trying this out with Sustaining Dunbar, near Edinburgh, in March where a REconomy event is being delivered with their local council. There will also be the 2nd annual local entrepreneur forum in Totnes in March.

This year is shaping up to be much more international, and Shane has just been on a ‘road-trip’ to Brazil, Spain, Switzerland and Germany to connect with local REconomy activity there. We’ll be sharing his observations via our blog from next week, seeing what we can learn from these places and taking more of their needs into account within our project.

REconomy Project recently moved to the domain here at www.reconomy.org as part of a non-monetary exchange with ReCitizen. For this we thank Storm Cunningham, CEO of ReCitizen, who gave us the domain. He has started up recitizen.org and would be very interested in your views about his site, so in exchange we happily post this request on his behalf.

Finally, if you are an avid facebook cross-poster, and would be thrilled to share things relevant to REconomy with our growing international facebook audience (1,100 at last count, only 30% UK) we’d love to hear from you.

We’re looking to set up a small team that is plugged into the social media outlets and can find for us the most useful articles, blogs and resources. Do get in touch with us if you’d like to find out more. We’re especially interested in having more female perspectives, and from a range of countries.

If transforming your local economy excites you, explore further the REconomy Project for advice and resources. There are also useful articles, funding announcements and discussions on our Facebook page (like us to get these) or via Twitter. If you have any suggestions or ideas about how the project could best help you, please let us know via fb or our contact page.

Main image: Snow Man, Andy McQueen