PORTALS TO PLACE
FLINDERS ISLAND, TASMANIA | 4-8 May 2026
A Place-Based Community-Hosted Conference
What if you could learn directly from the community, not just about them?
What if you could attend a conference, listen and reflect without having to perform a role or a label?
What if you could admit that you don't know, and that's OK?
Traditional community and economic development, tourism destination development, and experience design often feels performative. There is a playbook, a script, and a marketing guide. This conference flips that script.
You'll be hosted by the Flinders Island community – not as observers, but as genuine participants in their learning journey. Learn from them what is important to places and community, and take those learnings back to enrich your own work. Intuitively, you know it's the future, even though your organisation may not be there yet. So lean in and learn!
The Future Lies in Our Conference Themes
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Mindsets, assumptions, position and agency
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Meta-crisis and systems change
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Understanding terms: regeneration, responsibility, sustainability (and more)
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Honouring community: approach, skills, process and outcomes
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Alternative knowledge and place-based wisdom
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Storytelling for Impact: Beyond marketing
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Social and economic flourishing and alternative economies
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Case studies from the edge
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Regenerative business development
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Hosting, guesting and regenerative (experience) design
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Understanding and releasing policy lock-in
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Futures and futuring
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What is hosting in a changing world - a warm data lab
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Our Conference Theme - Portals to Place
This is definitely not your traditional tourism conference! It's an invitation to cross the floor, open doors, and explore new possibilities. We're exploring regenerative travel and hosting as a possibility for place, not a panacea for extraction.
We're flipping the script and asking: "What does it look like when communities design economies that actually work for them?"
Tourism is part of many local economies – sometimes big, sometimes small. But it rarely sits quietly. It can dominate, extract, or exist in its own bubble. We're done with that.
This conference explores what happens when you stop treating tourism as separate and start weaving it into the whole system – alongside agriculture, creative industries, nature stewardship, community wellbeing, and local innovation.
Join us to explore regenerative practice, thriving communities, and what it takes to build places and economies that regenerate rather than extract.
The setting? Extraordinary Flinders Island, Tasmania, where you'll be hosted by a community actively experimenting with this work. Not theory. Real practice, real mess, real learning.
Pause, Listen and Learn
We're challenging you to sit in the mess, listen to a community trying to do tourism differently, and lean in to the wisdom of real place-based practice. There's no need for you to come with solutions or tools. This is a place you can feel comfortable not knowing.
Narratives can't be controlled. Top down community engagement doesn't work anymore. We will blend theory and practice, and you will develop new skills and knowledge to help navigate working with communities.
This conference delivers something we all know deep down: that innovation is happening on the edge. Now more than ever there is a lot to learn from place-based, community-led innovation.
Join us for a conference that is hosted in a place that is working differently to generate genuinely positive impact for people and place, not just greenwashing.
Stories and Case Studies from the Edge
Traditional conference themes focus on marketing, product development, and experience design. We're breaking the tradition. It's time to explore where things are actually heading. Our themes include:
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Regenerative regional development
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Place identity and belonging
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Community wealth-building
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Local economic innovation
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Community co-design
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Ecological leadership
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Circular economy
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The role of nature
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Systems work
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Neuroscience of change
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Creativity in social and economic transitions
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Authentic engagement and deep listening
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Nature's design an designing with nature
Why Should I Attend?
Transform your Understanding of Future-Fit Tourism
Leave behind conventional thinking and discover new paradigms that are reshaping how tourism can contribute to thriving communities and ecosystems. You'll gain clarity on regenerative principles and how they apply to your unique context, whether you're working in policy, business, community development, or destination management.
Practical Tools and Frameworks You Can Use Immediately
Return home with a toolkit of proven methodologies, frameworks, and approaches for designing regenerative systems. You'll learn how to engage communities authentically, measure genuine impact and create positive change. We are not just talking theoretical concepts, we share practical tools.
Direct Access to Pioneer Practitioners
Connect with regenerative designers, practitioners, and community weavers who are actively working in the field. Learn from their successes, challenges, and real-world insights. We don't care about polished presentations. It's about about honest conversations with people navigating the complexity of regenerative approaches in real places.
