Category: workforce development

Greater Winston Salem, Inc.-2024 Chamber of the Year Finalist with Mark Owens

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Brandon Burton 0:00
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You’re joining us for a special episode in our 2024 Chamber of the Year Finalist Series. And our guest for this episode is Mark Owens. Mark is the President and CEO of the Greater Winston Salem, Inc. Mark has over 14 years experience building communities through economic development. He was named president CEO of Winston Salem chamber, now greater Winston Salem Inc in 2017 and previously served as president and CEO of the greater Greer chamber in South Carolina. Mark is actively involved in the community in Winston Salem and forcep County, serving on the board of directors at Novant Health Forces Medical Center and the Piedmont Triad partnership, among others. Nationally, he serves on the board of directors for ACCE. He’s a graduate of Presbyterian College and the US Chamber Institute for organizational management, and he holds his CCE designation. Mark is a native of Charleston, South Carolina, and he is and his wife melody, have a son named Luke and a golden doodle named boots mark. Welcome to the chamber tap podcast. First of all, congratulations to you and your team. It’s a great accomplishment to be named as a chamber the year finalist. I’d love for you to say hello to all the chamber champions that are out there listening and share something interesting about yourself so we can all get to know you a little better.

Mark Owens 2:29
Yeah, thank you, Brandon. I really appreciate what you do for our industry. And having the opportunity to be on this podcast, it’s great to to meet everybody through through this platform, and looking forward to meeting others in person coming up soon. We’re really proud of greater Winston to be one of the finalists, and really honored to be a part of this recognition. And it’s been a great a great process, a great journey as a team. And we’ll look forward to sharing a little bit about that with you today. A little bit about me. Fun fact, wow. I think maybe when I was at Presbyterian College, I played soccer there and was able to get an internship at this thing called a chamber of commerce, which I had never heard of before. And so I started as an intern, and then actually worked part time for a year while I was in school at the Chamber of Commerce in Lawrence County, South Carolina. And so work based learning is near and dear to my heart and provided an opportunity for me to to discover an industry I never even knew about as a young person. So internship is is probably that fun fact about me being in a chamber to start off?

Brandon Burton 3:35
Yeah, that’s awesome. You’re sort of a product of the programs that are being modeled at your chamber now. And that’s a that’s awesome. A lot of people find chamber work by accident, but that’s right, that’s about as intentional as you can be doing an internship. So that’s that is a fun fact. Well, tell us a little bit about greater Winston, Salem, Inc, just size, staff, budget, scope of work to set the stage for our discussion.

Mark Owens 4:05
Yeah, absolutely. So we are here in Winston Salem, North Carolina, and greater Winston Salem, Inc was originally the greater Winston Salem Chamber of Commerce. Technically, we are 138 years old. Our chamber existed before Winston and Salem became one city, they were two separate cities. So our chamber claims a little bit of responsibility for bringing those cities together 100 years ago, but our organization is greater Winston Salem inquire the combination of the Chamber of Commerce and the economic development organization for the community. That was a merger that took place in 2019 I moved to Winston Salem in December of 2017, and in 2019 our boards voted to merge economic development back into the chamber of commerce and evolve our name to greater Winston Salem, Inc. Little do we know that our bylaws say our first day is literally April Fools of 2020. And so during covid, I was the only person in the office on the first day of this new, newly named organization. But our team is really focused on three main things. Our vision statement for 2030 which is to be the top mid sized city in the southeast, to be a more equitable community, and to be the best place to raise a family. And we really shape everything we do around that. We have 16 team members here at greater Winston, Salem Inc, about a $3 million budget, and when we started, we were at about 1.7 million. So we’ve had a lot of growth, not just economic development, but specifically workforce and utilizing grant opportunities, which I know we’ll talk about here in a few minutes, but we have a great board, a 29 member board of directors, a community that was built on textile and tobacco, and we’re evolving into biotech, life science and advanced manufacturing being a key component of our membership base. We have 848 members, so we are a growing community, but really tied to the fabric of Winston sale with our rich history, and it’s a great place to be. That’s awesome. Yeah, I

Brandon Burton 6:08
love these communities that have such a rich history. To be able to go back 138 years and be able to see the those beginnings, and see how the communities evolve, see how the economy has evolved, technologies, all these different things, and to be able to be there for the growth and and championing, championing, championing the cause and change, right? So in these chamber, the year finalist episodes, I really like focusing the majority of our time on the programs that were submitted, and your chamber the year application and kind of how they came to be, the history leading up to them, the impact they’re making in your community. And we’ll dive into those programs as soon as they get back from this quick break.

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All right. Mark, we’re back. Let’s let’s jump into the first program that was submitted on your your chamber the year application, if you can tell us what it is and kind of its origins and the momentum that it’s built over time. Yeah,

Mark Owens 8:48
I’m going to start with our Career Ready youth part of our program, and that’s something that’s been really a key component to our community. And what we do at greater with cell make you heard earlier that I was a former intern, work based learning is is really important to me, but our organization has been involved with working with our young people, specifically K through 12, for a long time now, since the the late 90s, we have been contracted by our K through 12 school system to do career readiness and career exploration. We also used to do some third grade reading, coaching, coordination, but since our school district has taken that in house, we’ve expanded what we do as we work on really feeling that start of the funnel of talent pipeline. We know by talking with our business community that access to top talent is a key factor for community and economic development for all of our communities, not just for today, but for tomorrow. And being able to get our community businesses to buy into our goals of being the top, mid sized city, that means we have to retain and prepare our young people for this emerging, evolving economy that we sit in our office. Sits in a factory that used to make cigarettes, and now there’s scientists in here with us doing research on how to regrow organs. And just that evolution of the economy of Winston Salem is why we’ve got to start preparing our young people for the work for tomorrow. So a few of the things that we do, one of which we start with our eighth and 10th graders, we call it wow. It’s called World of Work. We rent out our Coliseum or Wake Forest University, plays basketball, and every eighth grader and every 10th grader in Forsyth County comes through a career fair over a two day period. We’re talking almost 9000 students come through over those two days to see what kind of career paths are out there. We do that about a month before they sign up for CTE classes, because in our community, 99% of students that take CTE programmings Career and Technical Education graduate, as opposed to our graduation rate, which is at an all time high, at 86% so we know that career and technology technology education. And Technical Education provides a path forward in the future of the workforce. It creates more graduates, and it gets those young people ready for that next step. So after World of Work, what do we do next? We have a program called Aspire. It’s for our 11th and 12th graders. It’s paid internships, and we’ve started by focusing at our Title One schools. So those schools that have been traditionally underserved, and these students go through paid internships, $15 an hour, where we receive grants. And those grants, we reimburse the companies for paying for those young people up to $15 an hour for 100 hour internship. So we believe that these young people, you know, have an option to go work, and some are providing in, you know, for family household income. So we believe in paid internships and find ways to really encourage those young people to go explore, whether it’s at Novant Health or atrium health or hospital systems, whether it’s with our banks like truist and Bank of America, or whether it’s in small businesses or startups, we have programs where we can, we can supplement those companies that are paying for these interns and reimburse them. That program was launched, but we noticed something. We noticed that our students needed a little more preparation before they went into the workplace. So we launched our work ready certificate, where now we have a 15 hour credit contact to our credential program, where we do soft skills, mock interviews, resumes, and if they create finish those 15 hours of the credential program, they also receive a stipend where we partner with local big box retailers For Dress for Success program. So we provide them with dollars to go dress and be ready for the the internship placement that they receive. So now we have graduates going through that that are getting placed in their internship program. And we also noticed that we had some students that just needed a little extra mentorship. And that’s where senior Academy comes in, and senior Academy is for mostly for seniors and some juniors that have been identified by their guidance counselors as as maybe just needing a little extra motivation to get to graduation. So we recruit businesses, business members and individuals that want to do one on one mentorship with high school students, and we help them get over the graduation line. We have about 140 students each year, a part of senior Academy, and we’ve about a 98 to 99% graduation rate of those, one on one mentors. So we’re really looking at this career ready youth as an opportunity to look at the entire individual and say from eighth grade on that there’s a there’s a pipeline, there’s a pathway that’s clearly laid out for everybody in our community to participate, not just the individuals that have more resources. And I think that’s been really important in what we’re doing. We know our companies need this workforce of tomorrow, but we also know it’s the right thing for our community to continue to grow and develop young, talented, diverse leaders. And this program is so impactful. It’s, it’s one of our favorite things to do when we go to those graduations and those ceremonies where we see individuals get those credentials, it’s really exciting. That is

Brandon Burton 14:13
awesome. Yeah, I’ve heard of a lot of, you know, career readiness, you know, programs that chambers have done, and they’ll list a couple things, and then you kept saying, and then it leads to this, and then it leads to this, and then it leads to and I love how it’s just all packed together, and it is a roadmap that leads to success. I was curious with the Aspire, with the paid internships, are there certain business types that you’re trying to match them up with or is it open to any Chamber members that want to offer internships? Or how do you go about promoting that and putting those offerings out there?

Mark Owens 14:47
Yeah, that’s a great question. It’s open to every business in the community and all of our Chamber members. So we we really actually target companies in our retention visits. We visit with our. Top 150 employers every year, and we talk to them about their needs and ask them to participate. Of course, there’s some challenges, if in manufacturing and automotive spaces, where you have OSHA situations and safety, but we really actually want it to be, you know, what I would call those office related jobs, or those jobs that they have an interest in, like construction working in construction management or in a law firm. Our real goal is that these young people dream and hope and see what’s out there and and that they get this opportunity to be exposed to new career paths that they maybe thought weren’t attainable. We want every student to feel like they have the opportunity to have an internship and understand what it’s like to work in an office or work in management, or work at a bank or or work at a hospital. And I think one of the biggest surprises Brandon that we’ve had is that some of our young people that have done paid internships at the hospital, we’ve had 10 students at the hospital, is hired on part time to continue that after the internship, so they’ve gotten great career opportunities and jobs right off the bat, and it’s really something that we weren’t expecting to happen. But students are saying, you know, I never knew that I could work at a hospital. I didn’t think that was for me. And now there’s opportunities that open those doors and provide opportunity beyond just what they could dream. So we try to open it up for everybody, but it’s really intentional in our marketing efforts, and one on one communication, we really go ask, and we tell the company that, hey, we’re going to reimburse you. There’s no cost to you, just your time. And that’s really been a great thing to break down the barrier. And one last thing I’ll say on that Brandon, we also provide transportation. So if these young people don’t have transportation, we’ve partnered with a local, you know, what we call micro transit company, that can go pick up these young people and take them to and from their jobs. And so that’s been a barrier that we’ve been able to eliminate in this process.

Brandon Burton 16:56
That’s awesome. I love the exposure and getting these young people exposed to different career paths and opportunities and show them what’s possible, but also give them a taste of what it’s like to be in that setting. Because maybe they hate it, maybe they intern at a law office and think I don’t want to go to law school and spend hundreds of 1000s of dollars in student debt, but to be able to really set them on a course of what it is that they want to do and what they don’t want to do, I think it’s just as important, man. You

Mark Owens 17:27
took the words out of my mouth. We just talked about that this morning. We had an intern here working with us, and I said the same thing, you may find that you love it. You might might find out it’s not for you. And both things are incredibly valuable. So you’re right, it just gives the gives them an opportunity to see what’s out there and and try it before they go down that pathway. And if, if they do like it, then that’s where, you know, this second program we’ll talk about in a second kind of ties in, because we don’t want that pipeline to stop at one spot. We want to be able to help those students progress

Brandon Burton 18:01
in their careers. That’s right. Now, you guys are obviously about stacking these programs on top of each other, so let’s, let’s see where this takes us. So they graduate. You know, they’ve had these internships, they’ve got the Work Ready certificate to be ready for those internships, or dressing for success. They graduate now. What now? How do you continue them along that

Mark Owens 18:21
path? Yeah, it’s this is an area where I do hope we can improve a little bit, because there there may be some leakage in the pipeline here when when they graduate and go to school or go in the workforce, it’s hard to track where everybody goes and stay in touch, but that’s where this next program for scythe works comes into play. And what we saw is that we have a lot of organizations in our community, probably like yours, that are listening, that do workforce development or some component, but we’re not as coordinated as we could be. We, you know, you’re you’re sending somebody who’s looking for a job opportunity or more training or job interview skills or whatever it is. You may send them to two to three, four locations just to to fulfill and get all the knowledge they need. So we applied as a group to the county for for an ARPA grant through the American rescue plan act, and for what’s called for scythe works. What that is, it’s the county. It’s us. Is greater in salmon. It’s our goodwill partners. It’s our school system and our community college for site tech, the five of us are all on this grant, and it’s created a one stop workforce hub location. We physically moved our chamber office in with the career and workforce team of Forsyth Tech here in innovation quarter on Winston Salem, we share an office every Wednesdays. Walk in Wednesday people can come in any day, but we we target Wednesdays for one on one, career coaching, interview, training, access to scholarships to go to for site, tech, whatever it may be to help them access new openings. In addition to hosting seven seminars a month for the community, they’re all free of charge through the. Grant to be able to talk about re entry after maybe something that happened in the law or or stepping away to be a stay at home parent, re entering the workforce or hiring individuals with neurodiversity issues. So there’s a lot of great things that we’re doing there. We also created forsythworks nc.com, which is a one stop shop for job posting. We’re aggregating job postings that we’re seeing through indeed and other places all to one site, so somebody can go to that site say, hey, I’m interested in this job. Here’s the training that it would take. Here’s how I can go ahead and register for that training, or register for classes for SciTech or Goodwill’s offering this program. Here’s the expected salary range in that industry field. It’s really a way to kind of come alongside an individual specifically as the American rescue plan act designates qualified census tracks more underserved communities to really help and create economic mobility. That’s one thing that we’re really passionate about, is be a more equitable community, as you heard in our vision, and we believe we can do that through economic mobility. So access is key to this. So we’re doing that in English and in Spanish, and trying to make sure everybody has access to the information, the training, the skills and the tools, so that ultimately they get that career that changes their lives and their family’s lives. So we’re really, are of trying to stack, to be honest with you, we keep finding challenges, and that’s why we keep trying to add on to it. If we, if we kind of just pieced it together, we may not have it as comprehensive, and we’re not done. We want to keep growing and find new solutions, but we’re really proud of that partnership. So now we’re all working together, and everybody is on the same page, going in the same direction, and it’s creating some impact. It’s only been launched for about a year, and so we’re starting to see some great metrics come in,

Brandon Burton 21:49
awesome so I’m curious with the job posting site, the reference so it’s aggregating from all these different resources of job postings and putting into the one, one stop shop to be able to find a job in the community. Is there a certain platform you guys are using? Is it a proprietary thing? Or how are you aggregating all these different job postings? Well,

Mark Owens 22:10
you know that this one, you have people on your team that are smarter than you, so I’m not sure I’m the best. Then I can tell you, it’s an RSS feed we’re pulling mostly from indeed, but we also have in our, I think it’s a WordPress designed website to where we have a job board in there, and we give access to all of our partners to be able to enter it in. So most chambers, right, probably have job boards that your members can post on for free or for cost, or based off of a tier, we have that as well. So it’s really just kind of pulling all of that into one page. Sometimes the job will click you and take you to an indeed, posting. Sometimes it’ll take you straight to a company’s website. But it’s really designed to try to help the seeker go to one place, instead of needing to carve out and go to different sites to do that. Yeah. So

Brandon Burton 23:03
it sounds like you hire well as well.

Mark Owens 23:06
You have a great team. I can say RSS feed and WordPress. If you ask me how to do the those things, that’s not me. But I know, I know the little, really good team that makes all this possible. For sure,

Brandon Burton 23:19
absolutely. The key thing is that it works. So that’s, right, works. Yeah, that’s awesome. So I like asking, especially with you being a chamber, that you’re a finalist. I mean, you guys are kind of top of the game right now for chambers that are listening and wanting to take their chamber up to the next level, what kind of tip or action item might you share with them to try to accomplish that goal?

Mark Owens 23:43
Yeah, that’s a really good question. I first want to just say our board and our staff that’s doing this amazing work together, and what it’s been really fun about this process, and I think kind of, as part of my answer to your question is we didn’t set out to go try to win an award. We tried to set out to make a difference. And I think whatever your community is facing, it’s going to be different for everybody. And so the first thing we did was go ask and listen and adapt. And I think that would be my first thing is go go together with partners and go find out what your members and your businesses are facing. We we sometimes get caught up thinking we know what our businesses and our members need, instead of listening first. So I think our first step was listening and then set out to really adapt and evolve and sell mission investments, not just transactional memberships, and really try to find a way to say, hey, we’re moving the community forward through our work, and we want you to be a part of that. So honestly, I would say, Put your head down a little bit. Go, ask. Go. Listen, it doesn’t happen overnight. We’ve been working on this. We’re honest. Were a little surprised to be a finalist. We again. We didn’t set out for for this as our goal, but the process of going through this has sharpened us even more. Has helped us put our plans together and and really audit ourselves and say, What are we doing? What are we doing? Well, what can we improve on? And I would just the last thing I would say is don’t be afraid to try something. If it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work, you can try something again, but it’s really exciting, and I’m really thankful for ACCE, the regional associations, chamber, chat, podcast, sharing ideas, to be able to listen and find new ideas is really impactful. And I just encourage you to start by saying, we think we know what we’re doing, but let’s go ask and confirm that with our businesses and make sure we’re providing the value that they want, yeah,

Brandon Burton 25:50
and that I can appreciate. You know, the the application process, and like you said, not going out to to win an award, but the process has sharpened you to refine things, and I can see where you can look at all your programs at work and be able to almost organize them in a way that makes more sense, on a kind of a flow chart, if you will, that maybe that structure has always been there, but to see it laid out and presented in a way that makes sense, I think, really helps to get everybody on board and and, like you said, to be able to sell the mission of The Chamber and what you guys are after, rather than transactional members. So that’s very well said.

Mark Owens 26:26
Thank you. Yeah, and I just want the listeners to know, like, I worked in a smaller chamber with five people. I worked my first job was two and a half people. I was the half as an intern. I think there’s so many skills that transfer from small and larger chambers. I mean, it’s different challenges, but at the end of the day, if we all can just listen to our community members roll our sleeves up and try to get after it. And really, I know it’s hard sometimes to pause and work on your chamber instead of just in it, but I think that’s so important to step back, and this process has helped us to really, like I said, audit what we’re doing. Where are our gaps? What can we improve? And I think if you take that time to do that, those those retreats, or whatever it may be, it really sets you up for success. And your community will see that, and your businesses will will invest in you.

Brandon Burton 27:17
Yeah, I think that’s wise. So I like asking everyone I have on the show, as we look to the future of chambers, how do you see the future of chambers and their purpose going forward?

Mark Owens 27:29
Yeah, this is a great question, and it’s actually something that I think about a lot and read about with the horizon initiative and other things a lot, and it’s chambers are evolving. We’ve been around for a really long time, and I think we’ll be around for a really long time, but we all know that, as you know, Zoom has changed what we do. Let’s just call what it is we used to be in person all the time. You got to adapt and how you engage. And I think the future of chambers really, really is going to be focused around talent. And I really believe that networking and marketing and membership, activities and events is the bread and butter, and it’s crucial. But if we can figure out as an industry how to maximize our value as it relates to talent, attraction, retention and development, that’s an area that’s so important for our businesses across the country right now, we all know that shortage and how hard it is to do it with our own teams. Think about our businesses and what they’re facing in this if we can help solve that problem, or even just ease the tension around talent development, how can we continue to adapt? But I do you know, honestly want to it’s going to be harder and harder to get memberships. You know, companies are tighter, especially post pandemic, it’s tighter membership numbers take more effort to do. And I fully believe in selling a vision and why you’re doing things, not just what you get back for it. And I think that’s been the area that I think if our industry can continue to push forward on selling the vision and selling the balance of Community and Economic Development together, that’s where the future of successful chambers are going to go. And you know, we can’t be all things to everybody, but we can guide a community forward and try to be catalytic leaders in our community, get everybody on the same page. So it’s going to be a challenge. We’re going to be learning from each other. And can’t wait to listen to more episodes, to steal ideas from from my colleagues, for sure.

