Weaving Infrastructure from the Ground Up: What We Learned from Six Months Alongside the Transition Movement
Over the past six months, This Living Place has been embedded in one of the UK’s most established grassroots movements—supporting a bold experiment in network weaving for Transition Together.
At This Living Place, we’re usually grounded in Somerset and Dorset—deeply embedded in our local patch, working in relationship with people and land. But over the last six months, we had the rare privilege of stepping into something broader.
Our director, Laura, became one of seven Network Weavers embedded across England and Wales—part of a powerful, experimental role within Transition Together, the UK wing of a global movement reimagining local environmental and social action.
Together, we formed a kind of moving network—travelling, listening, witnessing, connecting. Each of us rooted in our own region, but collectively holding a wider, relational map of change. Laura focused on the South West, meeting hundreds of people doing courageous, grounded work—quietly shifting culture, economy, and building resilience within their communities.
And we kept returning to one core question:
What does it really take to sustain the movements we celebrate?
What is the Transition Movement?
Transition Together supports the Transition Movement across Britain to grow and deepen. It helps local groups connect and learn, amplifies their stories, offered seed funding, and holds spaces like the online hub Vive.
Transition isn’t new. Since 2005, communities across more than 50 countries have been coming together to reimagine and rebuild our world from the ground up. From seed swaps to solar co-ops, rewilded green spaces to circular economies—this is a movement of everyday people stepping into collective action in the places they call home.
In England and Wales alone, there are currently 217 active Transition groups, with more than 3,473 people participating directly, and over 59,487 people reached through their collective efforts.
What makes Transition unique is its principled commitment to decentralisation, inclusivity, imagination, and local resilience. In practice, this looks like repair cafés, community gardens, tool libraries, climate hubs, and wilding projects. It also looks like deep, often invisible labour: relationship-building, vision-holding, and being responsive to the needs of community and place.
Alongside this, Transition Together is actively exploring what it means to centre Just Transition - recognising that real change must also address injustice, power, and access. It’s about ensuring that the shift to regenerative ways of living is fair, inclusive, and shaped by those most impacted by the systems of oppression and extraction we aim to shift.
Enter the Network Weavers
In June 2024, Transition Together launched an experiment: seven people, each embedded in different regions, tasked with strengthening the fabric of the movement. We were called Network Weavers.
Our role? To show up. Listen. Connect. Reflect. And prototype a model of support that responds to the realities of grassroots organising.
Together, we:
• Spoke to 125 groups across Wales and England
• Held online and in-person events
• Co-designed and facilitated the Transition Assembly
• Co-wrote a governance proposal for future organising
• Surfaced barriers, patterns, and opportunities
• Co-authored a report you can read here
Celebrating the South West
Over the course of this project, Laura had the privilege of travelling across the South West—meeting with groups quietly transforming their towns and villages in powerful, practical ways.
We spent time in climate hubs on high streets run entirely by volunteers, places where anyone can walk in off the street and feel a sense of welcome and possibility. We visited spaces where old jeans are turned into draft excluders, where chickens support young people to rebuild confidence, and where communities are planting bulbs in their forest gardens in the middle of the busiest dog walking field in town, preparing for spring.
We sat in full-time libraries of things in the middle of shopping centres, imagined what could happen if every high street had a permanent repair café, and heard how groups are redistributing their own seed funding to kickstart ideas in their wider communities.
We listened to stories of youth-led mapping projects, food growing schemes producing over ten tonnes a year, textile reuse, guerrilla gardening, climate adaptation events, and projects deeply rooted in justice and care.
Some groups are brand new—working to knit together community energy and shape a collective voice. Others are long-established, having sparked wide networks of action over many years. Some meet weekly in coastal huts with sea views; others gather in book clubs, community gardens, or borrowed buildings.
Again and again, we saw the same thread: people showing up for their places and communities. With creativity. With care. With a deep understanding that change grows when rooted in relationship.
We couldn’t write this without saying thank you to the incredible people and places we met—including:
Alton, Blackdown Hills, Chichester, Constantine, Dawlish, Devon (Living Projects), Dorchester, Exmouth, Falmouth, Frome, Helston, Lymington, Okehampton, Portsmouth, Salisbury, Taunton, Tavistock, Tiverton, Totnes, Wellington, Winchester, Worthing
What we saw: beauty and burnout
As Network Weavers, our role was to be on the ground—building relationships, listening closely, and unearthing the real challenges and strengths in our regions. We then came together regularly to reflect: What are we noticing? What’s holding this movement up? What’s making it stronger—or weaker?
