People-First Tourism Lab Blog

Today I had the pleasure of presenting the People-First Tourism concept to students in a colleague's World Forestry class with engaging students from all across the NC State campus.  While their academic backgrounds varied from social sciences to biological sciences and engineering, they all seemed captivated by our attempts to identify a people-centered model for community development and environmental conservation.  I've invited them to visit this blog and voice their impressions, advice and questions.  Can't wait to see what they say! The People-First community is growing  :-)   Duarte PS:  In Shangri-La, Yunnan, PRC, Tibetan communities had to quickly create cooperative tourism and non-timber forest product businesses to adapt to the government's prohibition of logging in the headwaters of the Yangtze river.

Last Tuesday, April 5th I had the pleasure of participating in a panel presentation titled "Sparking Social Change" at Harvard's Graduate School of Design; the co-presenters were Marshall Ganz (prof of Public Policy at the Kennedy School) and Maurice Cox (prof of Architecture at UVa and former mayor of Charlottesville).  In this event, we discussed ways to engender change to favor the most vulnerable segments of society.  Maurice Cox spoke about the importance of building trust with communities and of identifying and empowering community champions or change agents.  Marshall Ganz elaborated on process and challenges in organizing social change;  some of his most poignant comments included: "Don't help people - lead and organize them for social change." "In a healthy democracy, equality of voice must compensate for innequality of resources." "Those with power have all the resources.  Don't wait until you get the resources, be resourceful...