Northern Forest Tourism Network
Collaborating to Create a World Class Destination – Join Us!Regional Tourism Mapping
As we head toward our March 11 gathering of the Northern Forest Tourism Network, we seek your help in developing a better map of what is happening, who is doing what etc. Please take a few moments to answer these questions, either as a comment to this post or in an e-mail to Kate Williams.
What projects or approaches are you involved in or aware of that you think might be of interest across the region?
Who else should we be engaging in this network?
What works best and what challenges you most about working collaboratively?
What kind of support do you think is most needed to improve rural tourism outcomes in the Northern Forest Region?
Anything else you would like to share to help us develop a clearer and more complex picture of tourism in our region?
1. I have been involved with county-region based tourism economic development with UMaine Extension for 10 years. Much of this has been around building local organizational and leadership capacities. I am interested in connecting with others and trading field notes.
2. What challenges me most is the proliferation and fragmentation of tourism interests, and the utter disregard for the inclusive power and resource sharing principles that are the hallmark of true collaborations.
3. I am open to new thinking about what a regional entity like NFTN might bring to the mix, and how that effort might effectively connect with tourism businesses and communities at the local level. However, I wonder about this, and this may simply be rural Maine perspective, but, if we engage in this tourism work essentially disconnected from state tourism, small business and economic development entities then isn’t that simply a continuation of the politics of fragmentation which plagues tourism in this end of the Northern Forest?