In the beginning…

In the beginning…
My involvement began back in 2019 when Kerrien Grant from SKS asked me to join their team as the tourism expert and go in with David Bryan and the Social Enterprise Academy to pitch to Highlands and Islands Enterprise for their new Communities Leading in Tourism Programme.

SEA won the contract and after a hectic few months building the programme content on a new online platform then helping HIE review applications, James Hilder and I met the first cohort on Skye early in January 2020. James was the course leader for the Academy and doing all things leadership and I was there with my tourism hat on. This was when I first met Joan Lawrie and Mel Allen who both joined us on our SCOTO journey.

Over the sea to Skye …
We spent two days on Skye doing all sorts of fun things to first break the ice and then help everyone start thinking about their community through a tourism lens and tourism through their community lens – stakeholder mapping, asset mapping… lots of flipchart paper, felt pens, Postits and Blutak!

We then had a couple of days online developing leadership skills and hearing fascinating webinars about social enterprises from overseas. Next was two days here in Loch Lomond & The Trossachs National Park meeting the community partnership and the Park’s tourism team and then exploring Callander - Scotland’s first Social Enterprise Place (in the rain!)  Back online for a further two days and then we completed the first cohort 8 weeks later with two days in Stranraer - a week before lockdown.

Total focus in the hotel that houses an ice rink and learning about the town with the Oyster Festival. And as soon as we were done, reality was sinking in and everyone just wanted to get back home which for Joan Lawrie was the opposite end of the country – by train. Murdo was off to Glasgow wondering if his footie match would still be on and I was off to Stirling to pick up my shiny new (to me) V60 – a treat to myself given all the crazy mileage I had been doing…

And then came lockdown…
A week later … Lockdown … and I parked up the V60 for how many weeks?

I know we all had strange emotions to deal with at that time, but a very vivid one for me was feeling that we had just started something amazing, meeting such passionate people who cared about their communities and bang … we were pressing pause.

Taking Communities Leading in Tourism exclusively online
But HIE were on the ball and asked the simple question – could we take this next cohort – who had all applied and signed up - exclusively online?

As I have always been a face-to-face person and believing those first 2 days on Skye were essential to getting any group dynamic in place… I really didn’t see how we could do it exclusively online. But a baptism of fire with Zoom breakout rooms and video production and a brazen ‘can do’ attitude we took CLT online and over the next 2 years we delivered a further 4 cohorts with 85 individuals taking part. Many we never did meet face to face but somehow that simply didn’t matter. The sense of camaraderie over these five cohorts was incredible.

The guy with all the big ideas …
Russell joined us in Cohort 2, the first after lockdown and with his new job at Loch Ness Hub and Travel, he was the one with all the questions! And over time he kept coming back to the biggest benefit he was seeing, over and above the learning we provided, was the peer to peer network we had created. For me this was huge. These guys hadn’t actually met face to face yet everyone was so willing to share their experiences, good and bad, and offer advice and wanted this to continue.

Steven Dott and Lindsay Simpson at HIE supported some follow up online sessions to bring the different cohorts together and Russell’s idea was really resonating with everyone.

The Academy were very much in the programme delivery frame of mind whereas I found myself really excited about what this network could look like and what it could mean for Scottish tourism.

Community led tourism – flying under the radar
At this stage community tourism wasn’t really seen as a thing in the tourism industry. But what was becoming apparent to me was this wasn’t just a thing, it was exactly what Scotland needed if we were serious about ‘responsible tourism for a sustainable future’. The programme was demonstrating there was a lot happening across the country but it was driven by community development and therefore was flying under the tourism radar.

What was taking shape in this idea of a network was a new and incredibly exciting, purpose driven approach to delivering tourism across Scotland,    where securing local benefits was the driving force. Could this network embed community tourism in the industry and redefine what we mean by responsible tourism?

Norma Lyall who joined us in a later cohort was the one who reminded me this wasn’t new at all – communities through heritage groups and charities as just one example, had been doing community led tourism for decades, just not calling it that.

Communities leading the way
But what had been changing was the number of communities taking on assets. Here in Scotland our community empowerment legislation was enabling communities to own assets and have a stronger voice - and more and more communities were taking this opportunity.

However what was becoming very clear on the programme was that most if not all participants came at this from a community development perspective. The real value in the HIE programme was helping community development practitioners better understand how tourism actually works, and seeing tourism as a means to an end, a source of revenue to help make their community an even better place to live and work, as well as visit – and to learn from what others are doing both here and overseas.

Leadership and recovery funding
In 2021 there were various funds being made available to support tourism leadership and recovery and with Joan Lawrie, Lucy Conway and Russell we decided to put in a joint pitch for funding to scope out and set up SCOTO – a new community tourism network for Scotland.

The dream team
As the network was simply an idea and we needed an organisation to host this scoping project I offered to host and enable this through ruralDimensions. We were one of only 10 projects approved under this fund and late in 2021 embarked on our scoping project with myself as project director, Emma Guy and Catriona Waddington as our development team and Di Smith as our digital community manager – and a special mention for the dream team at Designline Creative who spearheaded our branding and online presence.

Emma, Catriona and Di were each alumni from the programme so came with a very keen understanding of what this was all about and what we wanted out it.

The dream becoming reality
From a standing start in November 2021 we took this notion through a heap of work talking to past alumni, exploring other networks and how they were set up, getting advice from Cooperative Development Scotland, designing a website and a brief for our brand…. to registering SCOTO as a cooperative and company limited by guarantee in March 2022.

SCOTO goes live
Our formal launch then took place on 25 April at Callander Hostel with Marc Crothall MBE and CEO of the Scottish Tourism Alliance, Russell Fraser as our inaugural chair, Di Smith as our new coordinator and the team at Callander Youth Project Trust.

This was such an exciting day and filled with so much positivity. That initial sense of teamwork and camaraderie has gone from strength to strength and here we are on our third birthday launching Community Tourism Awareness Day.

Things could have been very different
If we hadn’t gone into lockdown would Russell have got the same benefits from the programme and come up with the idea of creating a network? Would anyone have funded the scoping that led to our launch in April 2025? Would HIE have given us proof of concept funding? And, would Firstport have given us an interest free loan to help us grow?
Well Lockdown did happen and three years ago we got off the starter blocks at a hundred miles an hour!

Happy Birthday SCOTO
And here’s to the next three years of working with people who really care about their communities, have a sense of fun and adventure and are collectively putting Scotland as a nation firmly on the global responsible tourism map.