The National Extension Tourism Network (NET) recognized the impacts and accomplishments of several of its members during an awards banquet held during its biennial national conference last month in Milwaukee, WI. This year’s NET Awards program honored seven deserving teams and individuals with six awards.
“It is always wonderful to hear about the innovative partnerships, programs, and leadership our NET colleagues are engaged in around the country,” said NET’s Chair, Xinyi Qian. “The NET Awards program provides an excellent opportunity to celebrate their hard work and dedication to their communities.”
This year’s awards included:
- The NET Excellence in Tourism Collaboration Award – Montana Trail to the Stars and Coastal Awareness and Responsible Ecotourism Certification
- NET Excellence in Tourism Programming Award – International Workshop on Agritourism
- NET Local Champion Award – Menomonee Valley Partners, Inc.
- NET Partner Award – Northeast Regional Center for Rural Development
- NET Emerging Leader Award – Claudia Schmidt, Penn State Extension
- NET Career Achievement Award – Lisa Chase, University of Vermont Extension
NET Excellence in Tourism Collaboration Award
This year, there were two winners of this award: The Montana Trail to the Stars organization and the Coastal Awareness and Responsible Ecotourism Certification initiative
Montana Trail to the Stars organization promotes and celebrates the region’s wide-open dark skies, which offer some of the most stunning stargazing experiences in the world.
The Trail features more than 45 locations across eastern Montana, all ideal for stargazing. To promote Montana’s world-class night skies, several organizations came together to create Montana’s Trail to the Stars. This project is a collaboration between three of Montana’s official tourism regions, including James Cooler with Central Montana, Carla Hunsley with Montana’s Missouri River Country, and Brenda Maas with Southeast Montana, and Pat Doyle with Montana’s Fish, Wildlife & Parks Montana State Parks, additionally, Montana’s Office of Tourism, Montana’s Tourism Advisory Council, and several local businesses across Eastern Montana among others have supported the Trail to the Stars. Montana is known for its mountains and access to Glacier and Yellowstone national parks. However, there’s so much more to discover. Montana’s Trail to the Stars highlights the eastern part of the state and promotes visitor dispersal to less visited areas, helping boost those small, local communities.
The Coastal Awareness and Responsible Ecotourism Certification initiative (CARE) is an ongoing collaborative project among Katie Higgins with University of Georgia Marine Extension and Georgia Sea Grant, Allie Hayser at Manomet, a non-profit organization, committed to using science to address pressing conservation challenges, and Tim Keyes with the Georgia Department of Natural Resources, and now also involves The Nature Conservancy, The Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor, and participants from many communities.
This program, launched in 2021, has engaged a novel audience in specific stewardship education content creating a professional certification for nature-based tour guides. Three cohorts have completed the CARE course to date, resulting in 44 certified guides from 23 different organizations. The required six-month reporting from guides indicates that CARE course content has been shared with approximately 14,500 tour guests so far.
NET Excellence in Tourism Programming Award
This year’s award went to the International Workshop on Agritourism
The NET Excellence in Tourism Programming Award recognizes outstanding tourism program development, projects or initiatives impacts, or accomplishments, relative to innovative, creative, or scholarly activities. This year, the International Workshop on Agritourism (IWA) was recognized. After two years’ delay due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the International Workshop on Agritourism planning team held a successful 3-day hybrid conference from August 30 – September 1, 2022 in Burlington, Vermont. The planning team was led by Lisa Chase at the University of Vermont and was composed of faculty, farmers, practitioners and agriculture businesses across the U.S. and Canada including:
- Lisa Chase, University of Vermont
- Lindsey Berk, Origins of Food, Addison County Re-Localization Network
- Todd Comen, Vermont Strategy Group
- Leslie Dorworth, Illinois-Indiana Sea Grant, Purdue University Northwest
- David Gillespie, Canadian-American Exchange for Sustainable Agriculture
- Myrna Greenfield, Good Egg Marketing
- Chadley Hollas, Cultivating Tourism
- Trevor Lane, Washington State University
- Xinyi Qian, University of Minnesota Tourism Center
- Claudia Schmidt, Penn State
- Jacqui Taylor, Agritourism Africa
- Claire Whitehouse, University of Vermont
The conference offered a wide variety of presentations from researchers and practitioners (e.g., farmers, business owners), educational workshops, and hands-on field trips to a variety of regional farms.
In total, 504 people attended the conference, with 352 joining in person and 152 joining
virtually. Attendees came from 56 countries (33 in person), 44 U.S. stats/territories (40 in person), and 13 Vermont counties. Attendees included a mix of agritourism researchers, practitioners, support professionals, and policymakers. Attendees indicated this event provided great benefit with lasting impacts upon business outcomes as well as scholarship.
Scottie Jones of Farm Stay USA said of the conference planning team, “It was really a remarkable feat that the International Workshop on Agritourism, originally organized for August 2020, had such a long run. Much of its success was due to the team’s creativity, professionalism, and ability to pivot! The conference, twice canceled due to Covid, pushed Lisa and the planning team to fill the gap with Agritourism Gatherings to keep folks engaged. What a brilliant idea. These gatherings introduced many of us working in the agritourism arena to each other in a virtual world, something that might not have happened otherwise and that ultimately made for a better conference.”
NET Local Champion Award
This year’s honoree was the Menomonee Valley Partners, Inc.
