Dr. Robert D. Billington
United Nations World Tourism Organization
June 1, 2006
A very good day Secretary-General Francesco
Frangialli, Dr. Eduardo Fayos-Sola, Ms. Joaquin Lequina Herran,
distinguished members of the audience, ladies and gentlemen.
Congratulations to Dr. David Airey and Accor on their awards this
wonderful day. Greetings from the United States.
The entire Blackstone Valley Tourism Council family
is humbled by the recognition of our work in destination management,
and we are especially pleased to be honored as the first destination
management organization to receive the prestigious Ulysses Award.
Tourism practitioners look to the UNWTO to set high standards for
tourism developers to aspire. To be recognized for our programs is
certainly important to the future of developing sustainable tourism,
not just in our Valley, but also in our state and our nation. A new
standard for tourism in the United States has now been established.
When Dr. Eduardo Fayos-Sola, Head of Education and
Knowledge Management, called on behalf of the Secretary-General of the
World Tourism Organization, with the news that the Blackstone Valley
Tourism Council would be honored with the Ulysses Award for Innovation
in Tourism Destination Management, a wave of excitement immediately
overtook our staff, and then the feeling of new responsibility to a
larger world of tourism development, became apparent. Our sense is
that when an organization is recognized for its work, it comes with
greater scrutiny for its future projects, and an increased
responsibility to share its knowledge with others.
I was asked to recall in my remarks today, a bit
about the Blackstone Valley Tourism Council and its style of
developing tourism as an instrument for regeneration for over 20
years. The Blackstone Valley Tourism Council was founded at a time
when the unemployment rate in our state was 14%, and although the
Valley had an important history in America, a rich mix of cultures,
and a river with an important heritage, there was no organized
movement to use these benefits for positive community change. A few
pioneers however, considered tourism as a possible solution to some of
the problems in our community. The Tourism Council took on the
challenges and became an entrepreneurial destination management
organization interested in taking the tired Blackstone Valley through
the community tourism regeneration process. The Council became
involved in what we call: “place-making,” in the New England region of
the United States. The Valley is situated about 35 Kilometers South of
Boston, Massachusetts, three hours by car North of New York City, and
has a large East Coast interstate highway traversing the middle of the
Valley, so it did have near-by markets but was not tapping them.
People who work in tourism development are most
interested in how tourism creates positive changes for the communities
they serve. The Blackstone Valley Tourism Council models this behavior
and we immerse the organization in a process of continued renewal and
improvement, to make us more competitive to achieve excellence our
destination’s development. Receiving recognition for this type of work
is rarely a consideration.
Our not-for-profit, tourism planning, development and
promotional agency began its work in 1985 with a $300 donation from a
Rhode Island state senator who wanted to help get a “good idea”
underway. The idea was the creation of an organization that would use
leadership, imagination, determination and creativity to accomplish
goals to change their world through tourism. Thus began the odyssey to
create a destination in a Valley that was host to the first polluted
river in America. It did have the superlative however, of being the
Birthplace of the American Industrial Revolution, with the
construction in 1790 of the first successful water-powered,
cotton-spinning factory in America.
The textile industry grew from there, following the
textiles, came the machine, automobile and jewelry industries. America
became a world industrial power, and thousands of people from all over
the world immigrated to the Blackstone Valley to work in the mills.
After one hundred and fifty years of economic success, our factories
began to grow silent, organized labor and expensive electrical power,
drove jobs to the south, and many of the 1000 mills and the villages
industry constructed in the Blackstone Valley were abandoned and began
to decay. Morale of our residents sank, the image of the Blackstone
Valley as a place of American industriousness eroded to one of
depressed villages, economic decay, loss of direction as a community
and the legacy of a heavily polluted landscape and river.
Our work began with the creation of an organization
to lead the tourism development effort in the Blackstone Valley. This
non-profit organization was to be led by a volunteer Board of
Directors, many of which are still with us today, providing
single-minded leadership. A tourism development plan was written and
presented to the Blackstone Valley communities. It took more than a
year of public meetings, but eventually all communities adopted the
plan for tourism development. Many had questions about the need for a
tourism council because as they said, "visitors do not come here." In
1986, a year after the formation of the Tourism Council, the Rhode
Island State Legislature wrote the Council into state law assigning
responsibility for tourism development in 9 Valley communities. The
Blackstone Valley became a 241 square-mile destination based on shared
history, culture and our unique watershed.
In 1988, the Blackstone Valley National Heritage
Corridor Commission, a unit of the US National Park Service, adopted
the Tourism Council's strategy of place-making through tourism
development. The Tourism Council has worked for the past 18 years as
an agent of the National Heritage Corridor Commission, as well as city
and state governments, implementing plans, projects and programs to
affect large-scale community change. The management of government
funds brought us the expertise to work under the scrutiny and
adherence to intense government fiscal procedures and policies.
