About Destination Growth Partners

Maryland's Eastern Shore has always been more than a destination. It is a working landscape — watermen and farmers, heritage towns and barrier islands, arts communities and conservation areas, festivals and food traditions that belong to this place and nowhere else. The people and organizations that sustain that landscape do some of the most important work in the region. Most of them do it with very little.

Destination Growth Partners was founded in 2025 to change that equation.

DGP is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit whose mission is to promote tourism, economic vitality, and cultural understanding across Maryland's Eastern Shore — by building the capacity of the nonprofit organizations, community groups, heritage areas, and small businesses that make this region worth visiting and worth living in.

Our founder, Ann McGinnis Hillyer, has spent more than 30 years doing exactly this kind of work. After graduation from Duke University, Ann spent several years working in marketing for a start-up airline based out of Northern Virginia. Since 1999, she has built OceanCity.com into one of the region's most-visited digital platforms. She founded Shore Craft Beer in 2014 and helped establish craft beer tourism as a recognized economic driver on the Shore. She has written and managed grants, produced flagship community events, built partnerships across four counties, and served on the boards of organizations from Beach to Bay Heritage Area to the Maryland Tourism Coalition. She holds the Maryland Tourism Advocate Award and the Audrey Davenport Hospitality Person of the Year Award — recognition from a field that knows what it takes to move this region forward.

DGP was founded to put all of that to work in a new way: not building another for-profit platform, but giving back — sharing tools, knowledge, strategy, and relationships with the nonprofits and community organizations that have always been Ann's partners and neighbors.

We work at the intersection of tourism, community development, heritage, and technology. We convene, educate, and coordinate. We help organizations tell better stories, write stronger grants, run more effective events, and build the kind of digital presence that connects them to visitors, funders, and partners. We’ve worked with the Beach to Bay Heritage Area, Maryland Coastal Bays Program, Art League of Ocean City , Vienna Heritage Society and more. We believe that AI — used thoughtfully and taught widely — can multiply the impact of every organization we work with, and we are committed to making those tools accessible to nonprofits across the Lower Shore regardless of budget or technical background.

DGP is new as a legal entity. Its founder is not. The relationships, the credibility, the regional knowledge, and the commitment to this place are thirty years in the making.

We are just getting started.