Roger Merchant
University of Maine Cooperative Extension
165 E. Maine St.
Dover-Foxcroft, ME 04426
(207) 564-3301, (207) 564-3302 fax

TED: Tourism Economic Development is an educational and planning model for community-county approaches to sustainable tourism economic development. This purposes of this workshop are to: 1.) frame the three key interrelated elements of the TED model: assets—community—business, 2.) address the organizational and leadership implications of tourism asset inventories, community and economic development roles, and making tourism business-economic opportunities real through collaboration, and 3.) provide access to information and planning tools that support the TED approach.

This workshop is targeted for practitioners, educators and planners in tourism, business and economic development, and community and leadership development. The educational resources created to support the TED approach to education and planning for sustainable tourism will be brought into this workshop along with a case study presentation of the field application of this model. TED is supported by a new University of Maine Cooperative Extension Web site, “Nature, Heritage, Community”, which will be featured in this workshop.

The field application of the TED model to the Maine Highlands Region over the past two years has yielded these outcomes: adoption of sustainable tourism as an economic diversification strategy, expanded research links into the land-grant system, collaborative provisioning of business assistance and education, expanded tourism leadership capacity, multi-community engagement with tourism economic development options, and a shift in regional and state policies toward economic development and tourism.

PowerPoint Presentation (PDF Format, 1,922 kb)