Brandon Burton 29:30
That’s right. It’s your your weekly R and D resource, right

Mark Owens 29:34
here. That’s right.

Brandon Burton 29:36
Well, Mark is as as we wrap up, I want to give you an opportunity to share any contact information for listeners who want to reach out and connect to learn more. How about about how you guys are doing things? Where would you point them? What would be the best way for them to reach out and connect? Yeah, I

Mark Owens 29:51
would be honored to connect just when, when you email or LinkedIn message, we know I’m going to have questions for you too. So prepare for a two way conversation. But it’s Mark Owens, markowens@winstonsalem.com or I’m on LinkedIn as Mark Owens with Greater Winston Salem Inc, those are the two I’m probably monitor the closest, and would love to reach out, connect and and really appreciate the opportunity to share what our team and our communities doing. I love this industry as somebody who’s been in it since an intern, and hopefully we can continue to to open the doors for future people to come in and be a part of this. But look forward to connecting

Brandon Burton 30:33
absolutely I’ll I’ll get that in our show notes for this episode make it easy to find and and shoot that email or click that LinkedIn link and connect with you, but Mark, this has been great having you on the podcast again. Congratulations to you and your team. I wish you guys the best of luck in Dallas as chamber of the year.

Mark Owens 30:52
Thanks, Brandon. Appreciate being with you. If

Brandon Burton 30:56
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The State Chamber of Oklahoma-2024 Chamber of the Year Finalist with Chad Warmington & Brent Skarky

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Brandon Burton 0:00
This is the Chamber Chat Podcast, the show dedicated to chamber professionals to spark ideas and to get actionable tips and strategies to better serve your members and community.

You’re joining us today for a special episode in our 2024 ACCE Chamber of the Year Finalist Series. And our guests for this episode are Chad Warmington and Brent Skarkey. Chad has a rich history with the State Chamber of Oklahoma, where he serves as the President and CEO Since 2020. Under his leadership, the Chamber spearheads pro business advocacy and political affairs on behalf of Oklahoma’s business community. Brent is a long term media personality and communications professional in the in Oklahoma. Brent currently is the Senior Vice President of Communications at the State Chamber. Previously, he worked in local news and sports, but Chad and Brent, I’m excited to have you with us today here on Chamber Chat Podcast. I’d love to give you both an opportunity to say hello to all the Chamber Champions that are out there listening, and to share something interesting about yourselves, so we can get to know you a little bit better. Chad, would you like to take the first stab at it?

Chad Warmington 2:08
Well, I was gonna pull up, pull rank and make Brent go. So

Unknown Speaker 2:11
there you go.

Chad Warmington 2:15
So Brent, you get to go first.

Brent Skarky 2:16
Well, just happy to be here. It’s an honor to be in the running for prestigious award through a very prestigious Association, and we’ve done some great things here at the Oklahoma Chamber, and I’m very proud to be a part of it as the communications guy, and excited to keep the message going. I think we’ve got a lot of momentum here at the Oklahoma chamber, and excited to be a part of it. And something interesting about me. Played so much golf lately, I first have golf elbow for the first time. So some of the olds out there can probably relate to that

Brandon Burton 2:53
golf elbow. Alright, that is so

Chad Warmington 2:59
not interesting. I mean, okay, we’ll go with that. I wish I had something better. Yeah, no, I think, you know, I was just thinking, I mean, was always interesting for me. About Me is living in Oklahoma, and it’s a great state, right? But I’m originally from Michigan, and so I sometimes just kind of Marvel here now, coming up on year, like 27 or 28 of being here, that that Oklahoma is my home. But it’s funny how often it comes up that I’m a non native Oklahoman. And so I’d say the interesting thing is that at some point I’ll get to be, you know, get to be a certified card carrying Oklahoman. I’ve got three Oklahoma born and raised kids, but running the State Chamber of Oklahoma for a Michigan guy is a pretty cool gig, and I’m pretty excited to be here in Oklahoma, and I’m pretty excited about what we’re doing

Brandon Burton 3:48
at the chamber. Yeah, no, I can. I can resonate with that. I’m a born and raised as a California and I’m in Texas now. So took a while for Texas to accept me, but I feel like I’ve been embraced, and then I’m now a Texan, so I understand that it’ll happen. It’ll happen

Chad Warmington 4:05
one of these days. I’ll get, like, a ceremony and a certificate or something that’s right,

Brandon Burton 4:11
a belt buckle and hat has a

Chad Warmington 4:13
That’s right. That’s a great idea. Yeah, maybe we’ll start that. There’s a new chamber program for next year.

Brandon Burton 4:18
There you go. So I’d love for you guys to take a moment to tell us a little bit about the State Chamber of Oklahoma. Give us an idea. Obviously, it’s a State Chamber, so we understand, kind of the you know, the area you cover, but give us an idea of staff, size, budget, scope of work you’re involved with those sort of things to kind of set the table for our discussion today.

Chad Warmington 4:40
Yeah, I’ll jump in on that. And again, happy to be here and excited to talk to you a little bit about the State Chamber of Oklahoma. So when you know, when I’m going around the state talking to local chambers, I always try to, you know, point out kind of where our area of work is. And so for me, what I like to say is, you know, local chambers have such an important. Role in their communities, and they’re doing so many more things that we’re not doing in terms of just community development and the networking that goes on and economic development in a lot of cases. And for the State Chamber of Oklahoma, our field of work is really what we call, what I call 23rd and Lincoln, that’s the cross streets of where our state capital is. And so our focus really is on what happens in that immediate area, either under the dome at the legislature or with the executive branch, in all the executive branch and regulatory agencies. And so for us, you know that that’s kind of our everything, and that’s why it’s so great for us to be able to spend time with local chambers, hearing about those policies that we’re working on and how they’re impacting communities. So this our chamber. When I arrived here in 2020 I had about a solid three weeks before covid hit and and then the world turned upside down. So we’ve had quite a bit of change from the from that time we were a staff about 26 at the time that went down, I think our post covid Low is about 10 or 11 on staff, and now we’re back up to 20. And so you’ve had a, you know, significant turnover in our staff, which has been great. We’ve been able to bring in a lot of really good new people, and it’s been a fun team to be a part of. We’re running around about a $5 million chamber a year and and hoping to, you know, see that grow like I always tell the team, it’s, you know, more money, more mission, more revenue, more opportunity to, you know, to really impact Oklahoma and to help grow and make our mission of making Oklahoma the best place in the in the state or state, we want it to be the best place in the state, best place in the country, to grow a business and So, you know, obviously for us, you know, being a nonprofit doesn’t mean we’re not motivated by that. For us, what motivates is more revenue. We get to do more mission, and that’s what we’re excited about.

Brandon Burton 6:50
Absolutely brand anything you’d like to add to that.

Brent Skarky 6:54
Well, coming from the news background, I always knew the chamber as the voice for business in Oklahoma, and I, my mission coming on board is to make it even more so you’ve got a lot of great local chambers that do a lot of great work with the local communities and furthering business in their communities. But really it is our charge, our mission, to make sure that we are the voice for business throughout the entire state, political times, or, you know, going everywhere, as far as special interest over here and special interest over here, but it really is our goal to be that voice for business, to be some one that speaks up on behalf of the business owners and the companies of Oklahoma, and in turn, grow the Oklahoma business environment to make sure that, like Chad said, The best place in the country to grow, start and relocate a business.

Brandon Burton 7:45
Very good. Well, I know you guys are doing great work there in Oklahoma, and we’ll, we’ll dive into that, some of that work as we format these chamber the year finalist episodes. We really like to focus a majority of the conversation around the the two program synopsis that were included on the chamber year of the year application. So we will dive into that in much more detail as soon as we get back from this quick break.

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All right, we are back from our break. How. I’ve wanted to have you guys kind of introduce what the two programs are at just a high level, and then we can dive into each one individually in more detail. So I don’t know, Brent, would you like to tell us what the what the two programs are,

Brent Skarky 10:16
sure? And I think it is pretty universal for a lot of states and chambers across the country, two big problems for the Oklahoma business community, workforce and taxes. Workforce has been a problem for our state and a lot of others, even before the pandemic, but obviously covid made it a an acute problem for a lot of different business owners and business communities throughout the state, we have done a deep dive into seeing what the real problems are with the workforce chain, and what we can do to transform the pathways, to make sure that Oklahoma has the workforce, not only to grow the state, but to really make sure that our existing companies have the workforce they needed, both the numbers and the trained employees they need to flourish and and grow their businesses, and in turn, grow the economy for the state of Oklahoma, and we’ll get into the specifics of that a little bit later. Then, on the other hand, taxes. Oklahoma has always been fairly competitive when it comes to taxes, but we had been slipping in the last couple of years. We once again did a big research dive into what where Oklahoma stands on the national level, and we found that the news just wasn’t good. So we took a look and how we can change things, and teamed up a lot of very prestigious organizations and very learned organizations when it comes to taxes to make sure that we were on the right track. And I think we’ve got a pretty good plan that we know we can’t implement immediately because change at the state level is never quick and never easy, but we’re making progress, and we continue to push forward. Because I think really when it comes to recruiting new businesses, tax code is a huge thing. Talking about that absolutely.

Brandon Burton 11:54
And Brent, I think you gave a great overview there. Chad, would you like to dive in on the workforce issues and kind of the origin and why that was such an area of importance to really tackle on the chamber level, and to to have this kind of rise to the top as a program to submit on your application. Yeah, well, so when

Chad Warmington 12:15
I got to the chamber again in 2020, for me, I wanted to really focus on being really data driven in terms of what we spent our time on. It’s easy to get, you know, kind of in the bubble of your own building and thinking about the issues that chambers always talk about. But I wanted to know from business leaders what their biggest concerns were, you know, from, not only from our members, but I also wanted to know kind of what business leaders around the state thought, you know, for me, you know, the value proposition what we do is that we’re we’re working on things that are that are headaches to businesses, or that are things that keep them up at night. But if we don’t know what those are, and we’re talking about things that we think they are, it seems like kind of a risky proposition. So for us, we really started out with research, and we went and we asked our members and business leaders around the state, you know, what were the most important things to them, what are the biggest concerns that they had? And so for us, our policy development process starts there every year, every year we do a business leader survey, and that drives our agenda. And when we got so after our first edition of that, we got the results back, and I’ll never forget, we were sitting in our conference room, and workforce was at the top of the top of the issue. It was 62% there wasn’t even a close second in terms of what business leaders were concerned about. And we’re sitting around the table and and I said to the team, well, what, what does this even mean? Like, what do we even have a workforce agenda? And the answer is, we didn’t, and we didn’t know really what it was that we were going to try to go address. And so for us, you know, building a better equipped workforce was a key, you know, issue for business leaders all across the state, because they couldn’t find quality access to the people that needed to grow their businesses, and then, therefore, Oklahoma’s economy wouldn’t grow. And so that kind of started a journey for us, which turned into partner with the governor. We got a big grant from him to go out, and we hired McKinsey, an international consulting firm, to come in and help us diagnose like, what is going on in Oklahoma’s work, workforce ecosystem that’s not working. Why are we not getting the talent that we need? And so spent about six months with them, and really came out of it with some pretty clear ideas on things that we could do to address the challenges that Oklahoma’s workforce, you know, faced. And so it’s been a really great eye opening experience for us to get to always go back to the data, right? We’re tracking our progress. We identified the issue. We’re tracking our progress on are we moving the needle on it? And I think that’s the way we’re going to continue to run as long as we’re here. I want to always make sure that we’re we’re focused on things that really matter to businesses, and that’s how we got that’s how we got started in the workforce. Space, yeah, I’d

Brandon Burton 15:01
say 62% on that feedback of the surveys that workforce really matters. And like you said, addressing workforce is going to affect the overall economy throughout the state. So I think that it becomes obvious, as you’re stating, that this is a an area of focus, that the Chamber needs to be involved with Brent, as far as the execution of this goes, what what’s been at some of the implementation tactics being used? Well, I

Brent Skarky 15:27
you take that data, data, and you look at it, and you try to figure out what was going on. And chance told this story a million times that we had a an initial plan of the workforce pipelines drawn up by some of our researchers, and they put together a chart. We call it our spaghetti chart because it looks like a plate of spaghetti. The pathway is just going all over the place. And this organization reporting to that organization, but they don’t go through this organization, and they don’t communicate with this organization. A lot of great workforce related programs going on, the state workforce related offices throughout the state that are doing great things, but they weren’t coordinated. They weren’t talking to each other. And we looked to other states to see how they did it, and we saw that there was a plan to coordinate everything going through a centralized place. We called it the Oklahoma Workforce Commission. We drew up legislation that would implement that, but we wanted a body that had autonomy to make decisions on how to best coordinate pathways for workforce to get optimum number of people trained, to get optimum number of people into the workforce, and to get those high level jobs, or those high level skills that the Oklahoma workforce needs to flourish and grow. So we worked with legislators, we work with private businesses to develop a plan that ultimately was the Oklahoma Workforce Commission, which needed legislation, but it also needed help from the governor’s office to implement as well. Because there are federal dollars that go into workforce, that that need to be funneled a certain way, and then there are state dollars that need to go into workforce, that need that the permission of the legislature to then be accessed. So it was a long process. We involved a whole lot of different offices on state level, and we were able to, last year, push through SB 621 which is the Oklahoma Workforce Commission. It is a nine person, private business person commission that will ultimately lead to better coordination in the workforce. And Chad was very skilled on some of the inner workings that it took to make this happen, and has definitely looked to other states to make sure that we’re doing this the right way, because we felt that having that private business voice was very important because the bureaucracy of the state level really hadn’t worked so far.

Brandon Burton 17:44
Yeah, so I like when a chamber can see a need, create a program or an approach and be able to spin it off so it doesn’t have to stay within the chamber forever, and it can be thriving as its own entity. What kind of connection is there with the chamber today, with the Oklahoma Workforce Commission? Is there still feedback? Do you guys sit on a board or committees, or vice versa, or have What’s that relationship look like today?

Chad Warmington 18:12
Yeah, it’s a really good question. I like to always say is, you know, it’s a crawl, walk, run, approach, on the on the Workforce Commission, right? And what I really like to say is, it’s our little baby bird, and we keep nurturing our baby bird. It isn’t quite flying yet, but it’s getting there. And so I think our relationship right now, or our connection, is one we you know, we’re pretty passionate about who got on the Workforce Commission, and so there’s three appointees each by the President of the Senate, the Speaker of the House and the governor, and we did a really good job of vetting people and then suggesting names to them, because we were really concerned about who got on it. So we still have that connection that we vetted most of the people that are on it, and then, frankly, part of the deal was we got some ARPA dollars, some American rescue plan dollars that were dedicated for the commission, but there weren’t any state dollars at first. And so once we got into that, we realized that the ARPA dollars really aren’t appropriate for administrative costs. So we’ve really kind of taken the lead on kind of shepherding it through this kind of initial six months until we just got we’re able to get some state appropriations for it, and now they’ll be able to go out and hire their executive director and get going. It’s only been up and running about six months. So we’re very connected to it. Our goal is, obviously launch it and get out of the way, but we’re also willing to do whatever it takes for it to be successful. And so we’ll continue to, you know, keep that posture that until baby bird flies and leaves the nest. We’re going to do everything we can to, you know, to keep nurturing it because we know, we think, we know it’s going to be impactful. And the folks that have been appointed to the Commission are really good, sincere, you know, private sector leaders who want to see this work. And so we’re going to do whatever it takes, frankly, to keep it going. Yeah, and. I’m

Brandon Burton 20:00
sure there’s all sorts of intricacies we can dive into, as far as the staff and how their, you know, roles are developed and and just the whole structure of the organization. And I think it was alluded to that similar things have been done in other states. So there’s models that you can look at. There’s, you know, other chambers can look to you. Other states can look to you as you kind of looked around the country as well. As we shift gears a little bit, but let’s shift a little or focus over onto the tax reform program or issue that was on the application. Chad again, if you want to give us the origins and why this was important to you. I imagine it was data driven, as your other program was, but tell us more about that.

Chad Warmington 20:50
Yeah, it really was. And again, particularly when you get into tax policy, there’s a lot of ideas and thoughts and opinions on what you know, what are the appropriate tax policies or tax reform that a state should pursue. And so again, we tried to kind of come at it from a little bit of a different view, and said, How do we make sure that Oklahoma’s tax code is competitive? And so if, at the end of the day, in terms of economic development and growth, you have to have a competitive tax code, well who’s the best to kind of measure where we where we rank on that? And again, it goes back to us, kind of in terms of the three things we do, policy, policy, policy, politics and advocacy. And we really wanted to dig into the policy on this tax reform, but we wanted to approach it from a more of an unbiased viewpoint. It’s real easy for me to think it’s, you know, gotta be, by golly, it’s gotta be the personal income tax, and we’ve gotta lower that, and that’s what’s gonna drive economic activity. But I wanted to know that for sure. I want to look at states that were doing really well, and look at our tax code as compared to the states that were so we ended up hiring the Tax Foundation based out of DC, which is a nonpartisan, really well, you know, respected organization, and said to them, Look, we want to do tax reform, but we want you to tell us what makes us the most competitive, and then we want to be able to go back and track that over time. We want to score ourselves based on if this is what competitive looks like, and we’re here. How are we going to get where we need to go? And then let’s score ourselves. And so again, it was really very data driven, and the Tax Foundation put together a fantastic kind of guideline for us to share with policymakers on what would make Oklahoma’s tax code competitive. And you know, when you’ve seen one tax code, you’ve seen one tax code, they’re all different. And so we have a really interesting mix of lower property taxes, little bit higher sales taxes and kind of a medium income tax. But where does that put us in terms of overall competitiveness? I think the Tax Foundation gave us a really good roadmap of how to make sure we balance those things in terms of what makes it competitive, but also be politically smart, like what is actually doable in the state from policy standpoint, and so it’s been a real fun journey. And the funny thing about this too, is we did this two years ago, and I tell our team, it’s our example to remember that sometimes you got to plant the seed, but it doesn’t grow right away, and it took a full year before somebody went. The chamber has a tax plan, you know? And when it did, though, it bid hard, and we were able to get real good movement on a number of portions of that tax policy. And so I think, just as a, you know, as a reminder to all the organizations that are out there listening, you always won’t see the results right away of what you do, but you got to stay the course, and if it’s good policy, eventually people are going to pay attention. It helps to have, you know, a communications team that Brent leads, that does a good job of promoting it, but good policy wins out, and stay the course when you know it’s the right policy for your community or state that you’re working in. Absolutely,

Brandon Burton 23:52
I’m glad you guys took the interest to do the research and hire the team to be able to create those KPIs and those guidelines to be able to measure your success, and what would make Oklahoma successful. And as we know, chambers don’t, you know, create tax law, right? But you can do the research. You can plant those seeds and Brent from those seeds that were planted. How have you seen it grow to where it is today? Well,

Brent Skarky 24:21
I think Chad brings up a good point, like sometimes you look at taxes and just think, cut the income tax, and that’s going to be the end all be all and everyone’s going to be happy. But we took a strong look on some of the business friendly taxes, or business not friendly taxes, that were on the Oklahoma code. And where can we make those changes, smaller tax changes to make Oklahoma more competitive. We did away with franchise tax, which was a antiquated tax that was really just a tax for doing business in Oklahoma that makes us very uncompetitive on the national scale. We also did full expensing of capital equipment that frees up businesses to grow in their own. Space, and we also push a different income tax code, but we also know that condensing tax brackets is also a way that Oklahoma can make some serious progress and be more competitive. And really it’s worked. We haven’t gotten everything through that we wanted to, because tax reform is tough, and you’re always going to get pushback from lots of different sides, but we’ve gone from 30th in the country to 19th in the country in just two years, and that has been a testament to Well, first, our staff pinpointing those tax changes that can be made, but also our government affairs staff really advocating for those smaller tax tweaks that can happen that that make a big difference, specifically when it comes to the business community, and for people looking at our tax code from the outside state. So implementing those and educating the public, we get a ton of media interest every time we talk taxes, because, let’s face it, affects everyone exactly, exactly. We just did a grocery tax that has been very popular, obviously, with the masses. But, you know, there are intricacies that we thought might be better when it comes to using that money to grow the economy. And we educated a lot of people on that, and I think that actually resounded pretty well with legislature, because it’s not always just about, you know, the bottom line, when it comes to the number, it’s about making sure the money is available within the business community to grow the existing businesses, to increase the economy.