It took five years of speeches, presentations, and
programs after the Council's incorporation, to get doubters to stop
laughing about the Blackstone Valley becoming a destination, and to
think that tourism might actually be a tool of community change. By
1990 the Tourism Council was raising funds to build the first
riverboat to cruise the Blackstone River since 1848. Despite the idea
that there was nothing to see along the Blackstone River, the
fund-raising campaign was successful and the boat was launched in
1993. This once heavily polluted, and foul smelling river, was now
going to have a tour boat to ply its waters and educate about positive
community change. Since it’s launching, nearly 300,000 people have
toured the Blackstone River on the riverboat The Blackstone Valley
Explorer.
This element of tangible infrastructure helped the
Tourism Council learn how to, not only raise funds, but also raise the
profile as our organization that primarily worked with the intangible
aspects of the Valley. Since that time the Council has designed two
more 49-passenger ferryboats, The Hope and The Renaissance were
constructed for the Tourism Council on the Mississippi River. These
boats worked under contract for the Rhode Island and Federal Highway
Administration in an effort to implement mass transportation by water,
to the Blackstone River Valley.
In 1994, the Tourism Council began a twinning
relationship. It was based on the shared industrial history between
the Amber Valley of England and the Blackstone Valley of the US. The
world’s industrial revolution began in England in the 1700’s, but in
1790, an English immigrant exported his knowledge of textile
production through secrecy, to the States. This twinning became our
basis in international tourism with Europe.
The Blackstone Valley had a navigational canal
heritage, albeit a short one of 20 years, and remnants remained since
closing in 1848. For the Millennium celebration, a British Canal Boat
The Samuel Slater, constructed in Cambridgeshire, England, was
imported as a floating reminder of our important Blackstone Valley
Canal heritage. The Council also operates the riverboat Spirit of the
Blackstone Valley, now used expressly to carry handicapped passengers
through the state's largest art installation called Waterfire. To
further our transportation initiative, the Tourism Council imported
and operated a traditional 78- passenger British-built, double-deck
bus and operated a traditional-style 33-passenger trolley. All helped
to build the familiarity of the Tourism Council, all were handicapped
accessible and generated operational funds to be placed back into our
programs.
Today the Blackstone Valley is going through another
revolution. However, this revolution is not about the water-powered
textile factories, it is a revolution of people reclaiming their
landscape, river, and built environment, to create positive community
change through implementing sustainable tourism development
principles.
The Council is now focusing its work on more
riverfront development, the development of cultural events, operating
a floating bed and breakfast, directing a one-day, 1,200 person
motorcoach tour for residents, managing two visitor information
centers, increasing profitability of the Blackstone Valley's visitor
resources, affiliating with the Keep America Beautiful program to
continue the clean-up and green-up the Blackstone Valley by creating a
healthy landscape, increasing river education programs for younger
audiences and creating new, visitor programs for our over 55 years of
age Elderhostel groups, and of course, working to expand international
relationships.
The Blackstone Valley Tourism Council is a small
organization with a large mission and has just approved its 23rd
Annual Budget. This fiscal year, the Tourism Council is turning its
attention to the work of developing and adopting a sustainable tourism
development plan for the State of Rhode Island, which will begin with
a conference on VolunTourism on June 27.
While the Blackstone Valley Tourism Council has
written a proposal for statewide sustainable tourism development in
2005, we look to the UNWTO for leadership and expertise in tourism
sustainability, governance and tourism policy, as we work to make
Rhode Island more attractive to residents and visitors, and to make
our state the first sustainable tourism state in the United States.
The Council would like to share what is has learned
from our successes and our failures with other destinations around the
world, through the Sustainable Tourism Planning and Development
Laboratory by showing the application of the principles of tourism
destination development. This recognition today will help the
Blackstone Valley Tourism Council speak even more clearly about
excellence in destination management. Our Tourism Laboratory uses the
Blackstone River Valley as an experiential learning environment where
sustainable tourism principles are practiced, experimented with and
implemented. The continuous work on design and implementation of
programs for the achievement of tourism excellence in the
industrialized Blackstone Valley make it an ideal location for this
type of study. The goal is to share the concepts and strategies that
have regenerated the Blackstone Valley and urge them to be replicated
anywhere in the world.
This recognition will strengthen how our colleagues
in government and the private tourism industry perceive tourism. We
plan to employ further the principles of the UNWTO to assist the US
tourism industry to learn to expect even more corporate and government
responsibility in their work.
The Tourism Council will continue to seek excellence,
by continuing to improve its policies, procedures and programs in
destination management. Again, this recognition and future
collaborations with the UNWTO, increases our responsibility to tourism
worldwide.
In closing, I would like to thank my children and my
wife JoAnne, who has traveled with me as I receive this honor on
behalf of the Blackstone Valley Tourism Council, and thank her for her
years of support as the Tourism Council was brought along from its
infancy. I thank my very dedicated staff of professionals, some of who
have been supporting me for over 18 years, and I thank my long-time
supportive Board of Directors, especially my Chairman who has taught
me so much about tourism development.
The Blackstone Valley Tourism Council admires and
respects greatly the work of the UNWTO. This award is considered a
milestone in our history and will take a place of honor in our tourism
headquarters in Rhode Island. The World Tourism Organization
recognizing our work humbles us. We look forward to sharing this
wonderful experience today, and taking the message of the UNWTO to our
colleagues in the US and look to working even more closely with your
agency in the future.
Thank you so much for this recognition and good day.