Gluckin Rare Works Tourism

POLK COUNTY — Emily Gluckin has already started breathing new life and energy into the Polk County Rural Tourism Studio, a project that kicked off in January 2015.

Gluckin, 23, is a volunteer with Resource Assistance for Rural Environment, an Americorps program. She is working with the Rural Tourism Studio focus groups to help further plans and get the gears moving on attracting tourists to Polk County.

She studied environmental studies in college, with a concentration on sustainability and a minor in green building and community design. She was in Montana doing another Americorps program when she heard someone talking about “this cool-sounding program that focused on planning and was in Oregon,” Gluckin recalled.

She was working at a bike-ped advocacy organization, which will come in handy for the tourism efforts in Polk County.

“It’s kind of like my position last year was a small piece of planning, and my interests are really on a broader scale,” Gluckin said.

Gluckin hadn’t thought about the role tourism plays in community planning.

“The more I looked into (this) position and thought about the projects, it seemed like a perfect fit,” she said. “I don’t know why I didn’t think about it before. It’s community development. I really like the process of creating experiences in a community.”

Tourism is creating public spaces that make people want to visit, or make people who live in a community proud of it, Gluckin said.

“A big factor of this job is working with a lot of different people and different towns and different players in the tourism field,” she said. “I’m really excited to learn how tourism affects a place, how it affects the people who live there, and how it affects people who are visiting.”

With the work done by the Rural Tourism Studio committees, Gluckin has a solid starting point.

“They’ve gotten a lot done since (2015),” Gluckin said. “Our goal is to reboot that effort and get people motivated to be involved and get some projects on the table. One of my main roles will be facilitator of that process — coordinating meetings, creating action steps from those meetings, hopefully get some fun projects organized.”

Gluckin has the perfect hobbies to coordinate tourism efforts in Polk County — she loves hiking and mountain biking, and is learning quickly about the wine industry — not to mention the potential tourism draw of the 2017 total solar eclipse in August.

“We’re right in the path of totality, and apparently Polk County has the best average weather forecast for that time of year out of anywhere in the country,” Gluckin said. “I think it’s going to be big. I think my main role in that will be coordination — getting businesses involved, starting now, making sure people know it’s happening, and plan accordingly.”

Get involved: egluckin@ci.independence.or.us.

Originally Published in Polk County Itemizer-Observer
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The Dalles, Oregon 97338
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