Brandon Burton 26:31
Well, I’m impressed being ranked 30 in the nation and moving your way up to 19. I mean, you can’t get everything you want, or else you got nothing left to do right? So you got to have that job security and keep moving forward with the progress. But that is a that’s a needle being moved in a great way. So congratulations on that, and and I’m sure it’ll continue to move in the right direction as well. So great, great programs you guys have submitted, obviously making an impact in Oklahoma, and, you know, kind of leading the charge for for other Chambers as well, and being supportive there Brent, you have something to add well,

Brent Skarky 27:12
and I’ve always been a fan of Chad’s overall vision for the chamber itself is to tackle big issues. Lots of times, State Chambers will get bogged down, a little bitty tweets, little bitty nuances for specific businesses, for specific members, but we really have taken a big picture approach, doing things that will change the state to not only make it better for business, but to make it better for all Oklahomans. We passed some legislation this last spring to rework graduation requirements for Oklahoma K through 12 students that will help them have better options, ultimately leading to better jobs for them, but it helps the business community as well, because we’re going to get more trained, skilled employees and workers into the workforce, but not always. It’s not always a chamber that looks at the big picture like that, and I think we’ve done a pretty good job with that, through our workforce initiative, through our tax initiative, and some of the changes we’ve made there.

Brandon Burton 28:08
Yeah, now as a State Chamber, you guys do a lot of the heavy lifts, for sure, and I’m always amazed and appreciative of state chambers to be able to do that and provide those resources for the local chambers just take back to their communities and really amplify the advocacy that you guys are involved with and making those, those big changes. I do like to ask, as we have you guys on the podcast as a chamber the year finalist, you guys are kind of the top of your game at the moment, what kind of tip or action item might you have for listeners who are wanting to take their chamber up to the next level, but what might you suggest them to try to implement or to try to work towards that goal? Well, I

Chad Warmington 28:50
think for me, what I would say is we wouldn’t be able to do any of the stuff we’re doing if we didn’t have a team that worked really well together. And so, you know, I know that every leader has that issue of trying to get your teams to be a team and to have that collaboration. When I got here, we were very siloed off, you know, marketing and membership stayed in their lane. You know, government affairs did their thing, and there wasn’t a lot of communication back between the two. The Communications Department was kind of trying to pick up things from each of the other two departments, but there just wasn’t. There was very much siloed off. And I think the thing that for us, that made, you know, that’s really helped us turn everything kind of around and have a lot of success in the last couple years, is we knocked down all those silos, and we really are very collaborative. And frankly, we, you know, there was people that we brought in that didn’t help, and they’re no longer here. I mean, so it was a little bit of a trial and error getting the right people that could do that, and, and so my, my guess, my strong encouragement is, you know, focus on that first. Because if. You get that right once you, you know, once you kind of figure out the things you need to do for your community or your state, they become much easier when your team is a team. And then the last thing, I think is in this is, over the last year, we really implemented this is, we’re trying to build kind of, you know, excellence down throughout the organization, get people to get outside of their, you know, of their, of their, just their department. And so we’ve got cross functional teams that are working on things this year. So we as a team spent two days off site developing what our kind of four top, you know, priorities for the year are. And then we built and self selected a team within the chamber that has members from every department working on it. And so we’ll have a communications person working on a revenue issue, you know, for us, or we’ll have, you know, somebody from membership and marketing help understand, you know, what we’re going to do in terms of how the best communication strategies that we want to use are the software we use. And so we’ve got these collaborative teams that are, you know, cross pollinating each other, and I think that’s the single best thing that we’ve done in a long time. It’s been fun. We have a monthly reporting session. We have a leader of each group. And it’s been fun to get, to get and sit in those meetings and have them report back, and have our comms person leading, you know, the discussion on internal software programs that we’re going to use, you know, and so it’s an opportunity for them to grow. But what it really does is it build that sense of team. It builds the communication skills that we need internally to go get these things done. And it’s been just an eye opener for me in terms of, I’ve always, you know, known how important was to break down those silos, but to take it to the next level and force those people to work together has been a game changer for us.

Brandon Burton 31:41
Yeah, I love the idea of cross pollinating, so it does really help when you are in your, you know, maybe formally siloed area, to know what the other team members are doing, so you can work cohesively towards a common goal. So I love that idea, and that’s that’s so important to being able to elevate your organization, for sure, Brent would do you have anything that you’d like to add?

Brent Skarky 32:06
I we’ve got a great board here at the Oklahoma State Chamber with a lot of very well respected business leaders, and from a communication standpoint, I love that, because I’ve been able to use those people as our voice. Obviously, you’ve heard Chad, he’s an incredible public speaker, and we’ve gotten him out, spreading the word, I think, just the awareness of what we do. And, like I said, being that voice. But circling back to the board, using those board members as your voice as well. They are experts in their field. They’re well respected across the state, and to get those people out front, leading the charge with you as well as important. I mean, yes, do the work yourself. Speak out yourself and let people know what you’re doing. We use your board members as well as as great PR representatives, because honestly, a lot of people know them in the community, and it’s just another respected voice out there that will ultimately lead to more success for you, more buy in from the community, and just better public perception in general. And I think that it’s important to use all the tools you have at your disposal.

Brandon Burton 33:10
Absolutely. Great tip. I love it. So I like asking everyone I have on the show about how do you see the future of chambers and their purpose going forward?

Chad Warmington 33:22
That’s a really good question, and it’s one I think about quite a bit, you know, I think we all realize and are seeing, you know, what I like to call kind of community or civic engagement is declining. People don’t spend the time in either on chamber boards or on, you know, community organizations that they used to. So how do we one, how do we, you know, get people to spend, you know, their volunteer time on with us, on their issues. And I think it’s really pretty critically important, because if it’s not chambers leading the way on things, who’s going to, right? I mean, who’s going to step in and fill that gap and fill that void, if chambers aren’t stepping up, and community leaders aren’t stepping up, you know? So I spend a lot of time kind of, frankly, frankly worried about that. I think what we’re finding, though, is that, you know, it’s like a flywheel, right? You know, I love the good to great concept. And if, for those of you who haven’t read Good to Great, there’s a, there’s a, they call it a, there’s a version. It’s called Good to Great for the social sector, sports, it’s for people like us that are running nonprofits. And part of that flywheel is getting people involved, and the more that they feel like being involved with you serves their community. It kind of builds that flywheel effect. They want to stick around and they’re telling their friends about it. And so we’re really trying to do that. We’re really trying to recruit leaders who are going to help us recruit other leaders and keep that momentum going, because civic engagement is dropping, and if not us, who and and it’s all, you know, our success is really determined based on the quality of the volunteers that we get to come help serve, you know, on our boards and on our committees. And so we got to keep that up. And. The I think it’s something that probably all of us, you know, may lay awake at night a little bit worried about, about how to keep up civic engagement. Yeah,

Brandon Burton 35:07
and I think that needs to be preached over and over and over again. If you know who’s going to fill that void, is it echoes, you know, to chambers across the nation. So we will, we’ll keep pounding that drum for sure. Brent, how do you see the future of chambers going forward?

Brent Skarky 35:24
I think Chad, hit it right on the head. We’ve had a couple of state questions that are going to be detrimental to the business community come across the Oklahoma legislature and the Oklahoma just overall landscape in the last couple of years, and who’s going to go to bat for the business community. In that kind of situation, it’s got to be someone, and in this situation, that’s us, and that’s really what you’re supposed to do in that situation. And I think it’s important in the social media world that we all live in to not be afraid to tell people what you’re doing. Tell people that, yes, we are leading the charge on this, to make sure that people know that yes, we have your back in this situation. Because I think in years past chambers would like to maybe stay in the background a little bit, know that they’re supporting people, but not really take a out front, leading charge on some of these things. And I just don’t think that’s how the world is working anymore. People are not afraid to tooth their own horn, and we have to be okay with saying, Yes, we’re making a difference. We’re leading the charge on this, and this is why you need to be a part of it, because this is the direction the business community is leaning. It’s time to get on board and and be active and be a part of it.

Brandon Burton 36:34
I love it, but you guys are making a great impact in the state of Oklahoma, as has been expressed throughout this conversation today, I’d like to give you both an opportunity to share any contact information for listeners who might want to reach out and learn more about how you guys are doing things there at the state Oklahoma, at the State Chamber of Oklahoma, and just to reach out and connect with you. What would be the best ways to do that? Yeah. Yeah. Well, for

Chad Warmington 37:01
me, my my email desk is just pretty simple. chad@okstatechamber.com, and again, if there’s anything we’re doing that that would be helpful to another chamber, we are listen. We are not proprietary. We’re all in the all in the business of helping our community succeed. We’d be glad or happy to share anything that we’re working on with you. We’re not competitors. We’re all trying to make our communities better. And if there’s something we’re doing that would be helpful to you, please don’t hesitate to reach out and and let us know how we can be helpful.

Brent Skarky 37:34
I couldn’t agree more. I coming from TV news. You always wanted to beat the guy that worked across the street from you, and it’s been an eye opener for me to come to the chamber world and know that I can steal an idea from Kentucky or share an idea with Washington and and be collaborative and be cooperative with some of these chambers. So yeah, brent@okstatechamber.com. Would love to talk best practice on a lot of different things across the board, because I I’m an open book. I think I’ve done a couple things that might be helpful to people, but I know that there are people out there with a lot of great ideas that would help me. So would love to talk more. Absolutely.

Brandon Burton 38:07
We’ll get your your emails in our show notes for this episode. But Brent, I can see where that could be a mind shift change, you know, and that

Brent Skarky 38:18
guy, next year, no, no, you feel that idea. It’s great.

Brandon Burton 38:21
That’s right, absolutely. Well, I appreciate you guys taking the time to be with us today on Chamber Chat Podcast. I wish you the very best of luck at the chamber of the year and continue making that big impact across the state of Oklahoma.

Chad Warmington 38:35
Great. Thanks for the time. Appreciate it.

Brent Skarky 38:37
Thank you, bud.

Brandon Burton 38:38
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Greater Sarasota Chamber-2024 Chamber of the Year Finalist with Heather Kasten

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Brandon Burton 0:00
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You’re joining us for a special episode in our 2024 chamber of the year finalist series, and our guest for this episode is Heather. Kasten. Heather is the President and CEO of the Greater Sarasota Chamber of Commerce. Heather is from a small town just outside of St Louis, Missouri, and has been in the Sarasota region for over 14 years. She’s currently the present CEO. Prior to coming to the Greater Sarasota Chamber of Commerce, she was the President CEO of the Lakewood Ranch Business Alliance for five years in St Louis, she worked for Eli Lilly Pharmaceuticals and Six Flags Theme parks in a variety of regional management roles. Heather’s community involvement includes membership on the board of directors for career source, Suncoast, United Way Suncoast the educational foundation of Sarasota County. And she also serves on several local advisory councils, including the USF Muma College of Business Advisory Board and the 26 West Entrepreneurship Center Advisory Board. She completed leadership Sarasota in 2014 and leadership Florida in 2023 Heather received her undergraduate degree from the University of Iowa in Business Administration, and she has an MBA from Webster University in management marketing. Heather and her husband, Clint, of 32 years and their three children enjoy calling Sarasota their home, but Heather, I am excited to have you with us today here on Chamber Chat Podcast. And first of all, want to say a big congratulations to you and your team for being selected as a chamber of the year finalists. Very exciting, but I want to give you an opportunity to say hello to all the Chamber Champions that are out there listening, and to be able to share something interesting about yourself so we can all get to know you a little better.

Heather Kasten 3:00
Great. Well, thank you so much Brandon for having me today. I’m truly honored our entire team here at the Sarasota chamber. We are so thrilled and just blown away to have this recognition from ACCE. We’re really looking forward to Dallas and just so grateful for this wonderful opportunity. You know, something unique about me, I would have to say, you know, going back to my years at Six Flags Theme Parks, a lot of people, my husband, used to joke that I run the rides. And truth be told, on some of those early spring days before all the high school kids, everybody from the CEO, all levels of management. We’re working in the park for those early spring days. And so, you know, it’s just, it’s not too often you talk with somebody who actually, you know, worked on the ride. Worked on the rides. Mine was the giant Ferris wheel, so got very comfortable saying you keep your arms and legs and hands inside the ride at all times. And, you know, working for a theme park, it’s, it’s fun, as you could imagine, just a wonderful place. Did a lot of events there for a lot of companies. And just a really great time, you know, in that period of my life,

Brandon Burton 4:19
yeah, did you ever have to dress up in costume at the theme park.

Heather Kasten 4:22
We did have to, every ride had a ride costume outfit. So absolutely so you never knew, you know, if you were talking with a high schooler kid or you were talking with the CEO of, you know, the of the park, because we were all out there, all pitching in on those, you know those early spring days

Brandon Burton 4:42
still in all the secrets That’s awesome. Well, tell us about the greater Sarasota chamber. Give us an idea of the size of your chamber, staff, size, budget, scope of work, just to kind of set the stage for our discussion. Sure.

Heather Kasten 4:56
So our chamber, we have been around for 100 And four years, you know, going back to the early days, some of our things you know that we focused on, as you can imagine, Florida, going back 100 years ago, things like good roads, mosquito management, you know, competing for for tourism, you know, trying to get people from the northeast to come down and invest into the state of Florida, and obviously our scope of work have has truly evolved over the last 104 years. But we work with about 1400 local companies that employ about 60,000 employees in the region. Our team here, I always say we’re small but mighty. We have 12 full time and three part time team members. And, you know, I know we’ll get into the discussion about some of the program, programmatic work that we do here. It’s truly incredible what this small body of people, what we’re able to accomplish with with that, you know, tide of a ship we have. You know, we’re always looking to diversify our economy. Sarasota, as you can imagine, very big in tourism and real estate. And a lot of the work that we do, you know, is in that economic development space of trying to support other industries that make our community a little bit more resilient during, you know, economic downturns. So I know we’re going to talk about some of our programs later. We’ll, we’ll get into that, but we do a good portion of, you know, probably close to over, well over 100 events per year, ranging in size and scope, something you know, small and and more, you know, intimate type of events for 20 to 25 people, all the way up to last Friday, we hosted our Small Business Awards with over 600 people in a significant wait list on that event. Our but annual budget is about $1.8 million in annual revenue. And out, we’ll get into it a little bit. But just, you know, we’re finding that, you know, getting away from solely relying on membership dollars and some of these programs that we’ve kind of brought under the umbrella, you know, have really helped to, you know, fund the mission and the work that we’re doing here at the Sarasota chamber. That’s

Brandon Burton 7:20
great. Yeah, anytime you can talk about non dues revenue, ways to bring in the dollars, please feel free to interject that into our conversation. Today, I find it interesting where a community where tourism could be viewed as kind of the bread and butter of the community, to be able to have your mindset on economic development, what do we do as you know, to keep the community thriving economically, even if there’s a downturn or in different times of the year, where maybe tourism is not as popular, although in Florida, the weather’s always beautiful, right? Yeah, so for the majority of our conversation today, we’ll focus on the two programs or submitted on your chamber the year application, and we’ll dive into the details and what those programs are all about. As soon as we get back from this quick break.

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All right, Heather, we. Are back, if you would please introduce to us what the first program is you’d like to address. It was on your chamber of the year application, and kind of what the origins of it were, and why that became an area of interest for your chamber to address.

Heather Kasten 10:17
Sure, the first program is called Career Edge, and we have a very, very strong workforce arm here called Career source Suncoast, which works very closely in that workforce space. They deal with a lot of federal dollars. About 14 years ago, a program was created called Career Edge, which was funded by private funders, so foundations, locally and really at a national level, funded put money into this fund, the Career Edge fund. And what we do with that money is we look at what are the top industries, we look at the employers in our region, what are their needs? And then, what are some career pathways where someone can get kind of that first level certification and really be put on a path, on a career ladder, or journey, you know, to be able to make more money over the course of their lifetime. And so for us in our region, the five industries that we really honed in on were insurance, automotive, healthcare is huge, and that’s what we started with 14 years ago, manufacturing and then the trade. So think about HVAC, plumbing, electrical. We’ve we’ve moved a little bit into some logistics and transportation as well as some technology and as well as, you know, being on the coast of Florida marine technology, so you know, the ability to work on on boats and and marine products. But what we do is we partner with a training provider. So it could be a locals. Could be our local state college of Florida. It could be an independent private training provider. We talk with our employers. First, we find out what their needs are, we find a training partner, and then we market the program. We market it through here in Sarasota, and even within our chamber, we have over 200 nonprofits who are connected with a lot of these folks who are, you know, they’re, you know, in a minimum wage job, it could be fast food, it could be, you know, it could even be someone within a current company, someone working the linen room at the hospital, that someone sees some potential impossibility. And then we put these folks through the training in one of these industry segments. We fully fund that training. If it involves buying tools. We purchase the tools if it involves, if it’s healthcare and they need certain, you know, vaccinations, or, you know, all of those things are funded. We put them through the training, and then we place them in chamber member companies. So it’s a win for the individual. It’s a win for these companies. And when you look at the opportunities that are put before these people who participate in the training, it really does, you know, change the trajectory of their lifetime, incoming, you know, income potential. It’s such a phenomenal program over the course of the 14 years. I mean, we literally have trained 1000s of individuals and placed them with local companies.

Brandon Burton 13:28
That’s awesome. So you shared a few examples of how you find these, these young people, to get into the program. But are there other examples of how you find them to kind of fill that pipeline and pull the intro. I love that example, somebody working in the linen department in the hospital or something. But what are some of those resourceful ways of finding these people to join the program?

Heather Kasten 13:50
Yeah, well, the cohorts, you know, we put them through because we do a lot of hand holding and shepherding these cohorts. We do them in groups of 15, usually is kind of the magic number, and it can be, like I said, our community partners, our nonprofits, be surprised. You know, even the churches, you know, somebody’s grandson is, you know, not on the right path, and grandma refers them to us. It they come all different ways. You know, of course, we do the traditional ways of, you know, we do a press release. But really, it’s so much more organic than that. It really comes from these partners, or even the Salvation Army, or, you know, could be any of our any of the nonprofits that we work with that refer them. And then, you know, these people, you know they’re where they are for a reason. You know, they’ve had some life circumstances that have happened to them, and so we have a dedicated person, our Career Edge manager, who really comes alongside of these folks and helps them. If they miss a class, he’s calling them, Hey, why’d you miss class last night? Oh, your car broke down. Guess what? I’m going to send over a couple of Uber gift cards. Cards. Don’t miss class tonight. Here’s your ride to class. It’s that level of intention and detail that help get these folks across the finish line.

Brandon Burton 15:09
Yeah. And so are you able to put any kind of tracker on these? These people who go through the cohorts to see their their career development, and kind of get some check ins with them along the way.

