My name is Kelly Hydrick. I am Program Manager at Climate Stories Project, where I’m the lead instructor for the online Climate Stories Ambassador program. The Ambassador program provides education and support to diverse participants as they work to tell their personal climate change stories and conduct oral history interviews within their local communities. I also work as a Humanities Associate at MIT Libraries where I’m a digital humanities specialist. I am able to offer my expertise in digital humanities to the International Oral History of the Transition Movement project as we potentially create online digital exhibits of the collected interviews.
Reaching out to Transition organizations in the Boston area, where I live, has proven more difficult than I had anticipated and thus far I feel I’ve had mostly a non-start. In online searches, many of the results for organizations with the term “transition” in their names are over ten years old and now defunct. At first glance it seems that throughout many parts of the US, though perhaps excluding the West Coast, the Transition movement died down about ten years ago. Though I’m not as far along as I would like to be, the information I’ve gathered to this point will likely inform my next steps. As further progress on the project is made it will be interesting to see if the Transition movement actually collapsed in some areas of the US or if these organizations may have coalesced around a different term such as “green” or “sustainability”. And if this is the case, how might this have changed an organization’s goals and/or priorities.
