Hello all,
Here are the notes from the Transition Coonabarabran meeting held at Cardians Coffee Lounge on Saturday 9th June 2012. We gathered outside The Jolly Cauli as arranged at 11 am and walked to Cardians. Present were Joy, John, Kim, Pete R and Peter T. We finished at 12-40pm.
SBS had a feature in their Town series on 8th June about Totnes, the town in Devon, England that started the Transition Town movement. This is available, seems to be for another 4 days, at http://www.sbs.com.au/ondemand/program/157/Town-With-Nicholas-Crane
We discussed the focus of the last meeting being the decision to interact with the town vision formulated from workshops conducted by Council last year. We agreed with the offer from Kim and Joy to write a letter on behalf of the group to Council as a response to the draft town vision, priorities and proposed activities. Our main feeling about the draft is that the priorities seem to capture the feeling of the citizen meetings but the proposed activities fail to convince that these priorities will be acted on. We think there is a need for a long-term effort to change the culture of Council. This might involve ongoing citizen-Council dialogue around various themes. It would be good to have initially small and gradually increasing budgets for these citizen groups to be able to allocate.
We discussed our awareness that not all our members may be keen on this engagement with Council but those present saw it as just one of several types of community action that might help us make the social transition to sustainability.
Kim and Joy will prepare a draft letter and circulate it for comment before sending to Council on 18th June. [this was done]
We discussed the idea of a short regular item in the Coonabarabran Times to explain what Transition Coonabarabran is. Kim will discuss this with paper staff.
Next meeting is 11 am on Market Sunday, 24th June. I suggest the newly reopened Jolly Cauli.
Peace and love,
Peter T.
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