Steps to transition to regenerative communities, with Don Hall

After 8 years of interviewing people in the regeneration sector, It’s become clear to me that knowledge is not as valuable as experience. Gathering facts, concepts and theories is great up to a point, but until you put those ideas into practice, it’s impossible to know if those ideas clash with your reality, or require adaptation to what’s really going on on the ground.
For this reason I was excited to see that Don Hall, who has worked with the transition towns movement in various capacities for 16 years now, has come out with a new book titled, The Regeneration Handbook: Transform Yourself to Transform the World. Don also holds a Master’s in Environmental Leadership from Naropa University, a certification in Permaculture Design from the Central Rocky Mountain Permaculture Institute and is currently the Training Coordinator for Transition Network. You can find accounts of much of his work and learnings at his website and blog at evolutionary change.org

In this episode a lot of what we explore revolves around the International Transition Network, how it started, and how it's grown to a movement since the early 2000s. We go into Don’s practical experience building the transition movement in both Colorado and Florida, some of the shared priorities of those communities that formed the basis of initiatives and unity that was formed, and how others can participate in creating these kinds of programs in their own communities.

We also get into related topics like how transition is as much an internal process as an external community one, and the skills that Don believes we need to relearn in order to live in close knit communities the way that almost everyone used to in recent history.