About Us
Finding Orientation in a World in Transition
Great Transition Stories is a living online commons for people exploring a world in profound transition. Through stories, research, synthesis, and reflection, we bring lived experience, enduring wisdom, contemporary insight, frameworks, practices, and different ways of knowing into relationship.
The commons is designed for exploration. Stories lead to ideas, ideas connect with practices and frameworks, and each path opens onto others. There is no single way through. People can enter wherever curiosity takes them and follow the connections that become meaningful along the way.
Our Purpose
Great Transition Stories exists to help people find orientation within change. As ecological, social, economic, and technological changes unfold around us, we offer ways to recognize larger patterns, connect those patterns to lived experience, see what is already emerging, and find meaningful ways to participate.
Our Story
Great Transition Stories began in 2011 when Lynnaea Lumbard, Duane Elgin, and Jeff Vander Clute launched a wiki with Michele Stern’s support—gathering stories that could help people recognize the archetypal patterns of transformation shaping our world.
At its heart was a desire to help people find orientation within profound change—to recognize patterns of transformation, connect personal experience with larger movements of change, and encounter stories that might expand what they believed was possible.
As the work grew, so did the need for a platform capable of holding its depth and breadth. In April 2026, Great Transition Stories relaunched as a living commons, bringing together an intergenerational team and a growing network of contributors, storytellers, partners, and resources.
Today, we draw from living systems, history, psychology, Indigenous and ancestral wisdom, ecology, economics, peacebuilding, community practice, and other ways of knowing. Through human curation, synthesis, and editorial discernment, we make complex ideas accessible without flattening them—and bring experiences and perspectives that are often encountered separately into relationship.
We’re so glad you’re here.
Our Organization
Great Transition Stories is part of the NewStories ecosystem, a 501(c)(3) educational nonprofit based in Washington State.
Founded in 2000 and rooted in the Cascadia Bioregion, NewStories works locally and globally alongside communities, organizations, and leaders navigating disruption and profound transition—strengthening the relationships, learning, and collaborative capacity needed for regenerative futures to emerge.
Within the NewStories ecosystem, Great Transition Stories creates a place where learning from different initiatives, experiences, disciplines, and ways of knowing can meet—and where discoveries in one place can become visible and useful elsewhere.
Our Partners
Great Transition Stories grows through relationships with people and organizations who bring knowledge, lived experience, practice, reach, and connection to the commons.
Across fields and communities, people are often exploring related questions without knowing about one another. Bringing their experiences and work into relationship can reveal shared patterns, unexpected connections, and opportunities to learn across difference.
Partners help us surface important stories and patterns of transition, bring different ways of knowing into relationship, create meaningful pathways for participation, and carry the work into communities where people are navigating change.
These relationships are reciprocal. Partners bring stories, knowledge, communities, practices, and perspectives into the commons; GTS helps connect them with other ideas, people, and possibilities. Through these relationships, new connections become visible and the work travels outward again through partners, contributors, and communities.
How This Work Was Curated
Great Transition Stories has been developed through deep collaboration among writers, editors, researchers, knowledge holders, storytellers, designers, and partners. Our team has also used AI tools, including Claude and ChatGPT, in parts of the editorial and development process—to explore ideas, test structure and clarity, and support synthesis across a large body of material.
Human discernment remains central to the work. Our team determines what deserves attention, which connections are meaningful to explore, how ideas and voices are represented, and what ultimately becomes part of the commons. We use technology in service of that work while remaining responsible for the choices we make and the stories we tell.