Here is a great article from Canadian Geographic that describes many different approaches small communities are taking to addressing the impact of tourism in their communities. When I look at the examples of the small towns in this article I see some commonalities and some differences with our own little island.
The small communities in this article are Rossland, BC, Manitoulin Island in Ontario and Fogo Island in Newfoundland and Labrador. They are all small communities quite far from larger cities and they are all quite self-contained. Every community has a chance to take control of their local economy because unless they do so there is very little activity that comes from outside. in the traditional tourist model, people come and visit, perhaps stay a while and local business compete and collaborate for the tourist dollars. Typically these kinds of communities close up shop in the off season and folks try to stretch their summer dollars over the lean years.
What is different about Rossland, Manitoulin and Fogo Island is that they are able to build a year round local economy as well because, unlike Bowen Island, people don’t leave every day for work. If the local economy cannot sustain jobs and enterprises throughout the year, it cannot sustain a diverse business sector that has a chance to work its regenerative magic.
Here on Bowen Island, we live very close to a major city and the vast majority of our residents either commute physically or virtually into that city to do their work. People like Caitlin and I, who run small consulting businesses typically don’t serve local clients in the same way that our restaurants, builders and services do. In the cases of Fogo and Rossland, some of the key attractors in the communities attracted other businesses around them to provide specialized services. With very little money coming in from outside the community, a strong attractor like a ski hill or a boutique hotel can generate businesses around itself and people can create a local livelihood. Those folks will need to spend money locally on services like food and drugs and home repair and so a contained virtuous cycle can be triggered. The key is to diversify the economy as quickly as possible, so that everything does not hinge on the single big attractor in the system. Rossland seems acutely aware of this, having been a boom town in the past.
I don’t know what the pathway is for Bowen Island, but we face a number of challenges to making our tourism regenerative rather than extractive. Currently we get inundated with day trippers who like to wander through the village and do some shopping or hike the trails on the island. Most don’t stay but those that do use AirBnBs and VRBOs as well as traditional B&Bs and our four or so retreat centres. There is no hotel or inn that can serve people the way they are served on Fogo Island and there is isn’t much intention put behind hosting people in our natural spaces, although that may be changing with a new park proposal from Metro Vancouver that, for the first time, would ask our community to allow supervised camping in a primarily walk/bike-in campground.
What makes things very challenging on Bowen Island is that local residents can be very vocal about the impact of tourism,much to the negative. The village is too busy, visitors are rightfully confused by the implicit culture of the place, including how ferry etiquette works, and how tolerant local neighbourhoods are of parties in AirBnBs or on the boats moored in Mannion Bay. Most residents, if asked, would tell you that we have to address the tourism situation, but few could tell you how. ALmost everyone would say that bringing in more people is not desirable, although we can’t do much about being a 20 minute ferry ride from an urban area of 2.5 million people, many of whom love having easy access to the natural landscape of our forests and seas.
One thing that seems to stop us taking a regenerative approach and creating anchor enterprises locally is the fact that Bowen islanders seem to enjoy privacy and quiet and sustained high real estate values. Creating a new local enterprise is an absolute exhausting endeavour that often requires special kinds of permits and changes to zoning. In some cases the opposition to these proposal has resulted in lawsuits, hostile neighbourhood relations and a kind of general appeal to the fear of noise, traffic, overcrowding and diminished real estate prices and quality of life. The chance to develop a key tourism asset like the Fogo Island Inn or an Indigenous Park or something like a destination downhill mountain biking trail system, all of which COULD be possible here, faces a huge uphill battle from people who live close to where these things could be built and who doubt the ability of any government or organization to effectively manage the use and impact.
Additionally, these anchor enterprises are unlikely to generate much in the way of local services. We live merely 20 minutes from the Metro Vancouver area. Already huge numbers of services come from contractors who come over on morning ferries and leave in the evening. Many of these services used to be provided by local people, but the housing affordability crisis (partly but not completely driven by AirBnBs, VRBOs and other short term rentals) have made living on Bowen a near impossibility for service industry workers and those who are trying to start up a business. If you need $2500 or $3000 a month just to house yourself, it’s tricky to raise the capital to start a business, nor is it easy to develop a market on island where already the cost of goods and services is subject to a ferry premium.
Our local economy is incredibly leaky. Most of the money people earn here is spent off-island, and that’s just a reality of location.
At one point when I was on the Community Economic Development Committee I scoped out a concept for hosting tourism on Bowen called “Village as a Venue,” based on an idea developed by my friend Tim Merry and his mates in Mahone Bay Nova Scotia, a community very much like ours. The idea was to organize the hospitality industry here through shared services like housekeeping, booking and events planning to create essentially a big distributed hotel that could host events like arts festivals, Ultimate tournaments, theatre and music, golf camps, marine biology conferences and leadership retreats. I prototyped this idea more than 25 times through week long retreats we offered between 2004 and 2019 and it has efficacy. We even started organizing some of the services in some early conversations.
