Introducing Our Survey
As part of the process that led to the creation of this Plan, a survey was carried out on 220 households in Totnes and Dartington. The survey was conducted by the University of Plymouth during April 2009. Where findings relate to specific areas (food, energy and so on) they appear in the relevant sections in Part Four. The more general findings from the survey are presented here.
Transition Town Totnes (TTT) has been in existence for just over 3 years now, so we were fascinated to know the extent to which knowledge of it had percolated into the community, and also what depth of engagement it was attracting. It was encouraging to discover that 74.9% of those questioned had heard of TTT and its work.
The respondents were then asked whether they had ever participated in any of its events. 60.6% said never, 33.3% occasionally, 3.9% regularly and 2.2% often. Taking a rough figure for the population of Totnes as 8,416, extrapolated to al the survey respondents, this means that around 155 people are often involved, 328 regularly involved, and around 2800 occasionally involved since the launch of the project in late 2006.
Those who said they had participated in TTT events were then asked which ones. 59.1% said they had attended a talk or workshop, 7.7% had had some involvement in the Garden Share scheme, 36.9% had been involved with the Totnes Pound initiative, 21.5% had taken an active role in one of TTT’s 11 working groups, 6.2% had got involved with the Transition Tales project run at KEVICC and 12.3% had participated in the creation of the Energy Descent Plan for the area.
When asked whether they thought the work of TTT was relevant to their lives, 57.2% of respondents said it was either highly relevant or relevant. Only 11% felt it to be completely irrelevant. People were also asked for their thoughts on community. The next section looked at how people perceived the community in which they lived. When asked whether they felt adequately consulted in public consultation processes that affect the area, opinion was fairly neatly divided. 50.7% of people agreed that they did and 49.3% said they did not. When asked whether they felt it was hard to get their voice heard, there was again, a neat divide, 59.1% agreeing that it is hard, 40.9% that it isn’t.
When asked whether they felt that in the event of a crisis the community could pull together, 83.2% agreed that it could. They were then asked whether the sense of community the respondent felt from their neighbours had decreased over the past few years. 65.7% disagreed or strongly disagreed with this, only 8.3% strongly agreeing that their sense of community had declined.
Many of the questions will allow TTT to redo the survey in two years and to see whether the community’s resilience and thinking have continued to grow and evolve.
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Community involvement is a key ingredient to succeeding in any endeavor. However, if you want a Community to work together for the good of the whole–everyone, I mean everyone including the Government Officials and those that live ‘High-flying’ livelihoods off of the majority of the people need to humble themselves and become actively involved with the rest of the Community. In essence they need to give up the idea of ‘Profit for gain’, or ‘Wages for work’ idea. Instead everyone needs to treat each other as though they were your family. You would never charge your family for food, or shelter, or clothing (the essentials of life). So, why would you charge each other? Is it because you all believe that you are NOT family? See, this is the first step if you all REALLY want to cure your problems. The main source of the problems does NOT lay just with OIL prices being to high or being in short supply. You can all live without vehicles or oil consuming devices–you all know this deep down inside. It’s the soft life, the laziness that has over-come many that allows many to think they NEED it. Really all any of us need is food, water, housing and clothing. The rest is fluff!
Learn to live with your neighbor and treat them like family and your problems will suddenly be solved and less threatening.
DJ