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Preserving the foreshore: the Avril association and Granville Terre et mer Tourist Office join forces to raise awareness

2024 skills sponsorship

Preservation of the foreshore: the Avril association and the Office de Tourisme Granville Terre et Mer join forces to raise awareness

Bolstered by its gold-level Green Destinations certification, Granville Terre et Mer Tourist Office has decided to pursue its commitment to sustainable tourism for people, nature and the climate. In 2024, via a skills sponsorship agreement to raise awareness of the need to preserve the foreshore in partnership with theassociation Avril, a new mission will run from April to October on the set dates of high tides for volunteer employees of the Tourist Office. Armed with a roadmap to guide the discussions, they will go out and meet leisure fishermen on the foreshore. From 9 April, the date of the first outing to meet the public, they will be tackling a range of subjects such as regulatory sizes, product seasonality, quotas and legislation.

Published on 16 February 2026

The press release126KB

Contents

Skills sponsorship meets a need

The aim of skills sponsorship is to carry out actions of general interest for associations in the context of one’s work – as distinct from volunteering on one’s own time. It is based on 3 principles: meeting an identified need of the organisation, the personal commitment of the employee and the agreement of the company. Each party benefits from taking part in this operation, whether, for example, to give more meaning to their professional investment for the employee, to bring its values to life for the company, or to raise awareness and unite around a common cause for the association.

Few structures in the tourism sector in France have embarked on this approach. Having achieved Gold level Green Destinations certification, the Tourist Office team was keen to continue its momentum in terms of sustainable development initiatives. For the Granville Terre et Mer Tourist Office, the idea was to find an association linked to its own issues and raison d’être, and which offered a service meeting a need in the Destination. Raising awareness of the importance of preserving the foreshore was the obvious choice. And the choice fell on the Avril association, with whom we already had an established working relationship.

The mission of the Tourist Advisors for the Great Tides of 2024

Now that the broad lines have been mapped out, the 3-year partnership agreement has set out the concrete actions: On certain days during the spring tides, Tourist Office employees, trained in advance by the association, will meet visitors to the foreshore for educational talks, particularly on fishing on foot. The first event will take place on 9 April in Champeaux, and several other dates have been set with the aim of spreading out across the region:
– 11 April, 22 August and 21 October in Carolles
– 25 April and 19 September in Kairon
– 6 June, 24 July and 21 August in Saint-Martin de Bréhal
– 25 July in Champeaux

Exchanging ideas to raise awareness

In order to have a fluid exchange on the subject, and also to have an indicator of follow-up on this operation, the volunteer Resident Advisors were trained by the AVRIL Association on Thursday 29 February afternoon: A theoretical course and a practical case study helped them to prepare for the series of outings to come. They will also be given a roadmap for talking to visitors to the foreshore about a range of subjects relating to responsible fishing: sizes, quotas, seasonality of species, legislation, etc. It will only take a few minutes for this meeting, which is intended to be educational above all else!

“Tourist Office advisors have already been doing this prevention work for several years in our reception offices with visitors who ask them about high tides and fishing on foot. Here, they are going to meet, on the spot, people who, potentially, would not have come to question them. By definition, this inevitably increases the number of people aware of the values of our Destination. The team felt that they had a role to play and a number of them were quick to volunteer their skills,” says Deborah Le Goff, Director of Granville Terre et Mer Tourist Office.