Post-pandemic, I’m not sure now. I have seen local entrepreneurs create new businesses doing cool things, such a cidery or a distributed education program and I have seen them face fierce opposition by neighbours and legal challenges to the very idea that they could use temporary use permits to establish their businesses and services. In order to make something like this happen here, we would need to revisit our community plan – which is long overdue – and I would be very interested to see where we are as a community. I think folks like the idea of regenerative tourism in theory, but my suspicion is that we all carry many unexamined ideas about how it would affect us and there are very vocal folks who are very quick to pounce on ideas that would bring more people to our little island paradise.
But this article DOES inspire and as I have no plans to leave here any time soon, I await and observe these ideas and the conversation around them with curiosity.
An invitation to learn about transforming power.
Power.
What’s your reaction to the word? Do you love it? Does it make you shudder? Are you frightened by it or rather do you relish power, look for chances to acquire some and use it? Or maybe you’d rather talk about “influence” or “inspiration” because the word “power” seems toxic?
Have you been hurt by power? i have; my own and others. Power that exploits, power that lords it over us, power that extracts from us and drains us.
But I’ve also been lifted up and supported by power. Mentored, helped along, corrected, guided, enabled.
Kelly Foxcroft-Poirier and I have been talking about power in the context of lots of different pieces of work over the years including at the intersection of indigenous and settler systems of governance, policy and philanthropy. We’ve worked together with social service leaders, Indigenous families, Foundation leaders, churches, students of transformative systems change, folks interested in convening groups and making the world a better place. We’ve been in an active conversation about taking a view of power and it’s uses through a Nuu Chah Nulth lens.
Kelly, who is a member of the Tseshaht Nation is a deep student of her Nation’s culture and language, and in her work with Elders and communities over the past fifteen years, she has been thinking about power in a different way, by connecting it to its relational sources, grounded in family and community and lineage. When we are teaching together, Kelly uses the examples of four animals – the whale, the wolf, the eagle and the hummingbird – to explore four key aspects of cultivating and using power.
Stemming from a worldview that begins with an assumption that “everything is one” her learnings about power from a Nuu Chah Nulth lens invites us to look at how we use power to plumb honest Depth, strengthen collective Courage, create shared Vision and sustain one another to work with Joy.
With our friends Amy Lenzo and Rowen Simonsen at Beehive Productions we are ready to offer a series of four conversations about these ideas to those who work with power in group process and systems change. We know, working in participatory ways, that we can use and transform power to embed it in a relations system that shares leadership and lifts all of us, but it’s not always a simple matter to do so. So in this course we will explore relational power and its uses beginning with ideas Kelly has been putting together from her experience as a host and facilitator and leader in community and queried by my own experience working with power as a settler who is trying to lift more of these relational ways of doing things into the formal structures and systems in order to address the harms of colonization and promises of an alternative way of organizing and being actively reciprocal in the world.
If you are up for the conversation, we’d love to have you join us to explore how to transform our use of power. You might learn:
- How power shows upin group work and we might work with it differently
- How leadership is about creating shared contexts for action and actualization of both individual and collective work
- How working with power has the potential to transform relationships and create sustainability in social change and community.
And you might learn a bunch of other stuff besides! This course will place you in active learning with these ideas, and you will leave with a compendium and harvest of the teachings we all create together.
Want to join us? Learn more and register here.
I just came across this tiny short story “On Exactitude in Science” written by Juan Luis Borges. Enjoy.
…In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.
“On Exactitude in Science”by Luis Borges
—Suarez Miranda,Viajes de varones prudentes, Libro IV,Cap. XLV, Lerida, 1658
Brilliant. Thanks to Qamar Zaman at EPIC for pointing me to this story.
One of the earliest maps I ever discovered in my facilitation career was Sam Kaner et al.’s Diamond of Participation. It has been a stalwart companion for more than 20 years in my work. It forms a key part of the way the Art of Hosting community talks about process architecture, usually referred to as “the breath of design,” owing to its pulsation between divergence and convergence.
I realize I don’t have much on the blog about this map. So I thought I’d share my summary of Kaner et al.’s seminal work, The Facilitator’s Guide to Participatory Decision Making. If you don’t yet own this book, buy it now. It is an essential resource for all facilitators.
The Diamond of Participation
The Diamond of Participation is a map of the group process created by Sam Kaner and colleagues that identifies several phases a group goes through to create participatory decisions.