Heather Kasten 15:21
We they are checked in with through the entire program. Now, once they come out of the program and they’re placed, it’s a little bit hard to, you know, keep tabs on that, but we have some incredible success stories. I mean, there’s, you know, there’s some folks that you know constantly reach back to us and say, you know, if it weren’t for you, I, you know, I’d still be flipping burgers, or I’d still be, you know, whatever the you know, the minimum wage job is. But we do have, every year that program, we hire an independent third party evaluator. So it’s not just, you know, the chamber and career beating our chest of like, Oh, look at the great work we did. We fund an independent evaluator to come in and really evaluate the work. Look at the wage increases like we track, okay, what wage, when they started this program, they were at this wage, and when they completed the program, they were at this wage. And we can track those, you know, you know, those differentials between, you know, when they started and when they completed the program. And that’s how every year, we’re able to go out and get this private funding. And that is really what differentiates us from career source, Suncoast, which we refer people to them all the time because our money is private. There is no red tape. We make it as easy as possible to get these people into the program and then shepherd them through. That’s

Brandon Burton 16:42
wonderful. So I know for a lot of people, their experiences as they go into a career option or enter the workforce, they’re based upon their their experience, what they’ve seen from their parents or mentors that are in their life. And if they don’t have that example to look to or to be able to see what options are available a program like this is so crucial being able to just open their mind to what the options are and see, you know, just how big the world is and what they can do. Is there an application process to get into a cohort, and what kind of things are you looking for on an application to justify somebody joining the cohort? Yeah,

Heather Kasten 17:21
it really depends on which industry segment, you know, the insurance segment has different qualifications than the nursing than the electrical cohort. So it really does depend. There is an application process and we do do some personality testing. You know this we this funding is so crucial, and we want to have the absolute best return on investor investment for our funders. And so we do do some testing to see, you know, is this person you know are the odds that they are going to complete the program? And again, you have to keep in mind the population you know that you are dealing with. They, you know, they do come with some struggles and some, you know, some things from their past. We don’t just put them through the training. We also really incorporate some life skills training and some kind of emotional intelligence training, you know, interviewing skills. So they’re not going to their first interviewing and the first question they’re asking is, how much vacation time do I get? Really setting them up for success, helping them with their resume. So it’s, it’s much more than just a job training program.

Brandon Burton 18:25
Yeah, I love that. I love seeing the opportunities for people to develop their careers and see their horizons be widened. So I can just imagine that the sense of pride that you see as these people go through the program,

Heather Kasten 18:38
it really is. Brandon, yeah.

Brandon Burton 18:42
So as we change gears to the other program on your application, tell us what that’s about.

Heather Kasten 18:49
So our another program that we have, we have gotten private funding for through one of our local foundations, is called our opportunities for all program, and it has kind of two prongs. The first prong focuses on interns. So placing minority interns, uncovering what their interests are, and then placing them with companies that they can learn and grow through an eight week internship process. And we fully fund that so the employers, you know, hold those pay stubs. And at the end of the eight week internship, they submit us, you know, the pay stubs to us, and then we reimburse that company fully up to $3,000 for that eight week internship. We also, this year, something new. We added, we added an intern half day conference called spark, and that was actually just held this past week. We had about 70 local interns, 30 of which were our opportunities for all interns, but did a half day workshop on again, resume, building, networking, mentoring, how to, you know, connect with others, how to build their personal brand and and now. Work. So that’s really exciting. These are interns who really would not have had any opportunity like this to actually work within a company and get paid in their field of interest. The other prong for the opportunities for all program is minority business grant funding. So this program has been around for about four years. And last year, for example, we had, we had probably close to 100 minority businesses apply. We funded 20 of that the 100 that had applied, and we deployed about $100,000 so each minority business, you know, had different asks. For some, it was, I need, you know, some support to market my company. So we’ve, you know, funded, you know, six months of some social media advertising. For some it was capital things like a laptop, so that they could get their finances out of, maybe their personal checking and into QuickBooks and onto a laptop computer. Every ask was was different. The grants were anywhere from 1000 to $10,000 in nature. And then we really support these. These 20 companies, all were granted chamber memberships. We have programming throughout the year to support them, entrepreneurial classes that we partner with 26 West, which is our business incubator here in Sarasota, to again come alongside of them and give them resources, solutions, and also funding to really help build their businesses. And that has been so rewarding as well. We’ve got some incredible success stories of companies that, you know, have gone from, you know, someone kind of doing it as a side hustle, to, you know, being able to, you know, quit their corporate job and, you know, really come over into that entrepreneurial space.

Brandon Burton 21:54
Yeah, those $1,000 grant applications, when you said that that really pulls at my heart strings. Somebody’s needing to ask for for that amount to be able to make their business work. And I almost just on the amount, want to make sure that those ones are awarded. But it’s got to be tough to go through that many applications and and find where the money goes. Yeah. So with both of these programs, you’ve you’ve mentioned the chamber is kind of foot in the bill for a lot of these things, whether it’s helping get supplies for someone entering a workforce, or the vaccinations or reimbursing their their pay for the eight weeks in the internship. Do you mind speaking a little bit to how these are funded? You mentioned they’re both privately funded. So how do you go about funding these programs? So we

Heather Kasten 22:45
have started again. We we really track our funders. So Career Edge being that it’s been around for 14 years, we probably have eight to 10 funders, and we have two very large foundations here within Sarasota who really believe in that mission of workforce and upskilling workers. So they are great funders. The best thing you know when you’re out looking at grants is the flexibility of grants. You know, there’s some grants that are so limiting and narrowing that it’s just impossible to fulfill. You know, the request of the grants. And what’s nice about the foundations that we work with, they, you know, they support the funding of staff to run these programs. Because, as we all know, these programs do not run themselves. So without the funding for actual staff, these programs, they couldn’t occur. They couldn’t couldn’t happen. And so, you know, we, every year, are looking at, you know, private foundations, whether it be the Walmart Foundation, whether it’s Boeing foundation, you know, there are foundations who, you know, you really have to invest the time to find out, you know, what their missions are and what they invest in. And we’ve spent a lot of time doing that. And that’s really how we’ve, you know, come to have funders for both Career Edge and then, you know, funders for the opportunities for all program. These are foundations that, again, believe in this work. We’re doing the work, and they, you know, they fund it every year.

Brandon Burton 24:17
That’s awesome. Yeah, you guys have put in the work, for sure, that’s That’s great. So I like asking, especially as you guys are a chamber, that you’re a finalist. Chambers across the country are looking to you guys in your example, so no pressure. But for what kind of tips or action item might you share for a listener who is looking to take their chamber up to the next level.

Heather Kasten 24:44
You know, I’ve thought a lot about that question, and one of the things I think, well, I’ll share two things. First is process in the chamber world. It does, you know, we don’t stop, right? It is, you finish one event and you’re on to the next. Next 10. So I’m a big believer in, you know, setting up processes for everything that occurs under the roof of a chamber. And that way, you know, when you do have turnover, which we all do, you know, you’ve got a trail of breadcrumbs for that next person to come in and follow. So, big believer in process. And then, you know, I would say secondly, as chamber leaders, the importance of really taking care of your staff. I want to be able to look myself in the mirror and say, I’ve done everything in my power to keep the staff intact, to keep them encouraged and motivated and challenged, not overwhelmed. I don’t want anyone showing up to work feeling, you know, worn down, ragged out, exhausted, overwhelmed, that’s I don’t want to show up at a place and work like that. And so I would say, the last two to three years, we’ve just been really hyper intentional of the things that we’re doing with our staff making sure that, you know, we’re having early outs in the summer. We’re planning fun activities. We we’ve got a beautiful new aquarium coming up in our town, and just last week, took the team to do a behind the scenes tour. You know, nobody else got this opportunity but the chamber team. So I’m always looking for unique and special things to really bless them with. And, you know, just make sure that they are feeling good about the work and energized about the work. And you know, that’s something that you have to do with intention. It doesn’t just happen. And the timing is never good. You can say, Oh, well, we’ve got this big thing next week. Well, guess what? After next week, there’s going to be the next big thing. So making sure that you’re taking time to, you know, really engage your staff and build a culture that is one where people want to come and show up and work, and then for the chamber leaders and the CEOs, make sure, you know, in the the airline world, make sure you’re putting your oxygen mask on as well, because you cannot pour into members, pour into your board, pour into your staff if you aren’t refreshed and and, you know, refueled yourself. And so making sure that you’re taking that time and listen. I need, I need this advice as much as anybody I’m giving it as if I’m, you know, you know, I buy into it. And we really do have to plan those intentional days, you know, a half day, even if it’s once a quarter, where you get out of the office and you clear your head and you give some thought to working on the business instead of working in the business. Those would be my couple of tips. Brandon,

Brandon Burton 27:43
yeah. Fact, when you said process at the beginning, my mind went to where you just ended with to be able to take that pause and to be able to to process what you went through. So if there’s a big event that you you’ve put on, to take time afterwards to process the how things went and evaluate and take a breather, put on that oxygen mask, and be able to kind of re energize for the next thing. But to your point about taking care of your staff, I’d love that example, yeah, taking them out to that aquarium that see the behind the scenes, something special just for your team. And of course, we want to be able to take care of them monetarily whenever you can. But we all know chambers don’t always have the funding to take care, to pay what they’re deserved, right? But to be able to have those opportunities really adds to that experience. And

Heather Kasten 28:34
you know, that’s something that you do have to be intentional about, too. You know, we I do want, I want our team to be paid as well as any, you know, regular corporate jobs. So I feel that’s my responsibility, is to, you know, find that money to bring in the resources so that anybody working here at the Sarasota chamber, you know, has a, has a really good, you know, way of life.

Brandon Burton 29:00
Yeah, you’re gonna be flooded with applications. Now, I’m just kidding. No. Seriously, though, Heather, this has been great. I’d like to give you an opportunity to share any contact information for listeners who’d like to reach out and learn more about how you guys are doing things there at the Greater Sarasota chamber.

Heather Kasten 29:19
Absolutely. Again, it’s Heather Kasten. My email is hkasten@sarasotachamber.com. I’d love to connect with with anyone. I love bouncing ideas off each other. The great thing about the chamber world is I feel like there’s so many opportunities to share best practices. You know, as long as it’s not you know, the Chamber up the street. You know, aside from that, I mean, the world is your oyster, right? For new ideas and fresh ideas. My office line here, 941-556-4050, and really, just excited, you know, love to to talk chamber stuff. So anyone who’d like to reach out and. Be happy to connect with you and learn you know, really enjoy learning more about you as well.

Brandon Burton 30:05
That’s awesome. I appreciate that, and that’s the whole point of the show, right? Share those best practices and be able to help people connect. So we’ll, we’ll post your contact information in our show notes for this episode so people can find it there. But Heather, this has been great. I’ve enjoyed having you on the show and have I wish you and your team best of luck. It’s chamber of the year in Dallas.

Heather Kasten 30:26
We’re so excited we can’t wait. Thanks so much bringing in for your you know the opportunity today. Really enjoyed our conversations.

Brandon Burton 30:35
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Bend Chamber-2024 Chamber of the Year Finalist with Katy Brooks

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Brandon Burton 0:00
This is the Chamber Chat Podcast, the show dedicated to chamber professionals to spark ideas and to get actionable tips and strategies to better serve your members and community.

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You’re joining us for a special episode in our 2024 ACCE chamber the year finalist series. Our guest for this episode is Katy Brooks. She is the president and CEO of the Bend Chamber of Commerce in Oregon. Her vision for the chamber is to catalyze and environment where businesses and employees and the community thrive. The chamber supports a collaborative business environment and leads efforts to resolve tough issues like affordable housing and childcare shortage, assisting businesses with resources and advocating for businesses at the local and state level. Katy’s background and economic development coalition building and government relations enables her to understand public policies and issues in order to advocate for the businesses of band as well as forming partnerships and alliances that support a growing business community. Her career has included over 20 years working in public affairs and economic development for the ports of Portland, Oregon and Vancouver, Washington. She has been a public affairs and strategic planning consultant for public and private organizations in Oregon, Washington and Alaska and manage Community Relations for the Oregon Department of Tourism. Katy is a member of the Oregon State Early Learning Council and has served on numerous regional, state and city boards and committees. Prior to coming to bend, Katy served on the Public Affairs Committee for the Greater Vancouver Chamber of Commerce, and the board of directors for the Washington State Business Association. Katy received her BS at Southern Oregon University with and graduate studies at Portland State University. She’s received extensive training and facilitating public issues and resolving conflict her and her family reside in Bend. But Katy, I am excited to have you with us today on chamber tap podcast. And first of all, congratulations to you and your team for being selected as a 2024 chamber, the year finals. That’s a huge accomplishment. But please take a minute to say hello to all the chamber champions that are out there listening and share something interesting about yourself so we can all get to know you a little better.

Katy Brooks 3:25
Well, thanks. I’m really, really honored to be here. It’s just so terrific. Being a finalist. And in this fabulous industry that we’re all in. I have been in the chamber world for about eight years since I moved from the coast and port world working for port authorities for a long, long time. And it’s been a great transition. I live here with my family, we do a lot of mountain biking enjoy a bit of a higher elevation than what I was previously at. And for those of you haven’t been to this part of the world is quite beautiful. And it’s full of great things to do outside, which is what we’re all about.

Brandon Burton 4:09
That’s right. It is a beautiful part of the country for sure. Well, please take a few moments and tell us a little bit about the Bend Chamber of Commerce. What makes you guys so special, what’s your your chamber look like the work you’re involved with? Size staff budget, that sort of thing to kind of give us some perspective as we get into our discussion?

Katy Brooks 4:33
Sure. Well, we’ve had quite a bit of population growth. So the business sector has grown as well. We are population of about 110,000. We are on the east side of the caste range. So we are a little bit removed from where most of the population of the state is. So bend is kind of a it’s a mountain community but it’s really a self sufficient ecosystem here. That’s really unique. And it’s something that we take into consideration. Anytime we put any of our strategies together. We have great networking programs. Here we have a really strong advocacy program because our state capitol is in the valley. And to lift up our voice from Central Oregon, we align with a lot of partners here. We build our leaders, we concentrate quite a bit on how we support a system of of leadership and workforce development that can sustain our growth, not just in population, but our business growth and several industry sectors that have taken off here. And we look for our niche initiatives, we look for ways to take on things that we see and our members see as obstacles and impediments or opportunities. And really try to capitalize those and bring up solutions. And I’ll get into that here in a little bit of what that actually looks like.

Brandon Burton 6:04
Yeah, well that’s the crux of the Chamber’s to solve those problems, right that face the community. So very good. Well, as we focus on these chamber, the year finalist episodes who really like to dive in, in more detail on the programs that were submitted on your chamber that your application, I think those are a really good indicator of the type of work you’re involved with and, and where you’re seeing those levels of importance to be able to make an impact in your community. So I’m excited to dive into what those programs are and all those details as soon as they get back from this quick break.

Visit ChamberNation.com to learn more.

All right, Katy, we’re back. As we dive into the meat of this episode and talking about the programs that were submitted on your chamber, that your application, please share with us what what the first program was? And we’ll dive into that and save the good stuff on second program for for a few minutes.

Katy Brooks 8:52
Yeah, it’s always hard. I’m sure everybody else who submitted an application feels this way, it was hard to choose in some respect. Because we just do so much. And as with all chambers, we have changed so much over the last several years. So when you look at at our programs, it looks like like today rather than yesterday. And it looks like what the key issues are that we’re struggling with here, rather than some of the more traditional things you think about in chamber world. But I’ll I’ll talk a little bit about Ben 101. So Ben 101 was established in collaboration with a bunch of folks from the community from several industry sectors, who said essentially, you know, we are growing faster than any other city in our state we have the more more jobs per capita than any other city in our state and we’re losing touch with the culture we worked really hard to establish we’re very bootstrap kind of a community here. We were lumber mill industry, which declined dramatically in the 80s, we reinvented ourselves. Now we’re biotech, health care sciences, outdoor industry, product development, high tech, all sorts of things are happening here that frankly, didn’t exist 10 years ago. And what happens when you bring that many new people and new industries together, you kind of lose touch with everyone, you go from a small little town to, you’re actually a small city. And that’s got a different dynamic. So Bend 101 brings in key leaders from our community to tell the story of our history, tell the story of our culture, which is be nice, you’re invent, and we’re collaborative, we’re dolphins, we’re not sharks. And we have a lot of ways for people to plug in. So it’s like getting a turbo charge in everything you would want to know if you move to a new place. And not only do you get the information, but we match you up with people from the community in various industries, from the workforce. So it’s not like insta friend, but it’s close to it. It’s it’s hard introductions of folks that you might find really interesting and want to have coffee with later. And then we work with the human resources, folks to really make sure that we follow up. How do your folks feel about this? Did they meet somebody there that they didn’t get to connect with that they want to and really make those connections meaningful? So you have the background information, you know, where we’ve been where we’re going to, and you have access to the people who made it that way? Yeah.

Brandon Burton 11:45
So I think it’s interesting to to inform newcomers on the culture of Bend. And I imagine that’s a tough task to try to infuse culture. But what is it? What does it look like this with Bend 101? What’s the format? How do you? How do you structure I love the overall the, you know, the high level view of making those connections and welcoming those newcomers. But when you get down to the nuts and bolts of it, what what is the structure of it look like? Well,

Katy Brooks 12:15
we use a lot of humor, because we have some idiosyncrasies and little things about them, like every community does that are pretty funny. And one of ours is our claim to fame is roundabouts. They’re everywhere. And anybody who’s new to bend goes what is going on. You can’t get anywhere without going in a circle. So we kind of poke fun at ourselves, we have a really great welcoming video, where we talk about how friendly we are and kind of help people navigate the why of things and kind of laugh at ourselves a little bit. But then we we give the overall here’s how the city operates. And here’s some information for about 1015 minutes. And then every time we hold a one on one, we do it three times a year we fish feature a different part of bend. For example, last time we did this, we featured our healthcare system, educating folks on what that looks like, how do you access it? Who are the leaders there? Who should you know, what should you know, this month, we are, in fact, this week, we’re holding one that features our park system. Our Park system is amazing. It’s very robust, very well funded. There’s mountain bike trails, literally hundreds of miles you can ride and it connects different communities in Central Oregon. So we’ll share all that information. And then talk a little bit about, hey, this is everybody’s chance right now to reach out to somebody you don’t know, unless make those connections happen. So it’s kind of infusing that cultural welcome as much as we can. It changes a little bit every time we hold the event, depending on the information we share, but the outcome is the same. Right?

Brandon Burton 13:57
So does anybody come to multiple sessions have been one on one? How does that like if you want to learn about the parks? And you didn’t get that in your session? How does that work? Oh,

Katy Brooks 14:07
totally. We have repeat offenders. And because it’s really fun. And we are beer town, we have 14 breweries. And so that’s some fun, people just enjoy showing up and interacting folks that have been here for a really long time. They like to show up. In fact, we reach out to them. We want them there. Because how else are newcomers going to meet the establishment? Right? And so you need some of those people to come multiple times. And really mix it up with the old the new the the in between. And if folks are new, and they think hey, that was great. I want to learn about a different sector because I’m thinking about getting involved, then that’s great.

