Lopez Island
- Community Growing
- Other food projects
- Community hub or activities
- Festivals, fairs or events
- Building local networks
- Transport
MISSION STATEMENT Transition Lopez Island is committed to engaging our community in transformational change for a livable future.
In uncertain times, resilience is the capacity to bounce back and thrive. Our group is finding ways to harness our island-grown community activism and collective wisdom to create a new paradigm around issues of local economy, labor share, energy use, movement of goods and people, and food and water security that sustains life for us all.
As part of a worldwide movement of community-scale initiatives, Transition Lopez Island also partners locally with like-minded groups, including the Lopez Community Land Trust, Lopez Locavores, Lopez Community Trails Network, San Juan Islands Agricultural Guild, Lopez Solid Waste, and the San Juan Islands Climate & Sustainability Advisory Committee. We invite our fellow islanders to join us in creating a bold future for our rock that promotes health, creativity, and equality for everyone, in balance with nature.
Steering Committee Meetings are scheduled monthly to debrief past events, plan future activities, and make policy decisions for the larger group by consensus if possible. Anyone interested in joining the committee and playing a more central role in Transition Lopez Island’s leadership is welcome to attend.
In 2019, Transition Lopez Island launched our “Fossil Free by ’33” campaign in which we organized into three teams:
- Food/Agriculture/Water asked “How can Lopez feed itself?” This team has sponsored “Eat Local” campaigns and educational farm tours at S & S Homestead, distributed region-wide Henning Sehmsdorf’s and Elizabeth Simpson’s book Eating Locally and Seasonally, and as board members of the San Juan Islands Ag Guild and the Agricultural Resources Committee, contributes directly to seminal programs and policy making on a county-wide level.
- Transportation/Energy posed the question “How can we power our island with 100% clean energy?” To that end, the team has participated in several local energy fairs with our electric co-op, supported the acquisition of the first electric school bus in the islands, and is collaborating with the San Juan Islands Climate & Sustainability Advisory Committee on bringing a system of public transit to our county.
- Plastics/Consumption queried “How can our island be zero waste?” The team has partnered with Lopez Solid Waste to create a system of Road Stewards to keep our island’s roads waste-free, with the Lopez Chamber of Commerce to reduce single use plastic at island events and promote tourists bringing bikes instead of cars, and with local groceries to start the process of becoming zero packaging stores.
Past activities include barnraisings supporting community labor share through neighbors helping one another with homesteading projects, the Lopez Economic Group Underwriting Prosperity (LEG UP) pairing local investors with local businesses that need capital, monthly Potlucks with a Purpose featuring community conversation on topics that related to our mission of resilience and sustainability, an Inner Transition discussion group, and participation in a monthly Repair Café.