Visoko Scout Troop expanded capacity to host visitors from Europe

Long-standing scouting tradition in Visoko

The Visoko Scout Troop is not a new association making its way up. It is one of the most enduring scouting units in Bosnia and Herzegovina, with decades of organised work in Visoko. What the Troop offered to the city and the region considerably exceeded its modest budget.

The Troop regularly organised two major events that gathered more than 900 participants per year:

• "Greeting to Spring" - in cooperation with PD "Visočica", 400 to 600 participants (mountaineers, scouts, members of other associations, citizens)
• "Treasure Hunt" - a scout competition with 300 scouts from the region

International cooperation - something unusual for an association of this size

The Visoko Scout Troop had continuous international cooperation. Over the past years scouts came to Visoko from:

• England - more than 110 guests in two visits
• Denmark - 20 guests
• Qatar - 40 guests
• Montenegro - scout troop "Orjen" Herceg Novi, 35 guests
• Belgium - 20 guests
• several Bosnian cities (Tešanj, Nemila, Konjic) through joint camps

This was a real international visit in numbers that would be a good average for many city tourist organisations.

The problem the project solved - where to accommodate guests

What the Troop already had:

• The Scout House - a space over 110 m² in Visoko
• 17 tents of different sizes, suitable for about fifty people in nature
• A property with a devastated cottage for stays in nature

What was missing: equipment to receive and accommodate larger groups of guests - furniture, equipment for food, sleeping, sanitation.

The consequence of this lack was a concrete problem: the Troop constantly had to accommodate its guests outside Visoko, in members' private houses or in hotels and mountain lodges on Bjelašnica, Jahorina, Boračko jezero, in Zenica. This meant that the tourist money the guests brought did not stay in Visoko. The guests slept elsewhere, passing through Visoko only through the programme - a direct loss for the local economy.

What the project did

The project "We Create a Better World" had three goals:

• Increase the Troop's accommodation capacities to serve as a shorter stop and stay for tourists and scouts
• Turn the Scout House into a functional facility for a shorter stop and guest stay
• Include the House in the Visoko tourist offer as an official scout hostel, through a new European scouting web service that unites scouting centres, homes, and hostels, which opened the possibility of more scouting groups from Europe coming

Why the approach was innovative

The applicant themselves recognised what they did not do, things others could have applied for: rest stops along roads, open sports recreation facilities for children, marking of entertainment and recreation trails, cycling and walking trails, renovation of premises.

Instead, they chose a different approach. The Troop did not seek funds for infrastructure it would use alone, it sought funds for infrastructure that enabled others to come, who then jointly worked on the tourist offer of the city. This is a type of thinking that multiplies the effect of one investment - every piece of equipment the Troop acquired served both domestic activities and international guests.

Sustainability - why this endures

• The equipment is durable - quality equipment was procured, not cheap typical solutions
• The equipment is portable - when not in active use for guests, it was used in other cities and for other events (the KUD Festival, cooperation with PD "Visočica")
• The Troop has long-standing continuity - decades of work prove that investment in it does not disappear quickly
• A rising trend of international visits - the project used a continuous inflow of guests, not a one-off event

The message of the project

Through decades of existence, the Visoko Scout Troop has proved that it can retain purpose and activity through all political and economic changes in BiH. It was not an ordinary gathering of people that met occasionally, it was an institutionalised international window for Visoko through which scouts from across Europe flowed into the city.

With this project they asked for very little for equipment, but the effect was much greater: hundreds of guests a year who could stay in Visoko, not just pass through it. For a city that actively positioned itself as a tourist destination, this was the type of investment that returned in the first season.