Programs and projects

Helped found The Collective, a group of progressive destinations that came together around destination management and stewardship rather than marketing. The premise was simple: these places were all working on versions of the same problem, and none of them had reason to solve it alone.

Ran the group’s programming, including workshops and webinars for the full membership plus one-on-one solutions sessions where a single destination could bring a live problem to the table and work through it with peers. Facilitated groups ranging from twenty to two hundred participants, and presented the case for this kind of collaboration on the main stage at IMPACT Sustainable Travel in Victoria and at City DNA in Bologna.

Originated Thanksgiving Back, which started in 2021 and turns a shoulder season weekend into volunteer time. Visitors sign up for a project with a local organization, from trail maintenance to food security to a festival build, and have part of their accommodation reimbursed. The program was recognized nationally and has continued to run each fall.

It has since been studied by independent researchers, who found that the accommodation reimbursement was what made the trip possible for many people, but not what made it matter. Connection to Revelstoke, built through volunteer leaders, host organizations, and residents, was the stronger predictor of whether someone went on to behave like a steward of the place.

Partnered with Colour the Trails to create the Colour the Slopes Summit, a recurring gathering for BIPOC participants in winter sports. Days on snow were paired with talks and panel discussions, so the weekend did more than get people out skiing. It gave the question of who winter sports is actually for a room and an agenda.

Produced the summit end to end: the partnership, the programming, the budget, and the logistics of running a large-scale event in a mountain town in the middle of winter. It was built to recur rather than to be a one-off.

Led the destination management planning project for the community of Revelstoke, covering the procurement, the budget, and the consultation. That meant community surveying and a series of workshops and strategic planning sessions with local stakeholders, so the plan reflected what residents said rather than what the tourism sector assumed they would say.

The plan is a public document, and the process behind it is the part worth noting: a small community can produce a serious plan for how it wants to be visited, if someone does the work of asking.

Ideated and co-hosted Think Revelstoke, a podcast series about the concerns and objectives behind destination management, and the questions a mountain town has to answer about tourism, asked out loud instead of left inside a plan nobody reads.

Each episode brought in a subject matter expert, drawing on practitioners from around the world, which made the thinking behind Revelstoke’s destination management work available to residents, operators, and other destinations working through the same problems.