Media Statement

In February 2025 the Great Southern Universities Centre and Curtin University collaborated to bring the Regional Changemaker unit to Denmark, Western Australia.

The students spent two weeks in the community creating initiatives to help decrease the negative impacts of high-volume tourism in the area.

The students spent the first week of the unit meeting a range of community stakeholders and undertaking deep listening on the tourism topic.

The students undertook a range of field visits to sites where local community groups were interested in developing tourism strategies that would benefit the community and protect its natural assets, pitching their final ideas to the community on Saturday.

Course coordinator Dr Kirsten Hudson said the Curtin team found the impact of tourism to be a common theme in challenges residents were facing.

“We went in and asked the community for plenty of feedback so we had a direction of where things were going to go and what the residents wanted us to tackle,” she said.

“The idea behind the lab is to create solutions for regenerative tourism, where bringing tourism to a region like Denmark is something that brings the community together and is good for the people and low-impact for the environment.”

Fifteen students travelled to the Great Southern to be immersed in the challenges of the regional community of Denmark, the first time the lab had been run as a two-week intensive course in a regional community.

Dr Hudson said the engagement and passion the group received from the community was “incredible”.

“It was great to see the vulnerability and the passion for their community that came out when residents were talking with our students, and I think it made the students understand what kind of impact they could have,” she said.

One of the initiatives that students pitched was what Dr Hudson called a visitor vending machine, a free resource that could be placed around town to provide information for travellers without them having to go to the visitor centre to find it.

“What we’re finding is that not many people go to the visitor centre when they visit a new place, especially not with our reliance on the internet, so people are missing out on all this great free information that is available,” Dr Hudson said.

“The vending machines would make this information even more accessible, and it’s helping to integrate travellers into the community instead of separating them from it.”

For more information on the Regional Changemaker program in Denmark, please contact Holly Pepper holly.pepper@gsunicentre.edu.au.