As groups engage with complex decisions, a very common journey goes through emotional and creative phases. Our ability to stay open to this journey enables us to discover new ideas, enter into the unknown, engage with difficult dynamics and make sustainable decisions. As a map, the diamond of participation helps us navigate the terrain of participatory decision-making and can help a group identify common traps, pitfalls and opportunities. Alongside personal leadership capacities to host and participate with presence and openness, this map, with tools and practices to help move through each stage, can support engaging, creative, participatory decision-making.
The diamond is divided into five zones or phases that groups go through. In each of these zones, leaders can help groups make good decisions by paying attention to the emotional terrain and using good tools at the right time.
Zone 1: “Business as usual”
Most decisions and conversations go quickly. You might need a few ideas and a couple of options, but the pathway is clear, and there is little or no controversy about what to do. Because we are conditioned to make decisions this way, it is common for groups to close a conversation down early, and for complex conversations this can have the effect of both avoiding conflict and limiting choices and possibilities.
When important decisions are on the table and there is no easy or obvious solution, groups enter the diamond of participation. Good leaders, with an awareness of the underlying patterns the diamond illustrates, can help guide a group through these stages toward more effective participatory decisions.
Business as usual involves:
- Quick decisions
- Debate over dialogue
- No focus on relationships
Zone 2: The Divergence Zone
Once it is clear that there is no obvious or clear decision, groups enter the Divergence zone. Familiar opinions get bandied back and forth and diverse perspectives on the problem begin to surface. This can be an enlivening time as a group searches for options and brainstorms possible paths forward. In the early stages of the divergence zone leaders can invite teams to explore different points of view and perspectives and introduce three key types of thinking: Surveying the territory, searching for alternatives and raising difficult issues.
Surveying the territory is done with methods that collect stories, perspectives and data and share them between the group members to build a shared picture of the diversity that the group is working with.
As a group searches for alternatives, holding intentional dialogue interviews, undertaking learning journeys or gathering stakeholders together can provide valuable information and insight.
But in truly complex processes, the answers are still not evident, and emotions can turn negative, with frustration and impatience beginning to appear. At this time, leaders need to be able to host the difficult conversations that come up so that diversity and difference don’t turn into unproductive conflict. In these moments, working with limiting beliefs and taking the time to sit in processes like circles and hear feelings and emotions becomes an important part of the work.
From this point, the group enters the Groan Zone, a sometimes painful part of the journey that can lead to fresh thinking and innovative decisions if it is well-hosted.
Zone 3: The Groan Zone
As a group enters the groan zone, people begin to struggle in the service of integration and in releasing their attachment to their own perspectives. Creating something new requires mixing, combining, and letting go. This can be a fraught experience rife with confusion, irritation, discouragement, anxiety, exasperation, pain, anger, and blame. It is no surprise that we want to avoid the groan zone, but for a group to discover new things, leaders can help people through the groan zone by engaging two types of thinking: creating shared context and strengthening relationships.
Creating shared context helps to re-ground a group in their work. This can take the form of paired interviews or group conversations where people explore different perspectives with a deliberate intention to listen for differences and where each other is coming from. Focusing on need and purpose can be valuable here as it gets a group “out of the weeds” and into remembering the deeper intention and the bigger picture.
Strengthening relationships is important in the groan zone, because frayed relationships will undermine the sustainability of a decision. Practices as simple as sharing stories, or going for a walk together can alleviate acute conflict and give people a chance to shift out of positions and reconnect to each other.
Work in the groan zone is heavily influenced by emotions and it is a lifelong practice for leaders to work on their own comfort and resourcefulness around conflict and strong emotions if they are to hold a group through this work.
Personal leadership practices are key to developing the ability to stay present and host process effectively in the groan zone. Developing deep self-awareness and presence, and using self-inquiry practices to shift reactive patterns can be helpful.
Zone 4: The Convergence Zone
When a group has worked through the groan zone, it comes time for convergence. This is where new ideas, fresh thinking and innovation can rise to the fore. The convergence zone precedes decision making as options are weighed, paths forward are discerned and, in larger processes, prototypes are designed for the purpose of testing new ideas.
When working towards a decision, three types of thinking are helpful: applying inclusive principles, creative reframing and strengthening good ideas.
Moving through the transition from groan zone to convergence requires a change in the container and the work. Inclusive solutions require a commitment to an inclusive decision making process, so it can be good practice to have the group design and adopt a set of inclusive principles to guide their work. These can be used later in the decision making phase as well.
Creative reframing invites the group to look at the work with new eyes. Having come through the groan zone together, all of the ideas that were gathered and discussed in the divergence zone take on new life. Looking at solutions with creative processes like scenario planning and TRIZ helps to introduce new ideas and perspectives to strengthen proposals.
