Get on Board the Transition Bus

Camille and Charlotte are social activists interested in the juncture between the Transition Movement and social justice. In 2009 they set out with their two young children in The Transition Bus to travel North America. They were especially keen to visit and video projects like worker-owned cooperatives and transition projects with low income populations.

We caught up with them on Denman Island, B.C., off the coast of Vancouver Island, where they’re staying for awhile as their boys attend school. Camille, Charlotte and I plunked ourselves inside The Transition Bus—a school bus converted into a biodiesel-powered home on wheels.

Here are a few of the people and projects they met in their travels, and links to their video interviews:

Jeff Lillie, a community oriented biodiesel manufacturer in the Florida Keys whose priority is fueling vehicles owned by locals first, and tourists second.

Patrick Garvey, working with low-income people in the Florida Keys (5 minute video).

Nat Turner’s Our School at Blair Grocery, an urban farm in New Orleans filmed by Charlotte and Camille (15 minute video) 

Scott Crow, working to strengthen the worker-owned cooperatives network in Texas.

Tim Huet and the Arizmendi Bakery network of worker-owned cooperatives in San Francisco, Marin and East Bay. They’re modeled on Spain’s Mondragon worker-owned cooperatives.

After our conversation, Charlotte and Camille provided us contact information for people they met on their Transition Bus travels, people we might want to visit on our Peak Moment road trip—a perfect example of the reciprocity and generosity we are finding everywhere we travel.

Someday when The Transition Bus hits the road again, maybe they’ll meet up with our Peak Moment-mobile at an as-yet-unknown destination. I can just picture Charlotte and Robin whipping out their video cameras to capture—what? We’ll just have to wait and see, but I’m pretty sure it’ll be some interesting aspect of the emergent post-industrial culture. [transitionbus.org/en (English) and transitionbus.org/fr (French)]

Watch The Transition Bus – A North American Odyssey (episode 299)