Explore Sisters: Strategic Plan

68 pagesThis product is designed for Explore Sisters as a client of the University of Oregon’s Nonprofit Management Consultancy capstone course in Spring of 2023 in partnership with the University of Oregon’s Sustainable Cities Year Program. A team of four graduate students consulted for ten weeks by interviewing similar destination management organizations (DMO), facilitating a board visioning workshop, conducting literature reviews and analyzing relevant data to provide customized recommendations and resources to best develop and sustain the organization. Explore Sisters was established in 2022 to promote local tourism and recreation opportunities in Sisters. With its recent inception, building a solid foundation to promote long-term sustainability will be key to the organization's success. This document contains three strategic goals and subsequent action steps for Explore Sisters to consider when presenting their strategic plan to the city. Given its recent establishment, the steps provided are scaled to the capacity that Explore Sisters currently possesses

Our Adoptee, Our Alien: Transnational Adoptees as Specters of Foreignness and Family in South Korea

Since the late 1990s, adult adopted Koreans have been officially welcomed back to their country of birth as "overseas Koreans," a legal designation instituted by Korea's state-sponsored "globalization" fsegyehwaj project. Designed to build economic and social networks between Korea and its seven million compatriots abroad, this policy projects an ethnonationalist and deterritorialized vision of Korea that depends upon a conflation of "blood" with "kinship" and "nation. " Adoptees present a particularly problematic subset of overseas Koreans: they have biological links to Korea, but their adoptions have complicated the sentimental and symbolic ties of "blood" upon which this familialist and nationalist state policy depend. Because international adoption replaces biological with social parenthood and involves the transfer of citizenship, to incorporate adoptees as "overseas Koreans, " the state must honor the authority and role of adoptive parents who raised them, even as they invite adoptees to (re)claim their Koreanness. Government representations optimistically construe adoptees as cultural "ambassadors" and economic "bridges, "yet for adoptees themselves-whose lives have been split across two nations, two families and two histories-the cultural capital necessary to realize their transnational potential seems to have already been forfeited. Based on fieldwork with an expatriate community of adoptees living and working in Seoul, this article examines how adoptees are specters of both family and foreignness in Korea. I argue that, rather than demonstrating the possibilities of a borderless world, Korean adoptees illuminate how state practices and political economy structure "kinship" and "nation" for transnational subjects caught up in contemporary dialectics of nationalism and globalization