Communities: Destinations for Development

ABSTRACT

Community is a word which draws on several important elements of nation building - probably the most central characteristic of the word ‘community’ is the scenario of bringing people together for a purpose. It is structuring a collective mind-set, which involves sharing and using resources in an equitable and sustainable way. Community means relationships, at all levels, and how these relationships are harnessed to produce results. Community development therefore in its ideal form is people centred and driven; and involves a direct interactivity in any development process.

Tourism clearly is a people industry and a nation’s total hospitality offering can only be sustained at a high quality if the social needs of the masses are attended to. Community Tourism has been advocated for over thirty years, through the pioneering efforts of the Countrystyle team headed by Diana McIntyre-Pike and her family who have paved the way for others and received the support of the International Institute for Peace through Tourism (IIPT), the Sustainable Communities Foundation through Tourism and Desmond Henry (former director of tourism). Community Tourism is:

both an integrated approach and collaborative tool for the socio-economic empowerment of communities through the assessment, development and marketing of natural and cultural community resources which seeks to add value to the experience of local and foreign visitors and simultaneously improve the quality of communities.

Community Tourism seeks to shift the traditional mindset of tourism into an avenue where communities across Jamaica become empowered, educated and involved in tapping into the international tourism market; opening up new niches for destination Jamaica, most notably the nature-culture-adventure traveler. It is sustainable and seeks to build on the natural and cultural ‘capital’ of a specific area.

Community Tourism is about new levels of relationship between host and visitor; it seeks to market lifestyles and people which are authentic and natural. Community Tourism brings tourism as a community development tool; as it views the tourism product of Jamaica not only as specific ‘resort areas’ or traditional tourism establishments but the entire country.

Through community tourism marketing, schools, business places and the ‘common man’ become attractions and a part of the product. It seeks to diversity the Jamaican offering by promoting the ‘many Jamaicans and many Jamaicas - a promotion which can direct interest on Jamaica and its communities in new ways, producing opportunities for other sectors of the economy and creating new tourism partners and entrepreneurs.

Over the last thirty years, efforts have borne fruit, in the forms of the CPEC funded Jamaica Community Tourism Project, the relative success of Countrystyle Vacations and the recent formulation of the Unique Jamaica Tourism Cluster under the Jamaica Exporters Association (JEA), through a direct partnership with the International Institute for Peace through Tourism, it has been exported as a sustainable strategy of approaching tourism. However these efforts are basically attending to the foundation, through which more must take place.

Communities are destinations for development; for within them, they hold the destiny of the country. Communities can be marketed as destinations within the ultimate destination of Jamaica. Marketing of these destinations creates an image and a brand; a brand which can be used in an export strategy.

A career in ‘Community Tourism’ is built on a ‘Community Consciousness’ highlighting the community as a destination within the domestic and international tourism marketplace. Ultimately influencing ‘people flow’ into a community and the capitalization of providing goods, services and hospitality to these people attracted to the community both local and international. For example, the development of the Unique Village programme through Countrystyle in association with Unique Jamaica will create economic opportunities for community persons interested in investing in community tourism.

Tourism involves the movement of people into the power of hospitality, which stimulates the building and maintenance of relationships across borders. In the world of Globalization; this becomes increasingly necessary for everyone. Tourism produces ‘people flow’ into an area through marketing an area as a destination; entrepreneurship takes aim at any flow of people or money into an area, providing needed services or products to take care of visitors, who are not only internationally based but also local.

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