About Us

Transition Streets is a grassroots initiative that focuses on connecting and supporting neighbourhoods around the issues of sustainability. Renters, home owners and sharehouses can all join in and the solutions and suggestions throughout the manual range from no cost to some cost meaning there is something for everyone to try.

Let’s reconnect our local neighbourhoods and learn together to make our streets more energy efficient, less resource dependent (oil, coal, gas and other resources), more self-reliant with food, less wasteful, healthier and more enjoyable places to live.

Sunbury is an outer suburb located north west of Melbourne. Following the Transition Streets manual, we’re building more resilient neighbourhoods across Sunbury one street at a time.

To learn more about the Transition Streets program, here are some handy links

• Transition Streets Australia
• The Show Me How YouTube channel has a series of short films made for Transition Streets Geelong – this give a great introduction to why, how and what it’s like to be a part of a local Transition Street.
• Transition Australia – Transition Streets program

Ready to start your own Transition Street?

Would you like to take the next step to transitioning your own neighbourhood? Here are your next steps

• Consider your local neighbourhood – perhaps not just your own street but the surrounding area within walking distance too. Think about how many houses you (hint you may need to invite many more houses than you expect to reach an ideal number of 6-10 households expecting a 10-20% response rate).
• Contact Christie McIntosh at transitionstreetssunbury@gmail.com with any questions you have and for some tips and strategies to getting a great response. We can also supply an invitation template to make life easier.
• Using the Transition Streets invitation template as a guide, fill out and distribute it to your neighbour’s (if you have kids they LOVE playing postie) – you might even receive your first response the same day!
• Once you have approximately 6-10 households within easy walking distance, we can supply free printed guidebooks for everyone.  Your group then decides when to meet, and using the book as a guide, take on small or large challenges you can make each month.
• Use the initial meeting to get to know each other, and fill out the ‘Footprint Calculator’ as a starting point.
• At the initial gathering, everyone in the group is given the amazing and free 180 page ‘Transition Streets resource book (*Christie can provide hard copies or download it below) that supplies information, things you can do that both adults and children can take on, links to videos and other useful tips and even options to run the group.  It assists neighbours to look at their use of Water, Energy, Food, Transport and Waste & Consumption together to reduce our ecological footprint in all these areas.  It is for renters, home owners, young and old, single person households and families.

This initial meeting is a great opportunity to get to know each other, and fill out the ‘Footprint Calculator’ as a starting point. Meetings should of course be respectful, inclusive and certainly fun! Meet over a shared meal; cup of tea.  You can of course invite people you already know, but sometimes great neighbours you ‘never knew were there’ get involved and often have a lot in common with each other… The conversation just needs to get started!

*The resource book was created initially by Transition Newcastle, and edited /  refined for national use by the Transition Streets National working group.  We thank them for their work and vision; and for distributing the book under the ‘creative commons licence’ for non-commercial use.

Download a digital copy of the Transition Streets Workbook  [29MB, PDF].