San Francisco, CA -- Transition US and Transition San Francisco announced today that Transition San Francisco has received official recognition as a Transition Initiative.

Transition Initiatives start when a small group of motivated individuals within a community come together with a shared concern: how can the community respond to the challenges and opportunities of peak oil, climate change and the economic crisis? This small team forms an initiating group and then adopts the Transition Model with the intention of engaging a significant proportion of the people in their community to significantly increase resilience and reduce carbon emissions.

Transition San Francisco’s initial contact person is Ania Moniuszko. Their Initiating Group is comprised of a diverse set of individuals, each with deep roots in the local community. Ania said: “I believe that San Francisco is a unique place for the Transition movement to develop, and we are already at work creating positive visioning projects for what San Francisco can be. We’re interviewing leaders of existing groups interested in climate change and sustainability issues for a video about how we all see San Francisco evolving in the next 20 years. We’re looking forward to collaborating with organizations already working on issues related to transition.”

Bay Area Localize, founded in 2006, recently published the Community Resilience Toolkit for the Bay Area. Bay Localize co-founder and Transition US board member Dave Room said: “The Bay Area is highly dependent on a globalized economy which is not only economically unsustainable, inequitable, and dangerously out of balance with nature, but also highly vulnerable to energy supply disruptions and shortfalls. Transition SF holds to the promise of awakening San Francisco to the reality of our predicament and activating us to make our communities more resilient and equitable.”

Ongoing work includes:

• The Visioning San Francisco Project, a video which will feature leaders of interested groups sharing their vision for San Francisco’s development over the next 20 years.
• Speakers’ Training, a series of seminars in which half a dozen area residents are learning about peak oil and climate change while developing a presentation and skills to facilitate community discussions on the subjects.
• Steering Committee meetings, which have produced a “mind map” of needed actions and will focus on bringing them to life as a range of projects.

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For more information about the Transition movement in the United States, or to schedule an interview with Carolyne Stayton, please call 707-824-1554 or email her at carolyne@transitionus.org

For more information about Transition San Francisco, or to schedule an interview with Ania Moniuszko, please call 415-819-9663 or email her at ania@moniuszko.com

For more information about Bay Localize, or to schedule an interview with Dave Room, please call 510-834-0420 or email him at dave@baylocalize.org