Member Profile
Andrew Gaines
| Screen Name | andrewgaines | Activities | 539 |
| Member Since | May 5, 2014 | CoLab Points (actual) | 0 |
| Country | Australia | CoLab Points (max. potential) | 0 |
Andrew Gaines is the instigator of the Great Transition Initiative, a citizen led educational movement to inspire thoughtful mainstream commitment to doing everything required to transition to a life-sustaining society.
Andrew is a Feldenkrais practitioner, creativity trainer and psychotherapist. He studied philosophy and engineering at Princeton University. He trained in The Natural Step principles of environmental sustainability, and trained in creative thinking modalities including MG Taylor’s DesignShops, Synectics, improvisational acting, and guided visualization.
Andrew was a co-organizer of the National Summit on whole system change in Geelong, Australia in 2011.
Andrew is the author of the Kitchen Table Conversations Manual and Creative Conversations.
My story
About 20 years ago I went through a personal epiphany whereby I became committed to the well-being of coming generations. I shifted from being a pessimistic idealist who knew all the troubles of the world to being a committed optimist.
While I was training in The Natural Step I heard the term Corporate Social Responsibility. I thought that CSR should mean corporations taking responsibility for transitioning to an environmentally sustainable society.
This is not what I found. Indeed, I found very few people talking about the needed transformative changes. And the individuals and groups that were talking about systems change had no model for engaging the general populace.
My design for reaching ‘the mainstream’ – which actually is our friends, business colleagues and larger networks – is to inspire as many groups as possible to communicate with their networks. Our goal is to transition to a life-affirming global culture, rather than continuing on our present course of ecological self-destruction. The Great Transition Initiative provides tools to make communicating as easy as possible.
Andrew lives in the Blue Mountains outside of Sydney. His partner Julie Adam is a world-class concert pianist.
