The final webinar of the recent Online Training in Nature Positive Tourism was dedicated to the topic of “communities and enterprise”.
As we learned in the previous webinars, partnerships are essential to guarantee the success and longevity of a ‘nature positive’ operation and maximize its impact. Without local partners, it is more challenging for an operation to succeed in the long term. However, partnerships can take a long time and effort to be established and can also be met with frustration. Even if at first your project encounters some initial resistance, you can still leverage collaboration with the local community and businesses by finding someone with the right personality (not necessarily the same mindset as yours…Remember the importance of diversity that was mentioned in the first webinar?).
Safeguarding cultural integrity
Listening to feedback, even (and especially) if it goes against your idea, is extremely important. This will allow you to understand the local reality and potential challenges more deeply, and above all safeguard the cultural integrity of the area you are operating in. Asking yourself “what is the normal way of doing things in the local culture?” will help you to understand what’s the right way to engage with the local community, and guarantee you will preserve its authenticity. Like we already started exploring through the case studies in webinar two, there is a key difference between community based engagement and community based enterprises, which makes the latter the real mechanism for positive change.
Regenerative by nature
We had a special guest in the final webinar, Jasper Muller (co-founder of hide&b), who shared his experience in the field of hospitality as a tool to support regenerative agriculture. His operation is designed as a way to help Dutch farmers transition from intensive farming to regenerative farming, by providing them with an extra source of income through tourism and hospitality. Visitors stay in tiny houses (or other already existing accommodation types, such as tents) built with sustainable materials on the farmland that is transitioning, thus benefiting from a closer link to nature and a more direct access to local farming products.
© hide&b
“It is important to remember that every collaboration you create will bring contacts to new networks of like-minded individuals and help you maximize your impact” highlighted Simon. Including as many local businesses as possible in your network is another powerful way to guarantee the success of your project, and it is important to keep in mind that they don’t all have to be already 100% nature positive. They can still influence their own networks and work together with you towards your goals.
Key takeaways
So, what were the main takeaways of this final lesson, and of this super inspiring online training in general? That, through the adoption of Nature Positive Tourism principles, we can all be catalysts for positive change by stimulating more sustainable trends, educating our customers/guests, clearly explaining our choices to our audiences, giving back and being accountable and—last but not least—reinvesting a part of our profits into nature and communities to demonstrate our commitment.
Now that we’ve concluded our autumn online training, we have some time to absorb the wealth of newly acquired knowledge, before leaving for Abruzzo and putting the learnings into practice during the NPT Field Training. I can’t wait to meet the rest of the group and the trainers, take in some mesmerising landscapes, meet local partners like Wildlife Adventures and Rewilding Apennines and above all, experience in person the principles of Nature Positive Tourism in the field.
Speak again (from the mountains) very soon!
This blog is part of a three-part series written by Claudia Costa, a MOYO Training participant and volunteer writer.
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