Promote and develop an integral model for local, self-sufficient and sustainable economies and communities.  This human scaled model will be realized when communities take responsibility for providing the Twenty-two Basic Human Needs.  TC uses sustainable business principles.  Its “profit” motive is founded on the principle that more energy must be produced than consumed.  It embraces the idea of 3 Ps:  Profit, People and Planet.  Its business model seeks to keep as much wealth as possible circulating within an economically viable local region where it is reinvested in local sustainable redevelopment. 

The Vision of Transition Centre:

    Adaptable communities (C) with the resilience to overcome the inevitable challenges arising from the three E’s, or E³:  Energy, Environmental and Economic instability.

The Objectives of Transition Centre:

A review of the architecture of sustainable communities and economies suggest the following list of Twenty-Two Basic Human Needs: ^{© 2011}

The Fifth Sector

    There are three basic sectors in our economy, three successive waves of development.  The first is “extractive.”  This includes mining, forestry and agriculture, the founding occupations of what we call civilization.  The second came to full term with the industrial revolution and this is manufacturing.  The third is postindustrial, or services.  Some economists have declared a fourth sector focused on exploiting the margins of the industrial and service sectors in order to gain access to new profits.  Many “green” technology industries fall into this sector.  Each of these sectors requires its own unique style of management.

    None of these four leadership sectors is adequate to the real needs of the E³ challenges, the emerging “Fifth” sector economy.  TC is defining this new sector and its leadership.  This new leadership must be trained to deal with dramatic changes in environment, economies and societies.  It requires a holistic education to produce what John Brunner called a polymath.  This method resonates with Peter Senge’s fifth discipline and there is more than a simple coincidence.  Senge’s fifth discipline is an approach to understanding and managing whole systems.  The fifth sector leader must be a systems thinker, an ecological thinker (which the founders of systems theory were), a generalists with access to a wide range of personal knowledge, a humanists, someone with high moral standards, at ease with change and diversity, cool under pressure, clear of purpose, a member of a cooperative fellowship of peers and a sustainability architect.