And what we saw was staggering.
• Re-building hyperlocal food systems
• Supporting circular economies
• Hosting joyful, collective action
• Sparking change across generations
But that same work is held up by fragile infrastructure. Here’s what we heard again and again:
“We’re doing this work. But we’re doing it alone.”
People are stretched. Burnt out. Full of wisdom but under-resourced. We need shared tools, peer support, more chance to connect, and templates that save every group from reinventing the wheel. Most importantly, funds are needed to boost the resilience of their work.
It’s also worth noting the deep commitment we saw across the board to making inclusion and accessibility a lived practice. Many groups are recognising the limits of who currently feels able to participate—acknowledging that the movement still skews white, middle-class, and older—and are actively exploring how to build spaces that welcome more of life.
There were also real questions around succession and youth engagement: how to meaningfully involve younger people, and how to reach the wider community when most organisers are squeezing this work around full-time jobs, limited resources, and very little time to reflect—let alone communicate the work.
The Transition Assembly: a turning point
In February, after months of on-the-ground engagement, 120 Transitioners from across England and Wales came together in Wilmslow for the first-ever Transition Assembly. Like all beginnings, what unfolded was messy, beautiful, and brave.
We didn’t shy away from the real questions:
• What is Transition now?
• Who is it for?
• How do we organise without burning out?
• How do we truly decentralise power?
• What’s next when funding ends?
To help answer those questions, we created space for new kinds of leadership and challenge. An 8-strong Youth Caucus joined the Assembly, bringing experience of activism from outside Transition and pushing the movement to work across generations. They asked vital questions about roles, sustainability, and equity—reminding us that young people aren’t just “the future”; they’re here now, and ready to help shape what’s next.
There was also a strong and powerful presence from the Just Transition Circle—a group of eight people with lived experience of marginalisation who had been meeting in the lead-up to the Assembly. Their reflections, stories, and songs brought care, honesty, and depth into the room. They reminded us that inclusion can’t be a side note—it must be held at the centre of how we gather, organise, and grow.
Amid those questions, 46 people stepped forward to shape a future structure for the movement. Not because everything was clear—but because it felt good enough for now and safe enough to try.
So what now?
We feel deeply grateful to have been part of this work. To have met so many of you, to have built relationships, and to have glimpsed the full breadth of what’s happening across the South West.
It’s been a rare privilege to gain this bird’s eye view: to see how much is unfolding, how differently groups are working, and how deeply people care. It’s shaped how we understand the role of relational infrastructure as the backbone of community transformation.
As Network Weavers, our job was to connect, reflect, and begin to prototype new ways of organising. That role has now been handed on—to the Transition Together team and the 46 people who stepped forward during the Transition Assembly to shape what comes next. A new, decentralised governance structure is emerging. We’ll be watching, learning, and cheering it on every step of the way.
The work ahead
One of the key questions now being explored by the new Wales and England Working Group (the 46) is:
How do we build regional structures that let us work collectively, share learning, and build power together?
And, alongside this enquiry, a question Laura is holding closely is:
What would it look like if every community could employ a steward—someone local, trusted, resourced to build the connective fibre between projects, people, and place? And what if this work was louder - more amplified and seen.
This isn’t something voluntary groups can solve alone. It’s systemic—and it needs systemic solutions.
At This Living Place, we’re committed to ensuring that where power is centralised, it is undammed and flowing more freely and effectively toward the grassroots. That’s the shift we’re working towards—locally, regionally, and nationally. We’re also dedicated to amplifying the incredible work of communities—and building a cultural narrative that reminds us: we are all stewards at heart.
Our ecosystems, our communities, and our collective wellbeing depend on people being resourced, supported, and trusted to care. The crises we face—ecological, social, and economic—aren’t just happening because people don’t care. They’re happening because people are being systemically stripped of the time, resources, and power to act as stewards.
We believe that must change.
Gratitude + what’s next
To the other Network Weavers—Jess, Jo, Hilary, Rakesh, Phil, Richard—thank you. To the Transition Together team, to everyone we met and shared space with—thank you. To the groups holding this work on a shoestring with vision and grit—thank you.
Read more about our work in the co-authored Network Weavers report and this ‘Letter to Transition Groups from Network Weavers’.
This is wonderful - I would be grateful if you could please check the link to the report as I would love to read it and you have been weaving in and around where I live.
Fantastic work Laura, thank you for sharing this.