And strengthening good ideas is the way towards making a sustainable agreement. Once ideas are contested, experimented with and considered it comes time to strengthen them through prototyping and piloting. The idea is to move the new ideas towards a decision by working with them through various scenarios first. Whatever can be done to strengthen an idea helps.
Zone 5: The Closure Zone
In participatory decision making processes closure usually involves making a decision together. This could be through a vote, or a consensus process, or it could even mean that the leader takes the decision alone with the consent of the group. Regardless of how closure comes about it is useful to agree together on the rules of decision making and then facilitate a decision.
Starting with agreeing on the rules and process gives you a chance to have a dry run through decision making with your group and this is especially useful if the decision you are making is contentious. Start by agreeing what would constitute a good decision and what a good, robust process is for making that decision. There are different versions of what consensus decision making can mean. You can research and try different approaches that best suit your context. For example, you may want to test consensus and have a rule that if someone is opposed to a proposal that they must bring an alternative to consider. You also might want to make some rules about timeliness of the decision or the maximum amount of resources available. When the group owns the process, it goes a long way to having them own the outcome.
Facilitating a decision can take various forms but typically goes through four stages: First, prepare a proposal that is simple and clear and that ensures that everyone knows what they are voting on. In some cases you might prepare two or three proposals in order to poll the group of options. Regardless, a proposal for a decision should be something taht is easily understood and easy to compare against other options.
Second, test the group for consensus. See who agrees with the proposal and who has questions or other things they would like to add. This process allows for a final set of conversations to strengthen the proposal. If you experience blocks and vetos at this stage of the process, this can give you good information about changes that need to be made or ongoing relationships that will need to be tended after the decision is made.
Third, iterate the proposal and review it again. Focusing on the major issues and questions means that the iteration process can be focused and aimed at creating a stronger proposal. Finally, make a final decision. That may be a vote or a consensus decision depending on what is required of the process.
Once the decision is made, the process is closed and the work continues. It can be important to give some thought to how the decision is communicated and implemented as part of your next steps.
For thousands of years, the island I live on has been called Nexwlélexwm. It has always been an important part of the Squamish Nation territory, and as it juts out out the moth of Howe Sound into the Strait of Georgia, it represents the edge of the world for Squamish people, beyond which are the relatives and strangers of the rest of the Nations of the Salish Sea and beyond. The southern shore of our island is called Ni7cháych Nexwlélexwm which means “the outer edge of Nexwlélexwm” and refers to that place where the dry cliffs and rocky points meet the sea. You can find a little more at the Squamish Atlas if you are interested in learning the historical names of places in this territory.
When I first came here in 2001 I read about the story of the how the deer were created here and last year in a conversation with two friends who are Squamish Nation councillors I heard that story again with a little teaching.
It goes like this. In Squamish history there is a period before memory in which everything was in flux and could change. This is called Sxwexwiyam. This was followed by a time of transformation to the land in it’s present state, called Xaay Xaays. In this time, four supernatural beings called Xaays travelled through out the territory fixing things in the form, changing people and animals into rocks and islands and creatures and in every place leaving a teaching. The territory is literally soaked in these stories and they provide guidance to the present day.
Upon arriving on Nexwlélexwm at a place called Kwemshenám, which is a reef that connects Finnesterre Island to Bowen Island in low tides, Xaays found a hunter. This hunter prided himself on being the fastest runner, the most accurate shot, just the very best hunter in the world. When the Transformers found him he was making a spearpoint and bragging about his abilities. He is said to have declared “I have heard there are people coming to change us and I aim to kill them.” Xaays were amused by his boasting and so they began to tease him and change him, by stretching out his legs and embedding two branches of Cceanspray in his head, and turning him into a deer. They chased him off and he WAS fast! But realizing that he would make good food for the people, they decided to slow him down by clapping his legs together and burying the spear point in his leg so that he could be caught and provide food for people. As he took off into the forest, his hoofs made a sound on the ground and so the place where this happened was named Kwemshenám, which means “stomping feet.”
My take on this story is that Xaays took a man who thought he was above everybody else and transformed him to become something that provides nourishment for all. When I see deer around on our island – and they are literally EVERYWHERE – I am always reminded of this story. I think often about how the best of what we have here should be shared with others to nourish them too. Many who have visited our island in workshops with us have heard this story and invitation to become changed by being here, and many people do have that experience.
When I was on the Economic Development Committee we engaged in a branding exercise for our municipal government and to my secret delight the primary icon that was chosen to represent our island community was the deer. I’d like to think that is stands for a community in which we can find ways to transform the smallness of our individual egos in service of nourishing the greater whole. Can we take what we have, as individuals, as families, and as a community, and share it? In a world and a region that is swelling with people who need more access to natural beauty, places of awe, and transformation for our individual and collective mental health, how can we best use what we have to help serve that need?