PORTALS TO PLACE
A conference exploring regenerative approaches to place, economy and community
The Emerging Program
We're working on an inspiring conference experience, with opportunities for deep conversations and learning that you won't be able to unsee and unthink. It's the kind of wisdom that only emerges from slowing down and listening to what wants to emerge...
Conference Design
Deep-Dive Presentations
Thought-provoking sessions that challenge participants to examine the way we think and what locks us in to old ways of problem-solving. These sessions create a space for deep reflection on the paradigms, assumptions, and mental models that shape how we approach economic and community development, tourism and change.
Practical Tools & Frameworks
Practical Framework Sessions provide hands-on learning experiences with specific tools, methodologies, and frameworks that participants can immediately apply to their work. These sessions balance theory with application and are paired with the Tourism Colab's Regenerative Tourism Practitioner Program and global examples and case studies.
Experience Regeneration in Place
Immersive Field Experiences take learning beyond the conference room and into the living laboratory of Flinders Island. Hosted. by the community, these experiences facilitate direct connection with place, people, and nature through authentic engagement helping us see how regenerative living systems work in practice.
Submit Your Expression of Interest
Please submit your ideas, proposals, and creative ideas. We embrace all kinds of creative offerings alongside more traditional presentations. Our aim is to bring everyone together for inspiring conversations, deep thinking, practical workshops and connection to honour and hold space for place-based regenerative work.
In Conversation with Community
Most tourism conferences happen in anonymous venues where nature and place are invisible and communities are rarely in the room. This conference does something different.
We're creating space for genuine dialogue with the people of place - those who experience tourism not as a design challenge or market opportunity, but as something that arrives on their doorstep, shapes their home, and changes their landscape.
What's it like to be on the receiving end of tourism? What do communities need us to know? What conversations have we never been invited into?
We will be running warm data labs to bridge divides and build shared understandings of lived experience.
In Connection with Place
This conference is also an invitation to connect with place itself - to feel the rhythms and flows of the land, water, and wind that shape this island home.
We'll explore what it means to design WITH nature rather than exploit her. To let the more-than-human world be our teacher. To be transformed by what we notice when we slow down enough to pay attention - to bird calls, tidal patterns, the way light moves across country.
Sessions will invite us into direct experience with the living world, asking: What can nature teach us about regenerative systems? What shifts when we stop seeing nature as resource and start experiencing her as guide?
Conference Themes
Portal to Place #1 - Shifting Perspectives, Future Focused
Shifting Perspectives invites participants to challenge their existing mental models and the dominant paradigm shaping tourism. Through interactive sessions that explore how we know, sources of knowledge and thought-provoking discussions, we'll explore how our foundational thinking shapes outcomes, and discover new ways of seeing that can transform our approach to tourism.
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Mindsets, mental models and paradigms shaping tourism
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Futures thinking for a changing world
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Regenerative development and tourism
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Regenerative storytelling that connects
Portal to Place #2 - Deepening Connection, Listening to What is Emerging
Deepening Connection focuses on fostering meaningful relationships between people and places. This theme explores how tourism can strengthen bonds with local communities and landscapes, enabling authentic connections that benefit visitors and hosts alike. Through immersive experiences and thoughtful dialogue, we'll discover how genuine connection creates the foundation for regenerative tourism practices that honour place and community.
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Understanding place identity, belonging and stewardship
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Connecting with nature and llistening
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Authentic community conversations
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Social licence, welcome, and hosting
Portal to Place #3 - Designing for Regeneration
Shifting Perspectives invites participants to challenge their existing mental models and the dominant paradigms shaping the ay we work. Through interactive sessions that explore how we know, sources of knowledge and thought-provoking discussions, we'll explore how our foundational thinking shapes how we act. Discover new ways of seeing and sense-making that transform our approach to our work with places, communities and nature.
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Regenerative business development
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Regenerative experience design
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Regenerative design
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Monitoring and evaluation design
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Design for systems change
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Genuine community co-design
Portal #4 Leading
Regeneratively
Leading Regeneratively addresses the critical need for new leadership approaches in tourism that build resilience and foster positive change. This theme explores how we develop adaptive capacities, implement innovative governance models, and cultivate regenerative economies that thrive through uncertainty. Through collaborative sessions and practical tools, participants will discover how to lead in ways that nurture the conditions for regenerative places to flourish and welcome visitors with an invitation to connect.
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Building resilience and capacity to adaptation
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Regenerative leadership
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Future-fit governance
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Diverse value creation and regenerative economies
Call for Contributions
Calling all regenerative practitioners and curious travellers to the portal!
We're seeking regenerative practitioners ready to gather at the threshold.
Do you have a story from the edges, a place where something shifted? A practice you've been testing that breaks the old patterns? Questions that won't let you sleep?
Bring them here!
We're not looking for polished presentations. We want conversation circles, field experiments shared, half-formed ideas that need other minds around them. Bring your dreams, your bewilderment, your small victories in working with living systems. This conference is for those weary of silos and hungry for kinship with practitioners who understand that regeneration isn't a buzzword, it's a practice, a relationship, a different way of being with place.
What wants to be spoken through you?
Submit Your Expression of Interest
Please submit your ideas, proposals, and creative ideas. We embrace all kinds of creative offerings alongside more traditional presentations. Our aim is to bring everyone together for inspiring conversations, deep thinking, practical workshops and connection to honour and hold space for place-based regenerative work.
We acknowledge and pay our deepest respects to the Traditional Owners of the land on which we live and work. We thank all Palawa for their ongoing custodianship of the lands, seas, waterways, and skies we are lucky to call home in Lutruwita/Tasmania, and recognise their deep connection to Country. We support Palawa in their struggle for treaty, truth telling, and justice. We pay our respects to all Palawa and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Elders past and present, and acknowledge that this always has been, and always will be, Aboriginal land.
