RRT’s I Am Tourism Ambassador Academy gives participants in-depth knowledge of Richmond’s history. (Photo courtesy Richmond Region Tourism)
Maymont, Monument Avenue, St. John’s Church — what comes to mind when you think of touring Richmond? While these are certainly worthwhile places to visit in order to get a feeling for the region, to achieve an authentic picture of the area, you need to look beyond the obvious, says Valentine Director Bill Martin: “There’s more to Richmond than Monument Avenue.”
With that in mind, Richmond Region Tourism offers a free tourism ambassador program — I Am Tourism — in partnership with The Valentine. It’s open to anyone interested in learning more about the region’s sites, history and future.
There are two options available: A one-day workshop held regularly at the Greater Richmond Convention Center begins with class instruction and ends with a bus tour led by Martin or another Valentine staff member. The Ambassador Academy meets every Sunday for six weeks, with each session devoted to a different area of the city and surrounding counties. To enroll in the academy, participants must have attended one of the workshops, which are limited to 55 participants, while the academy enrolls about 30 people twice a year. Unlike other cities’ programs, which are often restricted to tour guides and those in the hospitality industry, Richmond’s ambassador program is open to everyone.
According to Tamera Wilkins Harris, events and sponsorship manager at Richmond Region Tourism, between 2009 and 2019, 2,500 people attended the workshop. Extra workshop dates have been added for 2020 to meet demand.
The program’s popularity has caught the eye of other cities. “I get inquiries all the time from other locations in the state as well as over the country on how or why ours has been so successful,” says Harris, who gives a lot of the credit to the curriculum created by The Valentine and how the program promotes the region as a whole as opposed to focusing on customer service centered around meetings, conferences and tournaments that bring tourists to the area.
The team at Richmond Region Tourism realized that residents are some of the best promoters of the region, and Harris notes that tourism contributes to tax savings for residents through the lodging tax visitors pay hotels. “We found that we have to have the stakeholders in the communities understand why tourism is important, and to do that, we have to have a community relations component,” she says. Harris adds that regional tourism organizations are beginning to embrace this philosophy nationwide.
Participants in Richmond’s tourism ambassador program not only get a behind-the-scenes look at some of the region’s most popular destinations, but they also learn the history of neighborhoods such as Barton Heights, Highland Park and Manchester.
“[We’re] trying to encourage people to go to parts of the city where they may not have [visited] traditionally,” Martin says. “So it’s new history, maybe history that you didn’t know. It allows … an opportunity to introduce the complexity of race in the city and how it informs so much of what the city is today.”
It’s a challenge embraced by the I Am Tourism Ambassador Academy: trying to paint a complete picture of the region within six class sessions. “There’s a complex history that we need to tell that we should be comfortable telling,” Martin says. This includes acknowledging subjects such as Richmond’s role in the slave trade. “What we do know is that visitors today like an honest story,” he explains.
“If someone comes to Richmond, and we just give them Carytown and monuments and St. John’s [Church] and maybe the river; I think they want more than the things that are the positive and the beautiful because for them to trust the history, they have to see it all.”
Participants visit the Maggie Walker statue downtown. (Photo courtesy Richmond Region Tourism)
Even at six weeks, 2019 academy graduate Sonia Arango says it’s still not enough time to learn everything about the region.
“We wish it was longer, because it’s a lot of history,” says Arango, a Colombian transplant who‘s lived in Richmond for 13 years. She stumbled upon the I Am Tourism program online. She was discovering that whenever friends and family came to visit, she assumed the role of tour guide, and she wanted to enhance her skills. “I have learned a lot,” she says.
That is a sentiment repeated by Arango’s classmate Zach Garza. A newcomer to Richmond, he works in the hospitality industry and attended the program not only so he can better assist his clients, but also to learn more about the place he calls home.
“For me [the program has] imbued more significance on my time here,” Garza says, adding that he and his wife are surprised at everything Richmond offers. “It’s a pretty special place,” he says, “particularly walking through Shockoe Slip or Shockoe Bottom and really having an understanding of what’s occurred there, from the slave trade to the Civil War prison and everything else that Shockoe has meant not only for Virginia, but for the entire United States.”
For Harris, the program has been a benefit not just for area tourism, but the entire community. “It’s been wonderful to see the growth from [the workshop] to the academy,” she says. “As far as a tourism standpoint, it’s amazing that we have these great ambassadors that now live in our destination that can continue to tell the story about why the region is what it is and [share] all of its history.”
For more information on I Am Tourism and to register for the workshops, go to visitrichmondva.com.