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Achievement Award

Connecting the Neighborhood

2009 Lake Superior Magazine Achievement Award honors
The Great Waters Initiative

by Konnie LeMay

It sounds a lot like just being neighborly:

• Tell visitors in your town about things to do up the road to spread the regional tourism dollars farther.
• Share what you’ve learned about attracting visitors with other nearby towns and cities.
• Create ways to introduce environmental principles and sustainable practices into the businesses that rely on the beauty of natural resources to attract customers.
• Plan together - the entire region - to bring in more revenue, whether the dollars are spent every time in your specific town or not.

Yes, it sounds like being neighborly, but these good-neighbor principles have been the revolutionary keystones to an initiative bearing profitable and eco-friendly fruit in the eastern half of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. A similar program is under way for the western U.P.

The Great Waters was spearheaded in 2002 by Northern Initiatives, a nonprofit corporation that helps regional business with access to loans, consulting services and other information working with a steering committee.

Basically the whole project started because of yellow perch, says Christine Rector, director of regional strategies for Northern Initiatives.

A community group hired a consultant to help the Cedarville-Hessel area rejuvenate its tourism, which once centered on families coming to fish the plentiful perch. “Over the course of time, the yellow perch died out. Many of the families … stopped coming,” Christine says. “So that community got together and basically said, ‘What could we do?’”

The small towns couldn’t attract and hold visitors alone, the consultant advised, but the whole region boomed potential. His conclusion: “You’ve got to think regionally.”

That sounds simple, but the tourism industry, much like any business, works to compete for limited dollars, not to share them. Not even when it’s within your Lake Superior - and in this case also your Lake Huron and Lake Michigan - neighborhood.

Northern Initiatives secured a three-year rural development grant and formed partnerships among at least 17 chambers of commerce and bureaus of tourism that also contributed to The Great Waters concept and developed the three main trails under the brand.

Regional promotional materials, like The Great Waters trail map above and the environmental information below make The Great Waters initiative successful for the community.

The Great Waters brought tourism, business and other organizations together and created materials and a website promoting the entire region. The partners are committed to pooling resources, and are even buying a regional audio plug from Michigan native and actor Tim Allen that starts in September. “Each member of The Great Waters Steering Committee, along with our valued resource partners at Pictured Rocks, the Sault Tribe, Tahquamenon State Park, the Hiawatha National Forest and the Superior Watershed Council, have embraced the Great Waters wholeheartedly,” Christine says.

From the perspective of uniting neighboring communities in the goal of attracting more visitors, The Great Waters has been fantastic, says Linda Hoath, director of the Sault Convention and Visitors Bureau.

“It keeps more people … coming up into the eastern end of the Upper Peninsula,” Linda says. A tool that she’s finding just as important is the opportunity to meet and strategize with neighboring towns, often small towns without the kinds of resources she can bring from a larger city.

“We’re partnering with small communities, other cities, the DNR (Department of Natural Resources), Tahquamenon Falls (tourism). It’s a whole new tourism and it’s a tool we’ve not really used.

“It’s wonderful.”

The Great Waters also paved the way for regional education about customer service, says Michelle Walk, county extension director of community and economic development for Michigan State University. She teaches local people, especially those working in the hospitality industry, that “The community - not your individual business or service - is your product.”

She teaches that small towns might become the “base camps” for visitors who can be sent on day trips out of town. “People don’t mind driving an hour to go do something when they’re on vacation,” she says, but if they think there’s nothing to do, they’ll leave.

At the same time The Great Waters was becoming a marketing and economic development tool, it has become a way for the Superior Watershed Partnership to join in and to teach area businesses how to become more environmentally friendly. They can then tap what is sometimes termed “ecotourism,” or tourists who like to spend their vacation dollars at “green” businesses. The initiative also developed “voluntourism” opportunities - in this case where those on vacation come to help environmental projects like stream monitoring.

“All of the businesses are dependent on nature tourism, they get that connection,” says Carl Lindquist, executive director of the partnership. Through The Great Waters initiative, though, the partnership developed and distributed simple environmental agreements for businesses to sign on to … agreements that outline simple things to do to be more green.

“They get on board, their customers like that, but the most exciting part for us is getting locals - whether they’re business owners or others who live in the community - getting them involved in projects that protect their community and the Great Lakes.”

Through The Great Waters website, visitors can find “service outings” to help in such projects or can download photos or GPS coordinates if they find problem areas on their trips, such as illegal dumpsites.

“They can feel like they are doing their part,” Carl says.

Everyone doing their part, of course, is the point of having The Great Waters.

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