Brandon Burton 14:49
Yeah, that is that’s fantastic. I love that. The idea of it. I love the execution of it and making all the connections and really welcoming people to a community that really sets them up to thrive from the beginning. And I’m sure there’s success stories that you can share with people that have come in and been able to make those connections and, and be able to get their feet on the ground much quicker so to speak. Absolutely. So as we, as we move along, let’s let’s shift gears into what the second program is it was submitted on your chamber the your application. Yeah,

Katy Brooks 15:26
our workforce housing initiative. So I’m co chairing the ACC II horizon initiative that Sheri Ann is, is heading up. And I was so intrigued by this, and I’ll tell you why it matters to the workforce housing issue, asking people about what is the most pressing issue and opportunity in front of you right now? And then saying, Alright, so in 10 years from now, what would that look like? And how do we get from point A to point B, I think is a really useful thing to do. And we’ve essentially been doing this for a few years. And every year, both in the front windshield and 10 years down the line, people are worried about housing, a little bit of background about bend, it’s, it’s quite lovely here, and I’m sure everybody’s community is. But we we experienced something in Cote COVID that a lot of us didn’t see coming. Obviously, nobody saw the pandemic coming. And that is a lot of folks who are professionals who could work from anywhere, say, why not live in Bend, and they came in during COVID, much of the housing stock has been occupied, and it drove prices up 75% In about two or three years, wow, it’s kind of ridiculous. And we looked around and said, Holy smokes, this is not, we knew it was bad. But now we’re 5000 units behind in a community of 100,000 110,000. That’s, that’s significant. So we hear this from our, our business partners and members all the time, we can’t hire biggest thing that’s deterring us is folks can’t afford to live here. So we started out about three years ago with research. And the research was alright, how do we assess how ready Ben dites are to address this population issue in this housing issue, and we ask questions around density. Because this is, everybody has a little yard and your little house and or it’s a cabin or whatever, and started that conversation about so we’re gonna have to go up, we’re gonna have to get more dense, people are going to be living closer together in certain parts of town. And we’ve tested that. We tested what made everybody accept it and feel better about it. And we use that information to form our platform. And one of the things that we ask that I think is really important is who should be leading this effort. And in that public poll, business sector came out at the top, as did the bend Chamber of Commerce, more than government and more than Housing Authority, nonprofits, etc. So we decided to take this on. So we developed several, several, I guess, strategies from they’re all based on research. And one strategy was alright, what we learned from the initial poll is, folks are hesitant to really talk about densification of a community that was an old mill town. But when we talk about what you get in exchange for that, they’re really willing to do it. So we launched a social media program called I Am bent, trying to educate folks on what this is, we’re not talking about everywhere, we’re talking about places in Bend, that are designed for people for community for Makerspace for art, and also here are the people we want to live in this. It’s a full range. And we would feature nurses and firefighters and massage therapists and artists and restaurant managers, the folks who could not afford to get a place here, rent or to own definitely not own. So we started that education process about two or three years ago, and it’s been going really well. So that’s one piece. The other piece was, what is the go fast button? And how In other words, how do you get more inventory out there as quickly as possible? accessory dwelling units. ADUs are one of those ways. If you have extra property, which a lot of people do here in Bend. If you put a small living unit back there, you can create some income for yourself and help solve the workforce housing issue. So we put together a website on how to build an adu. How do you finance it? How do you permit How do you manage it over time? And it’s just an easy step by step process and then we’ve partnered with the city of Bend to have pre approved plans. And we’re going to be starting to populate that here in the next couple of months of choose your style. And you go through a streamlining process streamlined process. So you’re permitted and ready to go much, much faster and much more less expensive. So the adu is another strategy. The other strategy really dovetailed with our advocacy program. How do we raise our voice as a region, the state level and at the federal level, on the need for affordable and attainable housing. So we met with the Tri County leaders in our area, it’s a pretty big area, and came up with one platform that we went to our legislature with, and it was very effective housing was top of mind with Governor Tina Kotek, this session, and a lot of great programs came out of that. And then finally, we brought in expertise from across the country to really take a look at our zoning, and look at our methodology of getting homes on the ground that are affordable and quickly, and use that person and those methods to inform policy at the local level too. So that was pretty successful. And during this time, we also wanted to do the thing, not just talk about it. And so we raised money, we raised a couple 100,000, and just did an initial investment in a nonprofit Land Trust, who was doing an experiment and the experiment was getting some subsidized housing and a cottage style. So for a lot that’s like 6000 feet by 3000 feet, which is typical city a lot you could put in maybe three to four cottage style homes in there. And so they built these, put it on deed restricted property, but lowered the price enough. So folks in in a below area median income could actually afford the downpayment and to purchase that house, and own the house, not the land, but the house. So we bought down that cost, those homes are net zero, they’re worth about, probably about 600,000. Here, we got it under 200,000. Wow. And all of those homes are now occupied by people who work invent. But the real unique thing about this was we decided we wanted to take a risk. And we wanted to demonstrate how employers can actually participate in solving this problem. So what happens is when you donate money for a certain amount per house, you get extra points preferential points in a lottery. And that lottery is alright, if I own Katy’s ice cream shop, and I give X amount of money to one of those houses, I know one of my employees is going to get that house as long as they qualify. And those qualifications included, you have to earn under 80, ami, you have to have had a job and bend for a year, you have preferential points if you’re a minority, and so on, and you have to be pre approved, you’ve got to be able to buy this house and pay pay the mortgage, that

Brandon Burton 23:13
I was gonna ask about that about the qualifications to purchase that house because I could see somebody say, Oh, what a great deal, like get a $600,000 house for 200,000. But the criteria and the application process for that. And I imagine so the the businesses that help pay into that fund, kind of get first dibs, so to speak as far as their employees being able to apply for that routing, is that correct?

Katy Brooks 23:37
That’s absolutely right. And it’s deed restricted for 99 years. So if the house ever sells the same restrictions apply to the next buyer. The great thing is that shit, that preferential chick comes back to you as an employer. So another one of your employees get a shot at qualifying to buy the house. So we bought down four houses. And instead of using it for my employees at the Chamber, we pushed it out to do a demonstration project with any business event. So if you agreed as a business at Brandon’s candy shop, if you said okay, I’m going to pay $2,500 down to help my employee with the closing costs. And here are my five employees that qualify, you would have had a shot and those employees would have had a shot and that’s what we did. And so, folks all throughout the city, radiology technicians, manager, Windows Store, folks who you think of when you think of middle class or or entry, you know, mid level that had access to this home these homes and it was so successful, that they built 50 more this year. They’re in the process of it, and almost all those 50 homes have been subsidized by employers. They built another 100 You In the adjacent neighborhood, to the west, and another 100 plus to the north of us in another community, and they’re doing the same methodology. So in one year, we went from let’s experiment with four houses and just put these these opportunities out as an employer subsidized formula, and proved a concept that is now over 200, or over 100, no 200 homes that will be occupied and subsidized by employers in the area for 99 years. That

Brandon Burton 25:32
is awesome. I can see it being a template, even that some of these bigger employers might might do their own system, right, where they do housing for their own employees, and almost like a military base used to see you know, military housing, but you could you could do something similar with some of these big

Katy Brooks 25:50
kids so that that people earn equity, the whole point to home ownership. Is that generational wealth, yeah. And so that has to be a part of this and doing it with a partner who’s a nonprofit on deed restricted property was the way to go. And we’re just now rolling out our next investment. We raised about a half a million so far, we’re trying to get over the million for a revolving loan to help nonprofits and builders just put more mid market product out there on deed restricted land. So we’re doing our next experiment. Yeah. Which is what chambers should do.

Brandon Burton 26:34
I love these creative solutions. I mean, starting with the the adu website and encouraging people to build the smaller dwellings on their existing land. I mean, that’s, I think any community would rather see that than a big high rise apartment complex or something, you know, it fits in the community a little better. And then, you know, this path with housing and being able to help people own it own a house is amazing. So kudos to you guys for thinking outside the box and really taking ownership of this and finding a solution. I love this. It’s a it’s a great model that can be followed in other areas, as well. So yeah, as we begin to wrap things up here, these chamber the year finalist episodes, I think are special because you guys are top of the game at the moment, right? So for those listening, who are interested in taking their chamber up to the next level, what can a tip or or action item might you suggest for them to employ to try to accomplish that goal?

Katy Brooks 27:38
Be willing to take risks, have a have a board? That is you bring along, work with your board? And identify, ask the hard questions identify what the issues are, that’s preventing folks from growing or the opportunities that would help businesses grow, and go for the ones that are gnarly and tough to do that require convening. And a lot of work to bring partnerships online. That is what we are made to do. And get people on board, do your research and make it happen. Because I think there aren’t very many organizations like chambers, who are built for this. And that’s how we’ve all changed right over the many of us went through COVID. And that changed a lot. But I think it’s much, much bigger than that, over the last 10 plus 20 years, something like that. I think that as businesses change, we have to be the first ones to we have to see it, identify it, predict it and do it.

Brandon Burton 28:46
Yeah. On those gnarly goals. That’s what people can get behind. Right? If it’s just something that’s barely going to move the needle, it’s hard to get get their interest and getting behind it. But yeah, there’s big hairy audacious goals, right, that that’s what people can get behind and and get some ownership in. I love that. So I like asking everyone I have on the show as we look to the future. And I understand you’re working on the horizons report as well. So you might have some additional insight. But as we look to the future of chambers, how do you see their future and purpose going forward?

Katy Brooks 29:22
So I think chambers are the leading edge. I think that we have an intrinsic design of who we are, to convene, to go beyond partisanship, to ask the harder deeper questions and take things on that don’t have an apparent immediate answer. There aren’t any other types of organizations who can do that in the private sector is a huge responsibility and it’s super fun, by the way. And so I think that is our Our future is asking that what’s 10 year out? Question? If it’s 10 years out, what are the signs? Read it? If you don’t know, ask somebody. That’s the other thing that we do is ask a lot of folks with great expertise. We don’t have to have the answers. We just need to know who to ask. And we have to have the the fortitude to identify things that make sense for us to take on that really requires collective effort, and foresight, and a little bit of risk. Yeah.

Brandon Burton 30:32
I love that chambers being the leading edge and taking on those things that don’t have an apparent answer. And that is the the DNA of what a chamber is, though. And especially when you think of AI and advancements in technology, like there’s there needs to be that continuing purpose of a chamber. And that’s it right there. I love it. So Katy, you mentioned asking if you don’t know as somebody so I’d like to see for people listening who might want to reach out and connect with you and learn a little bit more about how you guys are doing things, doing things in band, what would be the best way for them to reach out and connect with you?

Katy Brooks 31:11
Well, anybody can give me a buzz but my email address is katy@bendchamber.org.

Brandon Burton 31:22
Easy, we will get that in our show notes for this episode as well to to make it easy to look up and connect with you. But Katy, this has been great having you on chamber chat podcast and again, huge congratulations to you and your team being selected. As a finalist. It really is a indicator of the impact you guys are making in your community as as indicated through our discussion today. So you guys are are moving that needle and big. Congratulations to you guys.

Katy Brooks 31:49
Thanks so much. We’re so thrilled.

Brandon Burton 31:52
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Vail Valley Partnership-2024 Chamber of the Year Finalist with Chris Romer

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Brandon Burton 0:00
This is the Chamber Chat Podcast, the show dedicated to chamber professionals to spark ideas and to get actionable tips and strategies to better serve your members and community.

Learn how you can partner with Community Matters, Inc. to produce your next Chamber Directory, Community Guide or Map.

You’re joining us for a special episode and our 2024 ACCE Chamber the Year Finalist Series and our guests for this episode is Chris Romer. Chris serves as the President and CEO of Vail Valley Partnership or the VVP. Vail Valley Partnership is a Regional Chamber of Commerce, destination sales organization and economic development organization representing Eagle County, Colorado and was named Chamber the Year by ACCE in 2016 and 2020. As CEO of the Vail Valley Partnership, he brings a wealth of experience in strategic planning, business development and partnership building to the organization. With a deep understanding of the unique challenges and opportunities facing Colorado’s mountain region. Chris is dedicated to driving innovation and collaboration to ensure the continued success and sustainability of local businesses and communities. Chris is a macroscopic thinker who believes in tackling big issues through localized solutions. He is a graduate of the US Chamber Foundation’s IOM program and is CCE certified chamber executive. He’s also been named a top 25 Mind in hospitality sales, marketing and revenue management by hospitality Sales and Marketing Association International Chamber Executive of the Year by the Colorado Association Chamber of Commerce and Industry Colorado chamber executives, and was named a PEDDIT award winner by the Western Association of Chamber Executives. Chris is a respected voice in the chamber and economic development fields and is known for his ability to bring stakeholders together to achieve common goals. Chris has a is committed to making positive impact within the Vail Valley and on a broader scale, serving on advisory boards and participating in initiatives aimed at advancing community prosperity and enhancing quality of life. Chris, first of all, congratulations to you and your team on this great accomplishment of being named a ACCE Chamber the Year Finalist again, that’s a huge feat, but uh, welcome to the show, I’ll give you a chance to say hello to all the listeners out there and and I love to have you share something interesting about yourself as well as we kick this off.

Chris Romer 3:32
Yeah, Brandon, thank you so much. And you know, it is such a such an honor to be recognized by ACCE as a finalist for chamber of the year. It’s such a testament to the people and the board and the community that we represent. And it’s something that we never, ever take for for granted. You know, we really try to keep our foot on the proverbial gas pedal, to move things forward and to represent the interests of our business community. So, such a great opportunity to share a little bit of our story with you and to be recognized by ACCE for those community programs and community impact that we that we strive to make so thank you so much. I also certainly realized that an interesting thing about me is probably the fact that I can’t write a short bio, that bio was awfully long and awkward. So I would I would love to have a second crack at that and just keep it a whole lot shorter. So we could talk about the fun stuff because talking about me not so much fun talking about our chamber and our community and our programs. A whole lot more interesting to people.

Brandon Burton 4:49
I could agree with that it talking about the the great work you guys are doing is much more impactful and meaningful anyway but it is fun to get to know the background on yet and you I’ll share a fun fact I think you are the first three Pete chamber chat podcast so there should be I feel like there should be a trophy or something for you for being I’ll take a trophy

Chris Romer 5:14
I would love to take a trophy for being the first three time visitor or three time guests on the on the chamber chat podcast.

Brandon Burton 5:22
Yes, yes, you You deserve it. So well tell us about your great team, their the Vail Valley Partnership, the the work you guys are involved with the size of your staff budget, scope of work all that as we get into our discussion today.

Chris Romer 5:37
Yeah, we have. We’re really fortunate I have a great team. We have a team of eight full time and two part time. Employees We are located in Edwards, Colorado. That’s Eagle County, Vail and Beaver Creek ski resorts, home to Vail, Beaver Creek ski resorts for those who might not know what Edward’s are or know where Eagle county might be. But we’re right in the heart of, of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado. We have you had asked about our budget and membership size, we have just under 800 members. And our community is about 55,000 people. And that represents nine nine towns and we’re a countywide regional organization, our annual budget is about $1.3 million per year. You know, and I think the last part of what you had asked for in regards to giving people a perspective, we are a we’re a program driven chamber. We are a program driven chamber we have we have multiple 501 C sixes, we have c threes. And we have these different initiatives and we branch them off. And we’ll talk a little bit about more more about this, I think as we go through the podcast, but very program driven. And it reflects in in how we approach problems. And if that leads to some of our retention and other components that we may or may not touch on but we are we are very program driven group and you know, we’re not afraid to take big swings we take we take some really big swings within our community and in sometimes we strike out and sometimes we hit a double and occasionally we hit a homerun Yeah,

Brandon Burton 7:29
I think chamber works should be about those big swings make an impact. If you’re not if you’re not swinging big, what kind of impact are you making right? So I am excited to dive into this. So on these chamber the are finalists series for those who may not be familiar with the format, I’d like to really focus on the two programs and being program driven will focus on the two programs that were submitted on your chamber the your application and dive into some detail around those and why they worked for Vail Valley and we’ll dive into this as soon as we get back from this quick break.

Visit ChamberNation.com to learn more.

Alright Chris, we’re back. So let’s let’s dive into these programs you submitted on the chamber the your application, I know. It can be tough sometimes to kind of narrow down the focus and what you want to put on the application and really highlight the work that you guys are doing. But how did you land on these on these two programs? And what are they?

Chris Romer 10:08
Yeah, it’s, you know, how we landed on them is a little bit what I talked about earlier in the podcast, around taking big swings. And recognizing that big ideas require big solutions. Both of our both of our Synopsys, both of our case studies are around that idea that big ideas require big solutions. So our first Synopsys is the Eagle Valley Transportation Authority, where we lead the yes for transit ballot campaign to create a transportation authority, which is something that had been lacking in our community. Our second synopsis is the eagle county Collaborative for career pathways. That is a talent pipeline, Workforce Initiative, in partnership with our K to 12 school system to identify and train young people into the jobs that our community needs. Yeah.

Brandon Burton 11:12
So just from our background, and having on the show a couple times before, I guess I have a little bit of maybe added perspective, I think about your community and and why these, these two programs specifically would be of importance. But let’s dive in a little bit more on the Regional Transit Authority. Why? Why was that a hot topic? Why Why was that a big swing in your community? What was the need? And and how did you guys go about addressing that?

Chris Romer 11:41
Yeah, it’s so it’s so important for us. So we started this process. Actually, before the before the pandemic we had brought together, we recognized our population is growing, our ski resorts need to be world class destinations, our visitors are continuing to come. And yet our community growth, strained our housing and transportation systems, and our ability to move our workforce from one side of our valley to the other. We’re about a 40 mile wide, 40 mile long valley, and about a mile and a half wide, right, you’re surrounded by mountains and national forest on two sides. So we’re along linear Valley, and our housing prices, our median housing price is $1.3 million. So we really needed a transportation system that could effectively and efficiently move our workforce, up and down our valley or housing is a little bit less expensive, on the western end. So our basic premise is that improved transit supports workforce that helps our residents get to work home and school, it allows our visitors to better enjoy their experience. And this is a regional issue that required a regional solution. So we initiated the business community, we brought together our local municipalities and county, some of them run their own transit authorities. But there was nothing collaborative and nothing that was truly Valley wide. So we did focus groups, we did phone surveys of voters, we looked at what different models exist for funding transportation. We looked at 18 different models and governance structures, and landed on the Regional Transportation Authority as our best bet forward. Then we looked at how do you fund this thing. And we could have done property tax or a sales tax. And we made the decision. To move forward, we made the call in June of 2022, to go to the ballot in November. At the time for it’s hard to think about now. At the time, inflation was at 9.2%. So when we talk about having having courage and taking big swings, we said we’re gonna go to the ballot, and we’re going to ask people for a sales tax to fund this. And by the way, knowing inflation was over 9%. And we made that call, unfortunately, inflation dropped a little bit by the time we had the election. But we passed. We passed in November of 2022. Pretty overwhelmingly, I think, because we really helped to tell the story and identify the need and what this would create. As we sit here today. We have a complimentary free bus system that runs the length of our valley. Ridership for this past winter season was up 164% over the previous model, and it’s saving people time and money.

Brandon Burton 14:58
That’s amazing. It just it to be able to see it through to. So a lot of times when we’re talking about these programs and maybe leading a ballot initiative, you haven’t seen it all the way through to this point, but being that you’ve been able to lead that been able to collect the data, you know, have a successful ballot measure, and then to be able to see the results, the fruit of it right now happening throughout your Valley. That’s, that’s amazing. And I’m sure you’re seeing economic tickers, you know, the different indicators that you can measure to see the impact throughout the community as well. We are

Chris Romer 15:36
we’re able to see the increase in ridership, we’re able to see how many routes are are scheduled, how they’re completed. We did include funding for air service development in our ballot initiative. That’s a program that we’ve run for years at the chamber. And we always fundraised for. So we actually baked that into the ballot question to fund that. And we have two new flights this summer that we’re able to use that that funding to support two new Air Service flights. So we’re seeing the benefits on a local level, from a workforce standpoint, from a visitor standpoint. And we have long term enhancements that are baked into this as well, which included affordable workforce housing for transit employees, and included zero admissions, conversion, to help meet our climate goals for our region. So we’re really we’re really excited about not just the bus transportation, which is a big part of it. But the secondary components that were able to be part of that ballot initiative and more part of our storytelling around air service development and increasing opportunities for visitors to get here and locals to go on vacation. And to help achieve our climate goals. So we’re really, this one’s a was a big swing. For all the reasons we talked about, and a really nice success story that is helping make people’s lives easier. Yeah.

