Making the Most of Opportunities

Collaborate: Michigan’s Great Outdoors Culture Tour has found a unique cul-tural tourism niche in which partner organizations overcome the individual challenges of limited funding and personnel, a brief tourism season, and difficulty in reaching isolated and nontraditional groups. They accomplish this by sharing resources ranging from the programs themselves to sites, funding, centralized programming, and marketing.

Find the Fit between the Community and Tourism: This outreach effort to rural audiences benefits all players. The host site receives increased visibility, community relations, and income. Sponsors reach new audiences in new ways. Visitors are given added value for their vacation dollars and increased awareness of local history and culture. Local citizens gain the spin-off effect of an improved economy through more and returning vacationers, not to mention the intangible but important benefit of a boost in pride for their local history and culture. Frequently after a program, when presenters and audience members interact informally, residents bring up anecdotes about the local history that have provided presenters with new material for their repertoires.

Make Sites and Programs Come Alive: This is the very essence of the Culture Tour program. Artists, storytellers, musicians, dancers, and historical role-players literally recreate the past for today’s visitors and cultural interpreters highlight continuing local traditions.

Focus on Quality and Authenticity: All performers are carefully screened by the Michigan Humanities Council to ensure that the content of their programs accurately reflects the period or culture they are representing. Interpreters are urged to go to the source. For example, historical role-player Michael Deren developed a program about the 1930s Civilian Conservation Corps by conducting research with residents who had served in that organization.

Preserve and Protect Resources: Many of the stories of the areas’ people, culture, and heritage are obscure and often unknown even to locals. One benefit of the Culture Tour program has been the reawakening of residents to their heritage through these stories and presentations.

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