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Bloomingtdon's Great Unleashing: A Report by Ann Kreilkamp

Almost exactly one year following our Transition training, on April 24, 2010 Transition Bloomington, the 54th official Transition Initiative in the US, held its Great Unleashing in City Hall Council Chambers. A total of 113 people signed in and most of them stayed for the entire day. When it was over, the dozen or so members of the Initiating Group breathed a sigh of relief. Though we had been initially hoping for “hundreds” on this Saturday nearest Earth Day, lots of other events had also been planned in this town long crowded with groups working towards a more sustainable city — and, what we did not think about until it was too late — our event happened to coincide with the annual “Little 500” bike race of Breaking Away movie fame.

The week before the GU, our tightly-knit, dozen-strong Initiating Group had proved its own resilience when forced to improvise solutions to a series of challenges that bumped into view, one after another, including the musician scheduled for lunch hour falling sick and a Wednesday phone call announcing a death in the family of the person who was to facilitate Saturday afternoon’s OpenSpace process. Luckily, by Thursday, after numerous phone calls, we were able to land another experienced facilitator, John Drew, on short notice.

The doors opened at 9:30 AM with computer-aided registration. Besides the day’s program, participants were offered transitionbloomington.org bumperstickers, with a request for a $1 donation. The stickers were tickets to the kegger afterwards, donated by a local brew pub.

The program began at10:00 am with three talks introduced by our MC, Andy Mahler, a well-known local forest activist: a ten-minute introduction by Mayor Mark Kruzan, a 45 minute presentation on Peak Oil by City Councilman Dave Rollo, and a 30 minute taped presentation by Transition founder Rob Hopkins.

After a short break, we grouped our chairs into a large circle and the facilitator introduced the open space process. The energy was high. As soon as he tossed paper and pens into the center, six people immediately jumped into the middle of the circle to write the name of and passionately argue for its inclusion as the subject of one of the afternoon’s group sessions. Then we broke for lunch at the Farmer’s Market next door and listened to songs by our MC, who had graciously agreed to don his other hat as a musician for the occasion.

The afternoon sessions went well, and five volunteers with computers were on hand to type up comment forms from all 24 groups and get them into everyone’s mailbox by the next day.

At 5:30 p.m., we circled again and passed around the microphone/talking stick with our impressions and or take-away from the day. The atmosphere as we closed this long, full day was subdued, somber, and open-hearted.

In our rush to make sure the event carried on as planned despite the hurdles of the week before, the Initiating Group did not pay enough attention to what would happen afterwards. Some of the comment sheets did not have emails on them, and for some the convener was not named. As a result, we now have a bit of chaos on our ning site, which has gained 40 members since the GU for a total of 220. People are posting there, and milling about, wondering where their group is and whether it combined with another group, etc. Some groups have already met twice and some don’t even know who their members are. A Core Group composed of conveners of 12 of the groups met for the first time a month after the event to begin to make sense of the confusion, and we feel confident that within a couple of weeks it will sort itself out.

The Core Group plans an event in conjunction with a regional permaculture gathering in September where groups will report on their progress. The Core Group is also beginning to envision a multidisciplinary, theatrical event for spring 2011 when, hopefully, we will be prepared to begin the process of composing an Action Descent Plan for Bloomington.