My name is Danielle Cohen, and this site is all about my exploration of inclusion and the Transition Movement.
I’ve been involved in Transition Town Stoke Newington (TTSN) since March 2009. In November that year, our monthly social event was taking place on a Thursday evening. The same night, a 19-year old man was stabbed and left to die just a few streets away. This tragedy, sadly not an isolated event, reminded me that we were still struggling to broaden the initiative’s relevance and appeal, even though we had acknowledged a lack of diversity in TTSN before. I felt sad that on the same evening as we were trying to persuade people to embrace a positive new vision of the future, a young man was killed in our neighbourhood and couldn’t see how we could go out to our community and ask them to be concerned about Transitioning to a low-energy future when such things were happening on our doorstep.
This was the start of a personal inquiry into inclusion in Transition which culminated in convening a group of people in TTSN to collaboratively explore this, and eventually writing my dissertation for an MSc in Human Ecology on the topic.