Experience a Living Laboratory in Action
Witness firsthand how regenerative practice creates lasting change through immersive field experiences on Flinders Island. Engage directly with local businesses participating in the Regenerative Business Development Program, meet community leaders from the Furneaux Collective, and see how systems thinking translates into tangible outcomes for communities, place, and nature.
Build Your Regenerative Leadership Capacity
Develop the mindset, skills, and confidence needed to lead regenerative change in your organisation or community. You'll explore ecological leadership approaches, learn how to navigate uncertainty, and discover how to create the enabling conditions for regeneration to emerge. This includes developing your capacity for deep listening, systems thinking, and collaborative sense-making.
Connect with a Community of Change-Makers
Join an intimate gathering of curious, committed individuals on similar journeys. Build meaningful relationships with fellow practitioners who can become long-term collaborators and sources of support. The conference's small scale ensures plenty of opportunity for genuine connection, collaborative exploration, and ongoing learning networks beyond the event.
New and Emerging Practices
Across the world, regeneration is rising, and you probably sense that big change is coming. Our mission is to bring cutting-edge innovative thinking and practice directly to creative changemakers ready to take a deep dive into new ways of working.
This is an independent conference designed and delivered by regenerative designers, practitioners, and community weavers. This means we don't deliver industry-approved agendas. Instead, we bring you the latest thinking and practice from practitioners embedded in places, constantly making sense of how the polycrisis is reshaping communities, and the places that host visitors. This is where real, regenerative thought-leadership is born.
Flinders Island, Tasmania - A Unique Conference Setting
An intimate, small-scale environment with plenty of opportunity for discussion of ideas and sense-making.
Hands-on interactive exploration of regenerative tools, frameworks and practices.
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A safe place to explore unfamiliar ideas, question how we think, and why our systems are stuck.
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Opportunity to connect with place, engage with the community, and explore what regeneration means in place and community.
Connect with a community of curious change makers on a similar journey and a support network for the future.
Portals to New Practice Conference Program
Portals are symbolic of transition. Leaving old spaces and entering new phases. Think of this conference as a provocation to open new doors! We invite you to explore our conference portals (or themes). We're on a mission to open up new ways of thinking and practice that are fun, creative and inspiring even in uncertain times. Our program will reflect the following portals:
Portal 1: Shifting Perspectives, New Practices
Transforming how we think, make sense, and act:
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Mindsets, mental models and paradigms
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Futures thinking for uncertain times
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Regenerative development and tourism
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Regenerative storytelling and impact
Portal 2: Deepening Connection with Place
Building authentic relationships with people and place:
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Place identity, belonging and stewardship
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Connecting with nature
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Authentic community conversations
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Social licence, welcome and hosting
Portal 3: Design for Impact
Designing systems for regeneration:
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Regenerative design
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Design for change
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Designing in learning
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Monitoring and evaluating change
Portal 4: Emerging with Intention
Building capacity and resilience for the future:
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Resilience and adaptation
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Regenerative leadership
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Future-fit governance and policy directions
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Regenerative economies
A Professional Development Opportunity Fit for Life
A Unique and Practical Learning Opportunity
We stand at a threshold between business-as-usual and an emerging paradigm that is reshaping not just tourism, but how we build resilience to navigate an increasingly uncertain future.
Real, Applied Examples and Case Studies
Learn from real cases and listen to experienced regenerative practitioners. Witness firsthand how regenerative approaches create lasting change for the community, the economy, and for nature.
Actionable Insights to Navigate the Transition Ahead
Join us on Flinders Island and return with actionable insights and tools to navigate the transition ahead, implementing immediate changes toward long-term transformation.
The Islander Way Regenerative Living Lab
The Regenerative Tourism Living Lab on Flinders Island is a global lighthouse for regenerative development and tourism. We will take a deep dive into what we have learned about working with communities, and creating the enabling conditions for places to thrive.
The Tourism CoLab's Regenerative Business Development Program has been piloted internationally for two years and is being implemented on Flinders Island. This is an opportunity to get under the hood and understand what a regenerative business looks and feels like.
The Furneaux Collective is a holistic community voice and the steward for community interests on the Island. Engage with the Collective, hear their story and learn from their experience in setting up a community collective. Learn about the initiatives on the go including local stories podcast, the regenerosity platform, community designed projects, circular economy initiatives and more.
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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.
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