Brandon Burton 17:07
So with the bus system, it’s a it’s a free transit, right? So is there a way to track when people get on how long they’re on? Or is it just kind of hop on hop off as you go. And now there’s

Chris Romer 17:20
bus counters, there’s counters to know what the ridership is and how it increased. You know, in January, for example, of 2024, we had over 218,000 unique riders on the bus. And that’s an increase from 167,000, the year before, in the same timeframe in January. So we’re huge ridership increases. And we’re, we’re paying for it through the sales tax instead of having people pay a fare. And we have new routes because of the new authority and able to bridge a lot of what the individual communities were already doing to provide that connectivity.

Brandon Burton 18:01
Yeah. So as far as bringing workforce into the valley, is that are you able to see that direct tie in where they’re coming from the west side of the valley? Like you’d mentioned?

Chris Romer 18:10
Yeah, we are a route. Again, we saw a 64% increase in in transit ridership from the lower part of our Valley. So we can track that. The new authority tracks it, they share it with us, our work is kind of done on this one. But yes, it’s a it’s a huge success. And the community recognizes the role that the Chamber played in initiating leading and passing this ballot initiative to create the new authority.

Brandon Burton 18:42
That’s great. And it’s always nice when you can hand it off when it’s done. And you don’t have to keep ownership of it ongoing. Right.

Chris Romer 18:47
You know, we we at the chamber at the partnership, we might be experts on our community. And we’re certainly experts on on convening leaders in order to get things done. We’re certainly an expert on being a catalyst for for business growth. We are not an expert on how to run a transportation authority. Right. So we’re happy to have this one off.

Brandon Burton 19:11
Absolutely. Well, let’s switch gears to the second program that was submitted on the application around that building that talent pipeline and kind of again, the the origins of it and how it developed and in the impact that it’s making in the community. Yeah,

Chris Romer 19:27
so the second is synopsis was the eagle county Collaborative for career pathways. And that was a program that had had grown and morphed. We’ve been running a youth apprenticeship programs for a number of years. We have a very successful youth apprenticeship model. We’re involved with career exploration, in partnership with another local nonprofit in our school system. And this we really recognize that There are a handful of us doing great work. And there is still an opportunity gap at the end. So we work in sync to create viable, affordable alternative pathways to get people into high quality careers, with the idea that those need to be transparent about the outcomes and the cost, help young people obtain their relevant job skills, and ensure that employers value recognize and hire from the kids that we put through this pathway. So in Eagle County, specifically, Brandon, our businesses show an average 10% gap in securing and retaining young professionals across industry sector, with health care and education, are rising to near 30% levels of that gap. So working with our business community, our school district, youth serving nonprofit agencies, were able to target those key sectors and build the collaborative, we’re very fortunate to receive a million dollar grant by which to do this work with the idea to strengthen the systems that already support the career pathways, increase student readiness to pursue pathways and increase students exploration and experience in career exploration, and exploring those career opportunities. So it’s a really nice partnership. It’s a really meaningful program with very tangible results. Yeah,

Brandon Burton 21:43
I think that’s a struggle that a lot of chambers have is trying to retain the workforce that you put them through K through 12. And, and for whatever reason, it’s like these students graduate high school, and they want to move on to the bigger and brighter things outside of the community they grew up in, right? And, you know, what can we do to try to keep them local, show them how great this community is, and, and maybe they go away to school somewhere and you’re, you know, get some kind of education, but bring them back is such a key to be able to entice them, show them what there is in the community to bring them back why it’s a place for them. So having a program like this, I think really hits on those points of need. And I could see being something that and I know a lot of chambers have some sort of a workforce development, you know, pipeline or program with the school districts and whatnot. But to be able to draw that attention and keep them, keep them in the community is so key. So I think this is great work that you guys are involved with this program specifically. There’s anything else stand out to you with this program? As far as trying to retain this workforce here? Is there any any kind of secret sauce that you’re seeing that’s really been the AHA kind of moment, or they just with how the partnership has developed that is really made a big, big impact? I

Chris Romer 23:13
think so I think the secret sauce or the the aha moment is that this needs to be a program that is business centric, right? It can’t be a program that is just a feel good or a do good for the kids. It has to benefit the business. And it has to strengthen the systems that support not only the career pathways for students, but solves problems for the businesses. And I think that’s a that’s a big component that sometimes when we think about workforce, even in the chamber business, inherently, to serve the needs of our businesses. When we ask businesses to donate their time, we ask businesses to donate their expertise, instead of flipping that equation and saying, we’re going to do this for the business. And it happens to help the kids. We do it for the business. We do everything we do to build a stronger community and stronger businesses, the kids and the career pathway is a way to build stronger businesses. It’s not asking the businesses to help kids.

Brandon Burton 24:23
Yeah, I think that is that is a key. I’m glad you made that point, that distinction, because I think it’s easy to look at the kids and they Oh, we want to help give them a good career. And that’s noble. That’s

Chris Romer 24:35
Yes. But but that’s a that’s a that’s a secondary outcome. That’s not the primary purpose. Exactly.

Brandon Burton 24:40
Yeah. So you get the businesses on board by letting them know this is about you. This is about strengthening your business and providing good talent, you know, to keep the strong. I’m glad you made that distinction. That’s great. So I like it, especially as a as a chamber the year finalists? I think chambers can can look at you as kind of the top of the game right now, you know, as a chamber, they are finalists, and for a chamber listening who’s trying to elevate their chamber up to the next level, what kind of tips or strategies might you offer for listeners to try to accomplish that goal and to try to give that their organization that boost they’re looking for?

Chris Romer 25:24
Yeah, it’s it’s such a great if thought challenge for for chambers of commerce, to think, how do we what is that? What is that one tip? What’s the one thing you would share? And I’m going to answer that by suggesting and challenging chambers, to move away from thinking that what we do have it fixes technical challenges in our community. We don’t have technical challenges. Technical challenges are things that can be fixed by engineers, they can be fixed by surgeons and people with specific training. There’s not too many of us that came into this business, trained to run a chamber of commerce, right, we’re trained in a more of an adaptive way. So that’s my takeaway. Recognize that you have adaptive challenges, not technical challenges. And let me expand on that a little bit. Because I expect that doesn’t make much sense. Without context. When we think of adaptive challenges, the things that we face in our community, maybe it’s early childhood, transportation or workforce, maybe it’s homelessness, it could be any number of different things. We have the white. So then the question is, so what? Right, so what right that that’s a problem. And then it’s now what? How are we going to do that? So the framework, and the challenge to listeners thinking about adaptive challenges? is learning learning the what? Listening, taking action, I think we collectively do a great job of listening. Every chamber listening to this listens to their businesses listens to their community does surveys, they listen. It’s the question of taking action, how do we take action? How do I identify the steps to take action. The two last parts I’ll add on this is adaptive challenges have long term implications. They’re not transactional, they’re not, we’re going to do this, they have long term, community benefit, long term benefit to the chamber to the, to the community, to the businesses. And we’re really never ever going to fix quote, unquote, fix, and adaptive challenge. All the things I listed early childhood, workforce, housing, workforce development, talent pipeline. It’s homelessness, when we say fix what we mean is make better chambers have a very unique positioning and a position of trust within their communities, to tackle these adaptive challenges that are hard, they’re long term, and fixing the endzone always moves. So fixing these challenges really means making it better. And that that changes year after year, initiative after initiative, it never really goes away. And that creates stability. And that should hopefully create fundraising opportunities and grant funding and membership retention, and all the things. So that’s my one takeaway, and it was a really long answer. But I really want to share that if we can do that. And we can shift our thinking away from technical into adaptive, that chambers are going to fly, we’re going to thrive, because we’re going to be so uniquely positioned that no one can do what we do.

Brandon Burton 29:01
Yeah. So I like the idea that that adaptive challenges have long term implications. And I know you mentioned at the beginning of the episode about retention, and that kind of plays into here. Is there. Is there more you wanted to touch on with the aspect of retention before we wrap things up? Um,

Chris Romer 29:22
no, I don’t think so. I mean, I think that if anything, it’s really just when we talk about retention, there’s so many ways to spin that as retention of employees retention of people in our communities retention of business, retention of membership. I think if we as chambers, have had this mind frame of tackling big problems in our community and approaching it in an adaptive relationship driven manner. Then our work becomes central to the success of the community. And if we become central to the success of the community, we have solved retention at each of those levels that I talked about.

Brandon Burton 30:06
Yeah, absolutely. I love that. So the question I asked everyone as they haven’t on the show is about the future of chambers, which I think you kind of touched on with your your tip there. But how do you see the future of chambers in their purpose going forward?

Chris Romer 30:21
Yeah, I did lead into this a little bit or leak into this, if you will. But the I think the future of chambers is really, really bright, with a caveat. And that caveat is if we roll up our sleeves and tackle the big problems, our purpose, our purpose needs to be around that, that problem solving. And again, when I say problem solving, I mean, making things better versus versus traditionally fixing things. But we can make things better. I think all the finalists that you’re going to be talking to throughout this series, probably have one, if not both of their synopsis, focusing on how they made their community better. And I think that’s a lesson for everybody within the chamber of business. And if we can focus on our purpose being problem solving, and how we do that, knowing that it’s really hard, knowing that it’s long term, knowing that it causes some sleepless nights, knowing that it’s probably not going to go over well with everybody in our community. And we’re going to have the courage to do those things. Boy, the future of chambers is so bright.

Brandon Burton 31:31
Yeah. encouraged as important in that, as you mentioned, so absolutely. Swing big and have courage. Chris, this has been fun to have you back on chamber chat podcast. I love the pieces of advice you share the experiences you have, and especially the impact you guys are making. They’re there in the Vail Valley. I’d like to give you an opportunity to share any contact information for listeners who’d like to reach out and connect with you and learn more about what you guys are doing there at the VVP we’re what would be the best way to connect with you. Yeah,

Chris Romer 32:06
you can find all of my contact information on our website at VailValleyPartnership.com. That’s VailValleyPartnership.com. I can be reached at cromer@VailValleyPartnership.com. And you can find me on most of the social channels and my phone numbers on the website as well and all of that, but VailValleyPartnership.com is your best place to go.

Brandon Burton 32:31
Very good. So back from Episode 21, I think was your first appearance and we’re at episode 285 Now, but this has been a blast, Chris. Thanks for being with us. Again. Here. You’re on chamber chat podcast today and wish you and your team the best of luck.

Chris Romer 32:48
Thanks so much, Brandon.

Brandon Burton 32:51
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Chino Valley Chamber-2024 Chamber of the Year Finalist with Zeb Welborn

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Brandon Burton 0:00
This is the Chamber Chat Podcast, the show dedicated to chamber professionals to spark ideas and to get actionable tips and strategies to better serve your members and community.

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You’re joining us for a special episode and our 2024 ACCE Chamber the Year Finalist Series and our guests for this episode is Zeb Welborn. Zeb is the President of the Chino Valley Chamber of Commerce and Wellborn Social Media dedicated to promoting local businesses through growth and digital marketing. And award winning executives Zeb is passionate about connecting with driven individuals and fostering community development through initiatives like Upskill Chino Valley, recognized as the 2023, Executive of the Year by WACE, he continues to excel in leadership and service. Zeb, I want to welcome you to Chamber Chat Podcast are excited to have you with us today and say big congratulations to you and your team for being selected as a chamber the year finalists this year, wanted to give you an opportunity to say hello to all the Chamber Champions who are out there listening and to share something interesting about yourself so we can all get to know you a little better.

Zeb Welborn 2:09
Well, thank you so much. So we are very excited about that opportunity. Thank you for the opportunity to chat with you here today. Yeah, we’re our team is very excited about it. And then let’s see something interesting about myself. I was a national champion soccer player back in my younger days, and I bowled the 300. So those are the two things that I have on my resume that are not on my resume. Wow.

Brandon Burton 2:35
So you’re not competitive at all right?

Zeb Welborn 2:40
Yeah, there’s definitely a little competitive streak in me for sure. Yeah,

Brandon Burton 2:43
that’s awesome. Those are, those are two really cool facts. So tell us a little bit about the Chino Valley Chamber just to give us an idea of the scope of work size staff budget to kind of preface for our conversation today.

Zeb Welborn 2:57
Sure, so the Chino Valley Chamber represents two cities, we represent Chino and Chino Hills, both of them have a population of I think around 95,000 or so. So it’s almost 200,000 people. It’s a high growth area. So there’s like Chino was named one of the top 10 boom towns in the boom towns in the country, either last year or the year before. I have friends that come out from the military, they’ll be back in town every two or three years in the city looks totally different every time it comes out. So we’re we’re in the suburbs of LA and in Orange County. So all of the people that are working in those areas have kind of shifted out to where we live. Our budget is about $1.1 million. We have about eight staff members. When I started our budget was about $150,000. And we had three part time members including myself, so that was about six years ago. So we’ve grown a lot in the last six years as a as a community but also as the chamber. So that’s something that I am super proud of is kind of helping our chamber turnarounds and challenges they’re facing when I got brought in and now we’re kind of rocking and rolling. And I’m super proud of the work that that that I’ve done but also that our team has accomplished as well. Ya know, that

Brandon Burton 4:12
is something to be proud of for sure. That’s some some great growth. And I will say I I lived in South Orange County for a while and it seemed like everybody was moving out your direction. So I’ve seen the growth you know, almost firsthand I’ll say secondhand, you know, seeing a lot of people we knew moving out your direction. Yeah, lots of growth though. Lots of opportunity. So on these chamber, their finalist episodes we’d like to spend the majority of our conversation most of the time in this interview talking about the two programs that were submitted on your chamber the your application. So we’ll we’ll dive in deep on what those two those two programs are as soon as we get back from this quick break.

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Alright, Zeb we’re back. As I mentioned before the break, we’re going to spend some time talking about the two programs that were on your application for chamber the year. So introduce this with the first program is that you’d like to highlight with us today.

Zeb Welborn 7:01
So I’m hoping I can remember that too. We do a lot of different programs. But one of them for sure is our upskill Chino Valley program. So that is one that we initiated two or three years ago, and it was to address the needs of our workforce development shortage in our area. So right after COVID. I mean, when COVID happened, we’re very proactive to making sure that our business had access to resources have access to all of the things that they needed. And so we got a lot of recognition for the work that we did during that time. And a lot of businesses, you know, stayed in business because of the work that we were able to do at that point in time. But then immediately following, as you’re driving around town, you would see just help wanted signs everywhere. So our community had help wanted signs everywhere. Everybody was doing hiring. So you know, that was a big challenge facing our businesses. So then, concurrently, I was taking some classes with the US Chamber, and some other just other professional development learnings. And I came to realize that this workforce development shortage, and this is a stuff that they would teach us to the US Chamber is that this is going to be impacting communities for a while. There’s kind of this forecast of the 10 years of challenges, at least when it comes to workforce and finding good qualified workers. So that’s one of the things that we wanted to try to tackle for our community, how can we make sure that we were being better to better supportive of our businesses to help find their workforce needs. So we looked at it in the short term, but we also looked at in the long term, so trying to create solutions in the short term and long term. So we came up with four things that we thought that if we executed on these things, it would help not only solve the short term issues, but it would help solve the long term issues. So the short term issue is workforce development. So we started doing a lot of job fairs, a lot of one on one placements, we started partnering with our workforce, San Bernardino County Workforce Development, our local Chaffey College, our local school district. So we created these partnerships, we’re trying to build a pipeline of workers for our businesses. And so through that we’ve placed at least 350 job seekers in local jobs in our community, we have helped place at least 100 I want to say about 100 interns from the high school and college level with local businesses to help build the next generation of workforce in our businesses, and and build those connections between business owners and leaders and in the educational institutions that are around us. We did a lot of work with Chaffey College to help make sure that we’re building those strong connections. So that’s a short term solution, I think, or means short term and long term. But then the longer the more longer term. approaches were three things. So it was economic development. These are things that chambers normally do but economic development, leadership development and entrepreneurship development. So economic development, well we started doing was these roundtable discussions. So we’re doing two a month where we’re bringing in businesses from a specific sector or specific industry, or we’re bringing cross industries together, identifying pain points, and then creating action items and our chamber can take action on. So we’ve been doing that extensively for the last two years or so we’re about two years into our program. The next one is leadership development, we did not have a leadership program in our community. So we started one. So leadership developed, we have 25 leaders, we go and tour different business locations and sites around town connecting our businesses with business owners that are running some of the larger businesses in town and making sure that our leadership is strong. If you don’t have strong leaders, you’re gonna have employees that leave. So we want to make sure we develop strong leaders in our community. And then the last thing is entrepreneurship development, which is just enhancing the work that we do and are educating businesses on how to be better in business. So I think one of the gaps is where we’re making sure that we have business owners training, the business leaders that are coming up in our community and making sure that we’re having business owners training our up and coming entrepreneurs in our community.

Brandon Burton 11:03
So with that, the two that really stood out to me is the leadership development. So I know we have a leadership development and entrepreneur development. So with the leadership development, have you guys gotten to gotten through to full classes yet? Or where are you at in that, that process? And what does it look like at this point with the leadership development? Yeah, so

Zeb Welborn 11:26
we’re just about to finish year two, it’s been a great successful opportunity. Oh, and I didn’t mention this in the beginning. But that upskill Chino Valley program, we essentially pitched it to one of our legislators, and so they allocated a million dollars of state funding towards our programming. So that allows us to execute on this work. It’s a lot of work to do that stuff. And so I’m always like, how, how can we get the funding to actually execute on his work? So we pitched that, and that was something that they thought was needed for our community. So we were able to secure those which allowed us to do all this work. So this is our second year, we, our first year was highly successful, one of the things that we commit to doing as a community good project during that leadership program as well. So they do something good for the community. Last year, they bought AED machines to help in case somebody goes into cardiac arrest, we put them in three different businesses around town. So there’s a cost that was incurred that so we helped raise that those funds for that. This year, we’re doing helping our local community theater or children’s community theater. So we’re raising funds so that they can train more kids in the in the theatrical arts. And and it’s been, it’s been great. So yeah, you’re too we’re almost done. We got about two months left. Awesome.

Brandon Burton 12:40
And then with the entrepreneurial development, I’m always curious with entrepreneurs, and how to how chambers get connected with him in the first place to match them up with other business owners. And you know, a lot of times entrepreneurs have that bug of I’m going to do this by myself. Yeah, I can. I’m going to figure this out. And it tends to be the hard path, right? So what what are some of the ways you guys are connecting with entrepreneurs and helping to kind of bring them out and connect them with the right people.

