Geotourism Challenge Finalist: Natural Mentors: Virgin Islands Youth Heritage Exchange Farm Excursions
Monday, 01 Sep, 2009
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Natural Mentors (NM) facilitates cultural exchange and nature awareness through a youth excursion certification program and volunteer-vacation experiences for traveling groups from abroad. It connects local elder culture-bearers with youth leaders, youth with other youth, and local participants with traveling groups. Departing from the traditional tourism model, where the needs of the tourist come first, NM first focuses on relevant needs of the host population’s cultural survival through hands-on workshops that center on traditional nature-based lifestyle skills, organic food production, and cultural mentoring. Second, it is structured to provide an interactive element for visitors where they can take part in this cultural mentoring process. While NM facilitates a generational torch-passing in useful life skills (like how to grow your own organic food), it also teaches arts, crafts, and the art of cultural interpretation that can provide a basis for entrepreneurial career development. For visiting groups, it engages with a sense of local and global humanity, where through learning how to meet basic needs one is able to see cross-cultural similarities (organic food growing techniques are remarkably similar), and local identifiers that make us unique (how cultural geography defines our cuisine). The results are hand-held, colorful, and full of flavor.
Natural Mentors is innovative because it focuses on how tourism product development can go beyond direct benefits (i.e., jobs, service contracts, and so on) for local communities and provide instruction of practical skill sets to have basic needs such as food, medicine, and emergency preparedness. These skills are critical to small islands, which also face extreme pressures from tourism development. Over two-thirds of the worlds small islands are near the equator and have extremely diverse and threatened ecosystems, such as coral reefs. They also face cyclone and climate change threats, such as the 1989 hurricane Hugo, which disrupted power service in the Virgin Islands for up to six months. With largely import economies (99% of food is currently imported after it was a major export commodity in the 1950s), food security and psychological development to a place of confidence in survival are paramount issues. However, careful study of the host populations in Caribbean islands reveals a heritage of self-reliance and survival through culturally relevant life ways. On one hand, we use the economy of tourism to make this cultural mentoring possible, and on the other we use the island as a small-scale case of inspiration to travelers to the needs and possibilities that exist on a global scale.
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