The Vancouver Transition Coalition is VPO’s proposed umbrella to bring together all the many non-governmental organizations (NGO’s) in the Lower Mainland into one unified political force.

Traditionally, NGO’s tend to thin-slice the problems facing Vancouver, either because they’re only interested in a particular aspect (salmon, rivers, forests, economic justice, etc.), only have the expertise to tackle that particular problem, or only have the funds to tackle that particular problem. (And most of them never have enough funds to do what needs to be done.)

All these NGO’s are working to do the right thing, yet they often duplicate the efforts other NGO’s working on different aspects of the same problem, or a related problem, resulting in a waste of scarce money and resources. Worse, they may end up working at cross-purposes with other NGO’s on complex problems - for instance, trying to protect salmon can conflict with trying to promote renewable energy from run-of-the-river projects.

But possibly the greatest loss comes when two or more NGO’s are working in parallel, each of them needing the expertise that the others could supply, but not having any way to coordinate their efforts in a win-win.

Individual projects like the Demonstration Sustainable Neighborhood are meant to promote cross-disciplinary work involving multiple NGO’s, but the Vancouver Transition Coalition (VTC) is VPO’s idea for an umbrella that would bring us all together without requiring anything more from cash- and time-strapped NGO’s than registering with a central database that contains information on contact info, areas of interest, expertise needed, and expertise offered.

Once formed, of course, the database would be an easy way to raise mini-coalitions to tackle complex problems, block proposed legislation, respond with quick press releases, and so on. And as one giant coalition, it could harness an awesome network of mailing lists to create the real change that’s needed in our cities and our province in the short time that we have. This is “webworking” at its finest.

It’s reasonable to ask what could possibly unite such a diverse variety of organizations involved in so many different areas. We think the answer to that is simple: every NGO is working to take us from the condition we’re in now, to an improved condition where everyone enjoys a clean, healthy, safe place to live that has a hopeful future. That movement, from here to there, is what we call Transition, and we’re in it right now.

If we NGO’s - along with private citizens and governmental organizations - can focus on what we have in common, and join together to accomplish it, our power will be awe-inspiring. And the hard truth is that we need that power, because the forces maintaining or worsening the status quo - Greed, Selfishness, Ignorance, and Inertia being the 4 Horsemen - are more powerful than anything we can individually overcome.

Together, though, we could be unstoppable.

NOTE: in the long-run, VPO would like to see us all take the logical step of organizing ourselves by bio-region, rather than by the artificial limits of the US/Canadian border. In that scenario, the VTC would become the CTC - the Cascadia Transition Coalition.