Zeb Welborn 13:09
So I feel like I feel like I’m an entrepreneur, right. So I joined actually joined my chamber as a member back in like 2010, or 2011 or so. And when I joined, what I was looking for was mentors, I was I didn’t want to make those mistakes. I wanted to find people in my community that I could look up to that I could learn from. And there’s a couple of people that I thought of like there was a guy that ran our newspaper, there’s also the guy that ran the local golf course. So these are two guys that I was kind of hoping to connect with. And they were they were loosely connected to the chamber. So I joined the chamber not knowing when the chamber really was good. But I thought like, what I was really looking for was the business organization that I could turn to that I could get mentorship. And there wasn’t really anything in my community except for the Chamber of Commerce. So when I came across the chamber, and I kind of went into the first day, it wasn’t exactly what I was expecting. But there wasn’t anything else. And so my thought was was well either I could work like a you try to make that happen inside of the chamber community. Or I could try it like you said, do it on my own. So I obviously opted to get involved in my chamber and see if there are ways that I can help make this a system that worked out well for people like me, they get to come into business and get advice and mentorship from successful business owners. So that’s one of the things that I’ve had a passion for since I started and and now we’re, we’re we’re doing that. So we’re trying to there’s lots of different ways to go about doing that. I’ll share that we do a lot of business trainings and business development. So we do a business workshop. It used to be once a week, but we’re doing it once every other week. Right now, because we found that that cadence worked out better for our members, but we are trying to shift some strategies around to offer more. One of the exciting things that has happened for us and this is very new. So this was before I submitted our proposal was we just got accepted. So we submitted an appropriations request for an audit To bring an entrepreneurship center into our community that would be facilitated and managed by the chamber. So that’s something that we submitted for it’s been approved through the first phase of the process, we have no idea if it’s actually going to get funded or not. But at least it’s very exciting because that was a selected project out of, I think, 10, or 15, they’re able to choose every year. So we’re one of those 10 or 15. So we’re excited because we feel like that could be a good opportunity for our business, and business community. So that’s something we are excited about. And so we but we’re making ranking progress to try to develop more entrepreneurial programming, to making sure that we are have a space that we can do that stuff with, and that we’re bringing potential entrepreneurs and aspiring entrepreneurs and collaboration and connection with people who have made it happen and Bennett themselves here in the Inland Empire. Yeah.

Brandon Burton 15:47
Oh, that is great. And I’m sure along the way, you’re seeing you know, upticks in those different, you know, measurements to be able to see with with workforce, and hopefully seeing a few less help wanted signs and, and being able to fill some of those voids and needs throughout the community. As we kind of shift gears Do you would you like to introduce what the second program is that you guys submitted on your chamber, the your application?

Zeb Welborn 16:18
So if I had to guess I would say was the entrepreneur, the leadership program that we discussed already. So that was the part of it. So that leadership program is something that we are very proud of? It has, we have, we’re coming up on 50 graduates in the next two months, and I think it was just something that was missing in our community that we really needed. And that we wanted to. Yeah, it was just that there’s been a lot of things that have happened in our community that are kind of ostracized, ostracize people from one another. And when we bring people together, prior to those situations happening, solutions come together much more quickly, their people are able to collaborate much more better. And so building these relationships and connections with these different entities in town just plays a huge role in making sure that our community can stay connected, and looking at opportunities to focus on growth versus opportunities, where we’re looking for division amongst each other. So that’s something that we’re excited about the the collaborative work that we’ve been doing with our businesses, making sure they’re connected with our city and, and legislators and educational institutions, and all those things. When we do that. We feel like we’re doing really good work.

Brandon Burton 17:29
Yeah. So I love leadership programs and the whole purpose behind them. And I know every chamber has a little slightly different approach and how they go about it. But do you guys put a limit on how many, how many participants? How many students are involved with leadership programs? Is there an application process? Who reviews that? What? What’s it like to become part of the leadership class?

Zeb Welborn 17:52
Yeah, so we do, we do have like an interview process. So it’s, the number is 25 that we shoot for. And that’s because, you know, some of our touring locations have a restriction on how many people can go through it. So we found that 25 is a good number, because it’s manageable. And also, we’re able to tour the sites with one visit versus multiple visits. So that’s been a good number for us. They do do an interview. So they have to be interviewed and selected in and we actually went, I went through the corona leadership, the corona Chamber Leadership Program. So I kind of modeled a lot of what we do after them. And my understanding is, is that they model it after the Riverside chamber. So we still in use a lot of stuff from each other. But that’s, that’s what we do. And then we don’t really do any leadership training, we mostly build collaboration and connection and do tour visits. So we go visit different locations, give these business owners an opportunity to talk about their business and the work that they do. And then they provide a tour to our members, they get back behind the scenes look at what other organizations and businesses have to go through on a daily basis to make sure that their operation runs successfully. And so when you do that, there’s a lot of eye opening things that happen you realize how intricate and how much goes into these businesses and organizations. And so it gives gives people a bigger perspective. I mean, the biggest thing though, the biggest advantage is just the collaboration and connection is built because we’ve seen firsthand how many people get connected with each other for bigger projects that help support our community and a high one, which is we had somebody who was going through our program. She’s a leadership coach or professional business coach, and we toured our local so we have the California institution for men is located in our community. So we toured the prison and while we’re touring the prison, she got connected with somebody who was Aristotle I got in the I would love to speak to your your inmates to talk about you know, things that they can do to turn their life around and So she gets she came in and spoke to the I guess it was a large contingent was maybe like 100 200 inmates about leadership and challenges. And so that was a connection that was built through that. And because of that, I feel like it did good things for our community for the inmates that were there for the business owner. That was the business coach that was going through it. And so it’s just kind of like a win win win. That was a result of the work that we helped facilitate.

Brandon Burton 20:25
That’s really cool. So throughout the year, the leadership program, but how many visits site visits do you guys do? Or do you shoot for?

Zeb Welborn 20:34
Yeah, it’s what we go once a month, and it’s three site visits a day, so. So it’s one day, it’s about a full day. So they started around nine, and a three, so not not quite a full day, but nine to three, and we visit three different locations. So we’ll do one or two in the morning, and then we’ll have lunch, and then we’ll do one in the afternoon. And then we call it a day. Sometimes it’s fuck. It’ll move around based on the sites that we’re visiting. But that’s kind of the rough outline.

Brandon Burton 21:05
Yeah. And then just out of curiosity, how are you selecting the sites to go visit? Is it based on the applicants are just trying to figure out needs or what what goes into that thought process?

Zeb Welborn 21:17
So I’ll say it’s industry specific, we look, you know, we want to highlight each of the image industries that are represented in our community. So the first couple of days is with our city. So we go toward the behind the scenes of the cities. And then we have a healthcare day, there’s a Manufacturing Day, there’s a logistics day, there’s a small business day. What else do we do? Well, we visit public safety. So we have kind of a Public Safety Day. So I guess, those are the things that we do try to focus on. And we tried to make them days so that there’s a theme behind them, but sometimes just the way that the visits work out, we’ll move them around. But that’s the main gist. Yeah,

Brandon Burton 21:56
I like that idea, though, having a theme for for those visits each day. And kind of building the mindset around that about why is public safety important in our community. And as a developing leader, how does that play into my development and being able to make those connections going forward. So I see that across the board with the different themes that you guys tried to target. So I appreciate that. So I’d like asking everyone that I have on the podcast, especially as you guys are a chamber, the year finalist this year, kind of at the top of your game, so to speak. It, I’d like to see if there’s any kind of tip or action item that you might offer for chambers out there who were interested in taking their chamber to the next level.

Zeb Welborn 22:46
Well, when I saw when I joined the chamber that thing, as a as a member, I just remember thinking like this is not the hub of the business community. This is not what I was anticipating being like the business organization that represents business. And I don’t know if that’s the same case, for chambers across the place, I guess what how I would describe it is, when I showed up to different meetings and stuff, it was a lot of people that had retired from their careers. And we’re kind of doing a second career to make income on the side. So I was by like the youngest person by 30 years that was participating in those programs. It didn’t have the people that were running like big successful businesses in town participating in those programs. And so in my mind, I was saying like, like, this doesn’t make any sense to me, like there should be a way that business owners in a community can come together to support one another to grow the business community at large. So that’s kind of like, I guess, just my thought when I was coming into it. And so I’ve just worked really hard on trying to build that. So I think the thing that surprises me sometimes is the approach some of my colleagues make is, like, I looked at us as leaders of our business community. And so when I say leaders, one, we should not be operating the best business in our community. So we should have be running the most successful business in town, we shouldn’t be modeling that business behavior to our business owners, and then we should be compensated like successful business owners. And so when I started my role, like there was no way I could live in my community with the salary that they were offering. And so, but it’s not just like given to us, like we have to work for it. We have to be those leaders in business, we have to run a successful business. And then if we do run a successful business, we have to seek compensation for the work that we do in that regard. So I think that’s my one piece of advice is treat it like a business, be proactive and growing that business. And then if you focus on doing those two things, I think you’re gonna be putting yourself in a great position to lead your business community because you’re modeling what it is to be a successful business and your businesses will will learn from that more than they would if you’re just trying to help them and suffering at the expense of supporting your local businesses. I think it’s important to model successful business behavior to the members of the chamber. Yeah.

Brandon Burton 25:06
And I think yeah, at our heart, I think most people know that and believe that, but to hear it said, and to kind of reinvigorate that, yes, we do need to be that model that template to be able to show how to run a good business. So then businesses can look to you and trust what you have to say, if it builds trust in the within the business community. If you’re just a hot mess of a chamber, it’s really hard to, to get buy in as a business to think that this chamber knows what to do you know what to offer me any kind of advice or anything like that. As we look to the future of chambers of commerce, how do you see the future of chambers and their purpose going forward?

Zeb Welborn 25:55
So that’s a good question. I, I mean, I see it, and I’ll just speak for my community, right, I saw a lot of opportunity when I came in, like, I feel like I’m an entrepreneur, and then I kind of moved towards where the opportunities are most prevalent. I feel like there is a great opportunity for Chambers of Commerce right now. I think that everybody is trying to get connected with business owners. And there’s a lot of light, and I’ll just say like federal funding, but it’s not just federal funding, it’s even like, when you’re running your business getting connected with business owners, it’s not an easy thing to do. Businesses are more strapped than ever for time. And I’ll say that attribute that to the internet, social media, digital marketing, you’re on 24/7. Whereas in prior to the internet, you did not have to be on 24/7, you could work the normal workdays, and then you have the evenings and weekends off. And and now if you’re an entrepreneur, you’re you’re grinding it out 24/7. And that’s how I’ve been doing it for the last 10 years. So I just know how busy chambers have. I know how busy businesses are, but they do need people to speak up for them in these roles and capacities. And so we’ve been participating in these collaboratives, where there’s like this, this federal funding that is coming or the state funding that is coming for programs that are designed to help support businesses, yet there are zero businesses at the table in these conversations. So that’s where everybody is trying to talk to business owners, but business owners don’t have time to sit around and waste time in these meetings that seem really unproductive and don’t get anything accomplished. Even though there is going to be a strong outcome at the end, they don’t have the time to invest in that type of work. So they need a representative, those organizations that are looking to support business community, they need a representative. And so chambers are uniquely positioned in a way where we have immediate access to the businesses that are represented through our membership. And we can turn and talk to them. And we can pick up the phone and they will answer and they will respond to our emails, and they will get in touch with us. And that’s what is needed by a lot of these entities trying to get in touch with businesses. So I think I see a lot of opportunity, I still see a lot of opportunity for our chamber and the work that we’re doing. And I feel like other chambers have that same opportunity as well. Yeah, I like that.

Brandon Burton 28:07
I like that response was that I wanted to give you an opportunity to share any contact information for listeners out there who may want to reach out and connect with you and learn more about how you guys are doing things there at the Chino Valley Chamber, what would be the best ways for them to reach out and connect with you.

Zeb Welborn 28:25
So my business got me involved in chamber was social media marketing. So I was fairly early on the social media marketing train, so you can find me very easily. My dad was a reporter for the Orange County Register. So I think he named me with the intention of that my name would make a great byline in a news story, you know, like the the article by Warren. So nobody has my name, Zeb Welborn, you can find me anywhere @zebwelborn, I am on all the socials. And I’d be happy to connect with you if anybody wants to chat or ask any questions. Yeah,

Brandon Burton 29:02
that was very kind of your father do give you a name that nobody else says. Well, it’s

Zeb Welborn 29:08
it’s good and bad. So if I if I if there’s something that comes up bad about me, it’s very easy to find. But if if I’m doing good work, then that’s also easy to find as well. So it’s a is that?

Brandon Burton 29:20
The right path? Right? Yeah, exactly. I

Zeb Welborn 29:22
don’t think it was thinking about the digital marketing age where you can search up, you do Google searches. That wasn’t a thing back then. But yeah, for sure.

Brandon Burton 29:30
That’s right. That was it. I appreciate it. It’s been fun having you on the podcast today and learning where you guys are doing there it’s Chino Valley Chamber and make an impact in your community. And I wish you and your team the best of luck is chamber the year.

Zeb Welborn 29:43
Awesome. Thank you very much.

Brandon Burton 29:46
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Workforce Training Center with Jeannie Hebert

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Brandon Burton 0:00
This is the Chamber Chat Podcast, the show dedicated to chamber professionals to spark ideas and to get actionable tips and strategies to better serve your members and community.

Hello, Chamber Champions. Welcome to Chamber Chat Podcast. I’m your hosts Brandon Burton. And it’s my goal here on the podcast to introduce you to people and ideas to better help you serve your Chamber members and your community. You’re joining us for a special episode as part of our 2023 ACCE Chamber the Year Finalist Series.

Let’s hear from Becky Womble, President of the Bastrop Chamber to hear about her experience with Community Matters.

Becki Womble 1:03
I’ve been using Community Matters for probably six or seven years now. And in a previous life, I sold commercial printing so I can highly recommend Community Matters because it’s a complete turnkey job for any busy chamber exec and it’s a wonderful, beautiful printed product whenever you’re finished. And I just I’m very sold on Community Matters. And with a printing background I just big endorsement from me.

Brandon Burton 1:44
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Our guest for this episode is Jeannie Hiebert. Jeannie has been President and CEO the Blackstone Valley Chamber of Commerce in Massachusetts for 15 years. Under her leadership that BVCC has grown and developed into a chamber that works hard for business and the economic vitality of the region. often dubbed the queen of collaboration. Jeannie sits on several business and community boards and meets regularly with local state and federal legislators to make sure the valley voice is heard, and funding is appropriated to support their economic development and small businesses. Since her reign, the BVCC has become known as the go to place and resource for business owners and entrepreneurs to find assistance and funding to grow and develop their business. She has been honored with several awards, including the central Massachusetts outstanding woman in business power 50 manufacturing champion and Central Massachusetts economic development leader. Through her guidance, the Chamber secured over $1 million in funding to build the Blackstone Valley hub for workforce development. A Workforce Training Center located in the Chamber’s Linwood mill building, offering classes focused on advanced manufacturing. These certificate courses are offered to students of all ages throughout Central Massachusetts to help close the work skills gap and provide skilled workers to the region’s employers. Jeannie, I’m excited to have you with us today on Chamber Chat Podcast, I’d love for you to take a moment to say hello to all the Chamber Champions that are out there listening and share something interesting about yourself so we can all get to know you a little better.

Jeannie Hebert 3:43
Here, Brandon, thank you. I’m excited to be here today. Hello to everyone, all of our chamber colleagues there. And I am also an animal rights activist and help with rescuing animals in need. I do have you know dogs of my own. But I did rescue for African elephants. And they lived with me for two years. And we were able to secure some good homes for them. One of them Willie my favorite. He was the largest working African elephant in North America. And we found him a great home at Disney’s Animal Kingdom. So I used to go visit Willie there. So they were wonderful animals. It was a once in a lifetime experience. And I’m happy that we were able to find good homes for them because they had a terrible beginning.

Brandon Burton 4:41
So I have to say this is a first year the first guest on the podcast who’s rescued an elephant let alone for so. That is amazing. And I’m sure the stories about these elephants could go on for days. Lots of a unique experience. As a fan, I’m sure

Jeannie Hebert 5:01
they’re a unique experience they very intelligent, fun animals. One fun fact is I used to, you know, we used to wash them in the morning. And I would spray them with the hose. Use that big, big brush that you use when you wash your car, then grab the leaf blower to dry them before they would roll in the dirt and get dirty again. And invariably when I put the hose down, another one of the elephants would pick it up in their trunk, and they would spray me I thought that was a funny thing.

Brandon Burton 5:35
They got a sense of humor.

Jeannie Hebert 5:38
sensitive when we interacted very well, they were they were like my kids. So I missed them terribly. But they they needed to be in places where people who were better to take care of that could happen. So they had good lives. Awesome.

Brandon Burton 5:54
Awesome. Well, tell us a little bit about the Blackstone Valley Chamber. Just give us an idea of the size of the chamber scope of work, you guys are involved with staff budget, that sort of thing, just to kind of set the table for our discussion today.

Jeannie Hebert 6:09
Sure. Our chamber we have about 500 members. We were very active, we mean business and we listened well. We we listened to the needs of our members. And we’re very proactive in meeting their needs. That’s how the hub came about. We our service area is 13 towns from Worcester, Massachusetts, which is the second largest city in New England, to the Rhode Island border, just to kind of give you an idea of where we are central mass is kind of cow. It’s the belt to the middle of Massachusetts. And we work with everyone in Massachusetts. We collaborate a lot, you know, Queen of collaboration. But there is a field gap across the state and I think across the nation, really. And we found that a lot of the covenants of vocational schools because of a program we have here called the MKS. That funding is attached to it. So why are the MCAT scores on the more funding the schools are getting? So vocational schools have unfortunately changed their covenant and they are accepting more epidemic with superior students over vocational and superior students and the public schools. You have an influx of students who really want vocational training, they’re looking to go to work, and they’re not able to get it at public school level. So when we found this out and working with many of our manufacturers, the Blackstone Valley is the birthplace of the American Industrial Revolution, who Samuel Slater, who came here and started textile mills. And the mill is actually where we are, it’s a converted former textile mill of the whitened family. We’re in Waynesville named after that family, when we we would run the job fairs like everybody dies, and, you know, help them and it just wasn’t working. They weren’t getting skilled labor. And I was hearing, you know, I didn’t know this work, I have to turn it down. So when I found out that this was happening at the vocational level, I spoke with our legislators started doing some digging. And we were able to secure some funding from the Department of Education, and took on the legislation set the chamber, we take on the task to build a workforce training manager and said, yes, so long behold, we took over part of the middle, we didn’t build that out. And we have a design lab, we’ll hang on filling computers with CAD, and we have computer lab and we have a great fabrication laboratory. And it has 3d printers, augmented welding. We have mills and lane that start out with manual and it also has the coding, but the students learn how to use them manually. And they learn how to code. And we’ve recently just taken over the other end of the mill and put in a full electronics learn. And we’re building our robotics lab right now. So we’re meeting as the needs of our members change and evolve. We are meeting their needs well over now. million dollars in investment now.

Brandon Burton 10:02
And it’s typically for the hub,

Jeannie Hebert 10:04
specifically for the hub, but it helps us to grow our chamber. Because we’re training the workforce for many years, our members, and even those that are outside of our region support our chamber because of that constant with other chambers.

Brandon Burton 10:26
So I’m curious staff size, when you take on a project like this, just for all the chambers listening like this sounds great, but I’m sure she’s got like a huge staff to take this on. Right. So what is your staff size look like? The chamber

Jeannie Hebert 10:38
staff, there’s three of us. Okay, okay. And for a while. for probably a year when we were dealing with the billing, and so forth, there was no other staff. So I was doing two jobs, and it was exhausting. But it was very rewarding. But once the school was able to open, and we were ready to accept students, I hired an executive director, or the third Executive Director right now. She’s amazing. Um, I now have an operations director. He’s amazing. He’s, I’ve been tapping into retirement pool. He’s a retired engineer that worked in was head of Northeast for Thermo Fisher. So he’s got a wealth of information. And honestly, he can take anything from it to put a lock on a door for losing meeting diverged. In Bob ovens, our Executive Director, Ashley Bregman. She is a graduate of WPM, Worcester Polytechnic Institute. And she was also teaching robotics. She’s has an engineering degree, obviously, academic or teaching. So she’s perfect as an executive director. And we have several teachers, Instructor of some are retired vocational teachers. And some teach at night when we for the night courses, and they teach at the local vocational school. And one is an engineering teacher at one of our high schools. And we’re growing to the point where we’re building campuses in our high schools in the area, we’re up to 22 districts. So obviously, we’re working with high schools, but it’s not that we’re servicing. And we also teach incumbent workers. So some of the manufacturers who hire people with no skills, we listen to them, and we build a custom curriculum for them. And they will send their workers to us. And we do like a six or 12 week course for them. So when they go back, and they still work that you know, it’s worth studying. But when they finish their course and get their certifications, they’re more than an entry level here or mid level. Yeah, it really makes a big difference for them. So in the fall right now, because this year, Nast mass fire, who handles all the career, work with people who were looking for Jones, across the state awarded us the Youth Works grant, which means we’re now working with 16 to 23 year olds who are in a disadvantaged financial state, to their families. And we find them jobs and almost apprentice programs. We do have an apprentice program too. So we hired people to handle that under the umbrella. And we just received the connecting activities grant, which is K through 12. So now we’re working with elementary school students too. So we have at the hub 15 employees now running the hub, thank goodness, I would need to never ever sleep again. And we threes that work at the Chamber, but we interact all the time. So it’s, you know, it’s one big family, and we were growing so fast. At one point, someone would come in and like go Who is that? What is this name? What was this?

