Tourism is one of the world’s largest and fastest growing economic sectors. Within this continuing growth of tourism there is a growing trend & a raising consumer awareness for sustainable and responsible tourism. The CORRIE project aims to: • Create awareness on the topic of responsible tourism, an understanding of the business opportunities it brings and how to capitalise on it individually or as a group of small entrepreneurs together. In this way the project raises entrepreneurial skills and ‘responsible’ mind-sets amongst people and communities active in tourism. • Build high value/low volume (specialized) rather than high volume/low value (mass) tourism. • Produce the outcome of new innovative approaches to better support competitiveness and employment in particular at regional and local level. This will result in a reduction of rural depopulation. The main target group are small businesses in specialized tourism from rural regions with diminishing populations and/or regions which suffer from economic crisis. Trainers and other staff of tourism-related associations and consulting & business supporting organisations will benefit from CORRIE as well. It is through them as intermediary target group the outputs will be delivered to the final beneficiaries. The consortium of the project consists of 7 organisations from different European countries. The majority of the project partners are tourism-related associations and/or business supporting organisations: • Bulgarian Association for Alternative Tourism (BAAT) is a national NGO that unifies more than 100 members that are related to tourism. The policy of BAAT is to promote sustainable tourism and raise awareness for a sustainable travel. • EOLAS S.L. provides services and support to all enterprises, organisations and entities with demands in the field of the design and management of projects. • Eurocrea Merchant is a consulting and training company based in Italy. • BDF is an international project management agency focused on supporting SMEs and schools in the field of entrepreneurship and internationalisation as well as supporting start-up companies. • Sociedade Portuguesa de Inovação is a private consulting company established as an active centre of national and international networks connected to the SME and innovation sectors. • Canice Consulting is a small yet established private company based in Northern Ireland which operates in the fields of local and regional development, enterprise education and management and technical support to EU networks and programmes. • Projects in Motion Ltd is a Malta-based SME focusing on promoting environmental sustainability, renewable energy sources, and energy efficiency processes and products. The project uses a clear, complete and high quality methodology, including the 3 phases: Strategy, Development and Implementation. This is expressed in the construction of the results as all results contain activities (for preparation, research, development, testing, implementation and dissemination) covering above mentioned phases. The following results will be developed in this project: - Awareness raising campaign - Manual – How to become responsible - Manual – How to promote your image of CSR? - Manual – How to set up a local network of responsible companies? - Training kit – trainer manual to implement a training on the 4 previous results - Online platform & community The expected impact on the main target group of SMEs from rural regions active in tourism, is the creation of new material that enables them to develop better entrepreneurial skills for managing a responsible business in tourism. As a result of this they will increase their competitiveness and improve their company performance. The project will also have an impact on the local communities, the environment, the tourist and the world as they will indirectly benefit from the project results. The expected impact on the participating organisations is that the project results enables them to enhance and widen their policies and core activities. It also generates improved knowledge and network links resulting in improved outcomes in their future projects and more collaborative organizational culture. The expected impact on other relevant stakeholders (governance, CoC, etc.) is to better serve & support their target group with access to the materials in 6 different languages. Corporate Responsibility remains a subject of high value and to incorporate it into SMEs’ long term strategy, the EU platform will prove to be a very useful resource on the long run. The platform will serve as an Open Educational Resource (OER) and publish all developed IOs. This ensures that SMEs and all other interested parties can download the materials developed and legally and freely copy, use, adapt and re-share them.