The NET Local Champion Award recognizes an individual, organization, business, or entity located within reasonable proximity to the current NET Conference location (i.e., Milwaukee) that has been a champion of innovative, inclusive, and progressive tourism-related efforts. This award is intended to highlight and celebrate local efforts happening near the current NET conference location. This year’s honoree was the Menomonee Valley Partners, Inc., a nonprofit organization founded in 1999 that has served as the lead agency in the redevelopment of Milwaukee’s Menomonee River Valley. Once Wisconsin’s most visible eyesore with hundreds of acres of vacant buildings and abandoned land, the Valley has been transformed, becoming a national model in economic development and environmental sustainability. The organization serves as a convener and coordinator by engaging stakeholders, articulating a vision, leveraging funding, and aligning partners to accomplish shared goals.
NET Partner Award
This year’s award went to the Northeast Regional Center for Rural Development
The NET Partner award recognizes contributions that have made a significant positive impact on the NET organization or its members as a whole. This year the award went to the Northeast Regional Center for Rural Development (NERCRD) as the team has been an invaluable partner to NET in recent years. In early 2020, the Center helped organize a retreat for the NET Design team, which was sponsored by all four Regional Rural Development Centers, and took place in Savannah, Georgia, so the team could work with a facilitator to create its first strategic plan. This catalyzed the growth of NET to what it is today.
With NERCRD’s support, NET also was selected to receive funding and technical support as a participant in the New Technologies for Agricultural Extension (NTAE) project accelerator program, through which NET developed marketing materials, several publications, including The NET Effect, five topic-based one-pagers, and the 2021 NET Conference Proceedings. The funding also supported several NET “ambassadors” to travel to several different conferences to represent and promote the amazing work of the NETwork.
The Design team is grateful to NERCRD Director Stephan Goetz for his leadership and continued support; Jason Entsminger, who is no longer at NERCRD (and is now at the University of Maine) but whose support to the NTAE project was critical; and Kristen Devlin whose time to set up, administer and manage made all of the outputs previously listed a reality. The support of the NERCRD has been invaluable and the NET Awards Committee believes NET has a bright future because of the path that NET and the Northeast Region Center for Rural Development have co-created.
NET Emerging Leader Award
This year’s award went to Claudia Schmidt (Penn State Extension)
The NET Emerging Leader Award recognizes an individual who is an emerging leader in tourism extension and outreach programming. This award is presented to an extension professional who has been working in Extension for less than 6 years. This year we recognized Claudia Schmidt with Penn State Extension, who began her extension career five years ago, in the Department of Agricultural Economics, Sociology and Education.
In just a few years, Dr. Schmidt has already developed an impressive body of research and extension programs. Her publications encompass agritourism, women in agriculture, food access, craft breweries, and the scholarship of Extension. In all of these areas after only five years at Penn State, Dr. Schmidt has made significant contributions to the literature in her chosen areas of scholarship while also developing Extension programming with significant impacts on the ground and in the field.
One of the support letters for Claudia’s nominations stated of her “Claudia is a first-class collaborator, willing to take on various, and sometimes multiple and simultaneous, roles in projects that span disciplines, institutions, and even countries. She has established herself as an expert in multiple promising areas of creative scholarship with an overall focus on creating support for primarily rural agricultural entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial support systems to be more likely to succeed in an increasingly complex economic and social environment.”
NET Career Achievement Award
This year’s award went to Lisa Chase (University of Vermont Extension)
The final award given at the banquet was the NET Career Achievement Award, which recognizes and honors an individual who has provided significant contributions to tourism-related outreach and education to communities throughout their career. This year the award recognized Lisa Chase, who has served as a faculty member for more than two decades with the University of Vermont Extension and as Director of the Vermont Tourism Research Center for 19 years. Her involvement with the National Extension Tourism Network (NET) began in 2002, and she has been an active member ever since. She hosted the NET Conference in Burlington in 2006 and has served on the NET Design Team since 2003. She became the NET Chair in 2020 and led the organization through a period of extensive growth in membership and engagement. Lisa served as the Fellow for an NTAE Extension Foundation grant to NET administered through the Northeast Region Center for Rural Development. In her role as Fellow, Lisa worked with NET colleagues to develop several products to further the reach of NET including a series of one-pagers about NET, a NET e-zine featuring eight case studies around the US, and the first-ever NET Conference Proceedings. Although the September NET conference marked the end of Lisa’s term as a member of the NET Executive Committee, she has continued to support the new leadership team.
Lisa’s work extends far beyond NET. The distributed leadership model of NET is now serving
as an example for a new network that Lisa is leading: Global Agritourism Network (GAN), which is a direct outcome of the International Workshop on Agritourism that she organized in August 2022.
Her nominator said of Lisa, “True leaders are those who share their knowledge and provide support to individuals that are entering their field of expertise and equip them with the knowledge and tools to succeed. Lisa has been an invaluable resource for me and other colleagues, providing guidance, support, and encouragement as we navigate the various challenges of our Extension work in the tourism field. Her expertise in agritourism and dedication to collaborative, interdisciplinary work is truly inspiring. I cannot think of a more deserving candidate for this award.”
The National Extension Tourism awards are given every two years in conjunction with the organization’s biennial national conference. To be alerted of the next call for nominations, be sure to join the NET listerv or follow NET on LinkedIn.