Brandon Burton 14:36
Do? Yeah, that’s great. Well, that definitely that helps to set the table for more of our discussion. I’ve got a lot of follow up questions for you about the hub and we’ll dive deeper into this in the whole topic of developing a workforce training center as soon as we get back from this quick break.

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Donna Novitsky 16:40
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Brandon Burton 17:34
All right, we’re back. So let’s dive in deeper. I want to know more. So tell us your when did the idea get presented to you for developing the hub? How did things unfold to see the vision come to pass? Well,

Jeannie Hebert 17:52
we’ve been open and seeing students for five years now. But it took a good two years to get it going. Because we weren’t quite sure what we were going to do. We knew there was a huge problem, especially in our area. For our you know, manufacturers just couldn’t find any employees and we’re in, as I said, job fairs were not working at all. It just wasn’t working. And I went to a skills America conference at the vocational school. And the superintendent, there was bragging that 90% of his students were going to college. And then I went what’s going on here? And I spoke with one of the students who was given who had a display on being electrician and I said, Oh, why are you going to be electrician? Because that week I want a grid. I like to have an electrician in my office crying because he’s done pretty good in Okay, location of school that he wanted to pass. And, you know, they were telling us they had a waitlist of six months students. And I talked to that student and I said, Oh, you’re gonna be an electrician. Oh, I’m going to Cornell. I’m going into sports medicine. Oh my god. You took up four years that that gentleman son could have had to become an electrician. So you know, a light bulb went off and said we need we need an we need somewhere where these students that the public school system parents that can go for training because the superintendents were telling me they didn’t know what to do with these students that will be coming discipline problems. They didn’t have the vocational training that the students wanted. The dropout rate was going up. So we aligned ourselves in office and I went to the legislators told them the problem. We have great legislators very approachable in our area. And we put together a plan And they connected me with our patients Department of Education. We applied for a work skills grant. And our first one skills Grant was half a million dollars. And we, you know, put together a plan to do the build out. It takes it does take a village, it really does. I mean, I can say, Oh, I built a school. I didn’t do it alone, and had a lot of help. And it was a process and even the middle owner. You know, our landlord was very understanding, very cooperative. And we all work together, and everyone was looking forward to it. They came together, I had some naysayers. I have one very prominent business person, say to me, you’re a dreamer. It’s never gonna happen. This is not going to work. So when, when I got last year, I got the manufacturing Champion award. I said, you know, I told that story. And I actually have a little locket that, like, my significant other gave me that people say I’m a dreamer. But I’m not the only one. And I said that to, to the audience, it was all out there. Most of the manufacturers told them a dream or been looking at, you know, I can see. Yeah, you know, span, so that really fit in perfectly. But, you know, that’s how it started. And we’re growing like crazy. And it’s wonderful to see these students, they come to us dejected, because they couldn’t get into the school they wanted to get into. And when they learn the skill, then amazing picture. They just have that vocation. And the brain is wired, for whatever it might be the body aches or electronics or CNC machining or, you know, developing coding, CAD, and we even have a shop where they we have businesses come to us that want merchandise, personalized, we’ve believed a quarter and upstream we have I hate to say it, but our biggest customers in the cannabis industry distilleries and breweries, they went through classes to action, the cannabis industry, they want human doors with their logo on it. So the kids do that. And then they buy from us and the money goes back into school and help to, you know, pay for another student. So it’s terrific.

Brandon Burton 22:31
Face the mill, you had mentioned it is a previous manufacturing mill, before you guys moved in with the hub, was it actively being used before then had it sat vacant for a while, like what was the the revitalization of the the space? How did that look?

Jeannie Hebert 22:51
That was very interesting, because that bill was that mill was slated to be demolished. So ironically, we were located in the same town but a few streets over in another building. And we worked with the our landlord, now the mill owner to connect him with an amazing grant writer. And they were able to get a grant and start renovating. It was a cartel. Everybody else fell away except for these two people bill and Patti gianopolous, who believed in the project. And they partnered with another organization for over 55 subsidized housing. So above us three floors above us is over 55 subsidized housing. And I have an interesting story. They are how we interact with them. But it’s it came together over a period of I think two and a half years that they were able to renovate the mill. It’s beautiful. It has great architectural elements for big, huge wooden beams that have all been sanded so that they’re natural. Now, you know, they they were painted that hospital clean beautiful granite and brick in the windows of huge and it’s just really, really lovely. So they’re above us were below and we said why don’t we move in the mill and we moved into the new in 2016. And then 2018 We started the school. So a lot of history and had the elements or pictures of what it was. And there’s several mills in the town that were in northbridge and throughout the valley, and a lot of them were owned by the whitened family. And so our area of North there just called whiteness fell. So it’s really beautiful. It has a tower or any house out which is It’s a cute little shop now. So it’s, it’s, it’s bustling. We have. We’re there. We at the school, we have a physical therapy, we have a gym, we have a barbershop that’s run by naturalized citizens, former immigrants, and we’ve just helped them with their expanding. We have Girls on the Run. We have we were named the National Park by President Obama. So we have our rangers are there that national heritage corridor and the National Park is located there. So the national park rangers have a brewery in one of the other buildings because there’s a number of buildings usually. So it’s a pretty busy place. Oh, and beautiful woman owned business. That is a crepe or a company is another modern day Helsinki. And it’s a great little restaurant that’s been restored and invest. You know, it looks industrial. But it’s so it’s a unique place. And it’s a wonderful gathering place for the community interaction. Yeah,

Brandon Burton 26:16
that sounds awesome. So as you’re talking about how it came to be, it sounds like in the collaboration, I see where you get the title mokwena collaboration, but to be able to have, you know, somebody who’s familiar with grant writing, to be able to help see a vision and help bring things together to to see these things come, you know, kind of unfold and come together. Two of the things I wanted to ask you about, you’ve mentioned them, but I wanted to dig in just a little bit more. So there’s these certificate programs that the students come through, I imagine that there are varying lengths depending on what their focus of work is. So if you could touch on that, and then also touch on how you work with the schools, you had mentioned the K through 12. Now with these districts, what does that look like with those relationships and, and interacting with them?

Jeannie Hebert 27:06
Sure, well, the certificate programs are varied, some are custom that we utilize for incumbent workers. And some are standardized. Like we have, as I said, the Miller augmented augmented welding, that’s six to 12 week course, depending upon the type of welding, but it’s industry accepted, we would not have purchased them if our manufacturers didn’t try them out and say, oh, yeah, this is just like real world. And they do after they get their certificate, we bring them to one of our couple of our partners yr fab and package steel systems, who make metal buildings, all for all over the world. And invariably, they will say to the students are so come see me, you know that so they have great skills. So that’s one certificate we have. We have an OSHA, obviously, we do OSHA 10, everybody gets an OSHA 10. Everyone, we have a reentry program as well with the sheriff’s department. So we start teaching OSHA in the jail before they’re released. And when they’re released, they come to the school, and they get hands on training, that everybody gets OSHA training, we have what’s called Mecalac, which is a Massachusetts certificate, and it’s through mas MEP, which is manufacturing extension partnership. So this brings you through all of the steps of what manufacturing needs, like would have shot now. It would teach measurements, believe it or not, we’re finding graduates of high school have no idea how to use tape or read a tape measure or ruler. And they cannot even tell turn on the clock unless it’s digital. If you say to them, it’s quarter. They’ll go and they don’t know what that is. We had one guidance counselor say they had a disqualifying when they were monitoring the number six certificate examinations, because he pulled out his phone and I said, take out your phone. He said I wanted to see what time it was. They said there’s a clock on the wall. He said I can’t read it. No one ever taught me how to read. Like when we went to school first grade, they had the clock remember you

Brandon Burton 29:37
missing the mark somewhere, right? Yeah, I remember. I remember doing worksheets like that. Yeah. Don’t

Jeannie Hebert 29:42
do that. More than he is on job no more curse if they can’t. I was talking to a business that we were helping out. yesterday. She it’s called hair jewelry. She’s an archaeologist and she had an intern from one of the quality If he didn’t know how they couldn’t read the report from the patient because they didn’t know how to read cursive, so we’re really missing the mark in our schools. So these are the things that we try to address. But back to the certifications, we have those certifications with custom certifications. And then at some of the campuses that thought like Brookdale campus, which is one of our close up spirit campus, which is another one of our towns, their certifications. outsprinting is focusing on carpentry. Newbury is also property Hopedale, a cyber security. So we get certifications for those types of industries where the students are learning we even started, we help them get and I always say this wrong. And in a Tom baton, table, virtual. It’s almost like mines, US operations,

Brandon Burton 30:59
operators. That’s how I was gonna guess when you said that? Yeah, it’s a real body,

Jeannie Hebert 31:03
but they have a human meaning male, human woman, dog, cat, rather, Frog, which I love, because now they might have dissected me animals. But it’s very realistic. Students were showing me their skills. And I said, I was getting woozy and you’re doing a great job, right? I gotta go to the next. It’s like, Oh, yeah. That table alone costs $100,000. So we were able to help the school right grant, so that they have that. So Arginine is we helped a lot of the schools get DNS. So maybe you go to help deal, but you want to take manufactory. So you have to close the hub, or maybe your middle bring you to market sure you want to do you know, introduction to some kind of medical research. And that’s it helped. So we do is we’ll move the kids around. So they will take these courses together. The one principal said to me, it was hilarious. He goes, Yeah, these kids are all working together in class. And then on the weekend, they beat the heck out of each other on the football field. Because that’s great. So we put classes together, not necessarily by school, but on a subject. So the students get to even try it out, we’ll do a trial. You know, they’ll come and say, Oh, I think I want to do this. And they might try it and so on. That’s not Well, maybe you want to try that? Oh, yeah, that’s a better fit for me. So we do that, too. So that’s so it’s some of the certifications that we offer, I’m sure there’s a lot more that escapes me right now. But the K through 12 that we had the smaller kids, I think a good example would be rewarded grant kind of nothing for the energies that it was for younger kids to learn about engineering. So we had camp over the summer. And kids would come in the morning, and they’ll have a little bite to eat. And then they would learn about engineering and mechatronics and robotics and make make something. Mr. Evans, our engineer ran this program. So they’d make something and they put it all together, they do it on the computer, and they’d make it. And he would say to them, did you have fun? You know, you did you know what that was? Well, they have engineering. And the robotics is we have these really cute little robot, these, this is very key in first, and second graders, paying them. And they were like, they know, control robots, but they had to program them to make them work. And they were able to do that. And we have these little robots that look a little Michael Jackson, they had a damn thing. They were dancing with each other. And they were doing tasks and picking things out, handing them to each other. But it’s a natural for these kids. They blow me away. And it’s amazing. And then some of the middle school kids, we had codons, which are cooperatives are going to occur in an industry. They do the stuff where people say, Oh, robots are gonna take my job. Well, did you really want to keep ticking boxes and putting them here? You know, you don’t want to do that. You want to be the one telling the robots to do that. Use your brain. So what these students were doing, I went in after they kind of let a they taught them how to work, how to program them. They could like Legos out so they could build make the robots build. And then I they had free time. So I went in and they began to have the robots and they can like be stitched in Your hands. And I go, What are you doing the courts very proud of their sword fighting.

So I mean, this is a concept thing, maybe learn through having fun, but it’s part of what they would do in a job situation, they would have to program the robots to do a task. And some of them have 345 robots interacting with each other and completing a task. And that’s pretty complicated. For like, an eighth grader, too. So I just like I said, they blow me away. One of the older kids, it was a birthday, what’s what was like three of them, they came in, and they gave me these beautiful stainless steel shakers that had an unusual shape, then you throw them on the machine. And they gave her to me, it’s a birthday gift. And they said, Missmiss look, we even put pain on the top. So you can tell which is which. program that and have the drill press drill, drill it, and then had Christmas was just from a piece of aluminum or stainless steel that they had. And they design them themselves and made those, then it was just amazing that they did pocket some of the kids from shoestring High School, which is my hometown, they were making Christmas ornaments out of brought up some of the metal and like drill guns, and they were beautiful. And then they made dreidels to the trails are gorgeous, they were intricate, they were terrific. So it was, you know, it’s a fun, fun thing to learn. But while they’re learning there, we say to them, you’re an engineer, you just love

Brandon Burton 36:55
that. I love it, they have these opportunities, and they get that confidence and explore these these future career opportunities. This is such a invaluable resource for your community. So applaud and Pat, pat on the back to you guys and your team for for executing this and integrating it into the schools as well.

Jeannie Hebert 37:14
Thank you. We have a great team. We really do. I’m really fortunate really blessed. Yeah, yeah.

Brandon Burton 37:19
So as we start to wrap up, I wanted to ask if, if you might have any tips or action items for chamber folks that are listening, who want to take their chamber up to the next level? What might you offer for them? Well,

Jeannie Hebert 37:34
I think you know, you need to listen to your members, which you know, most of my chamber colleagues do. Every region is different. What works for me might not work for you. But if you listen to what your members need, or what your municipalities are your region, we work very closely with all of our municipalities and our legislators in and listen and get advice on how to meet those needs. And then you know, collaborate with the great resources that you have in your region, we have wonderful educational institution, terrific educators, innovative people on and, you know, we’ve worked together and they’re not afraid to roll up their sleeves and work. So I think, you know, sometimes you look at a project and you think that’s really daunting. But when you you know, I hate this analogy, but how do you eat an elephant one bite at a time.

Brandon Burton 38:37
Especially after your introduction today, no, no elephants on the table.

Jeannie Hebert 38:43
And your chamber will grow. We are gaining members inside and outside our region. Because of the services that we provide, and I’m not stealing numbers from anyone, what we do is, if I see that I’m getting a number of members, someone, you know, reaching out to me, I reach out to that chamber and say, You know what, I’ve got like five industry people that have come to me, why don’t we do a collaboration and we have an affiliation with like seven other chambers, and will offer a discount, but you have to be a member of the region’s chamber first. And then I’ll give you this note to join us. And we’ll provide everything but we do provide a lot of services without membership to and I know that I get criticized from some chambers for that, but it comes back, you know, comes around and it’s a pleasure for me to work with a number of people to help them and you know, it’s great to work together but no, just listen to your members or You read and see what the needs are and think about and seek out people with resources that I can drop in on how to develop focus to meet those who

Brandon Burton 40:11
have that so important. As we look to the future of chambers of commerce, how do you see the future of chambers and their purpose going forward?

Jeannie Hebert 40:22
I think we’re going to have to really prove that we are a worthy organization. And you know, we’re going to, to be a good resource for your members. It’s not, as we all know, already, I’m preaching to the choir here. It’s not like the inundating myself, the fog of news best attitude where Jimmy Anderson would say, I’m going to the chamber dinner, you know, like everyone already knew how to join the Chamber of Commerce. There’s too many people into the new organizations billing for the that dues that dues revenue, and I don’t think that dues revenue is going to be our is already isn’t our main revenue stream, we have to find other revenue streams. And it’s going to be to run instances

Brandon Burton 41:21
of it. Good advice. Jeanne, I want to do give you an opportunity to share any contact information for listeners who might want to reach out and connect with you and maybe learn a little bit more about the hub and how you guys went about this, this great big project, what would be the best way for someone to reach out and connect?

Jeannie Hebert 41:44
Well, through email, which is jhebert@blackstonevalley.org. So that’s email. And if you want to learn about, you can go to our website, which is BlackstoneValley.org. And you can also check out The Hub at be thehub.org. And if you go to our website, there’s a tab and it’ll bring you right over to the hub. And I’m happy to share any information to help with anything, any resources and, you know, whatever we can do to help you with programs. And if you want to take on a project like this to go get them and we’ll help you every any way I can.

Brandon Burton 42:42
I love it. Thank you so much. So this has been great having you on the podcast today. I love getting these insights from chambers that have taken on a unique projects and have a neat approach to it. revitalizing a building that was set to be torn down and really changed the outlook of the community. I love it. But thank you for being with us today and sharing these experiences and insight and, and I’m hoping it gave you know a few people out there that drive to take on some of those big hairy audacious goals. Thank you for being with us today.

Jeannie Hebert 43:15
Thank you very much. Thanks Brandon for the opportunity we really appreciate you’ve ever thought my way I’d love to give me a tour.

Brandon Burton 43:22
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Next Level of Chamber with Donny Jones

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Brandon Burton 0:00
This is the Chamber Chat Podcast, the show dedicated to chamber professionals to spark ideas and to get actionable tips and strategies to better serve your members and community.

Let’s hear from Becky Womble, President of the Bastrop Chamber to hear about her experience with Community Matters.

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Our guest for this episode is Donny Jones. Donny is the Executive Vice President for The Chamber of Commerce of West Alabama and the chief Workforce Development Officer for West Alabama Works. He’s responsible for the daily operations of the chamber including financial management and information technology and manages a contractual relationships with vendors and professional service providers. Donny is instrumental in ensuring that the regional workforce systems leverage federal state resources to develop and grow the necessary K through 12 and adult training pipelines to support the current and future workforce. He is a former appointed Member of the governor’s workforce Council, and is currently an appointed Member of the Alabama Workforce Board where he serves on the executive committee and Policy Committee and appointed Member of the governor’s Career Technical Education Task Force to enhance the CTE curriculum and appointed Officer the Alabama committee of credentialing and career pathways and appointed member of the committee for Grade Level Reading. The Governor’s Committee on Employment of People with Disabilities awarded Donny the Public Service Award for West Alabama and 2019 and 2022. He received his accreditation as a CCE a distinction that less than 4% of leaders in the chamber profession hold. He serves on the board of directors for the Public Affairs Research Council of Alabama, Tuscaloosa Educational Foundation, ACC foundation board, as well as other committees and ACCE boards. He also worships and teaches at five points Baptist Church reserves as Deacon he’s most known as a husband of Clara is a 29 year educator and father to Carson and Carter, the dining Welcome to chamber tap Podcast. I’m excited to have you with us today on the show and love to give you an opportunity to say hello to all the chamber champions and share something interesting about yourself.

Donny Jones 3:53
Absolutely. Well, as you can see, I don’t do much but chamber work and work in the community. So but I am a one of the things that I tell people is very interested in the in the chamber world, I don’t play golf. And so I’m one of the only chamber execs you’ll ever made that has never played golf. But I do have four animals that are in the record books that I’ve killed with my bow across the country. So with that being said, most of my board members never mess with me. So anyway, a lot of really cool things are happening in our area. Of course, if you guys have seen the NFL another cool tidbit about our chamber is you probably saw the number one pick with the NFL last night. Jalen is actually right down the street from us or has been his career at the University of Alabama where our chamber is actually just right on the edge of the campus. So a couple of interesting things about us and myself.

Brandon Burton 4:56
That’s right and as we record this, that’s end of April 2020 Three. And then to add on to that this morning, my son is getting ready for school and he tells me yeah, this is the first time that an Alabama players been taken number one overall in the draft. And he’s a big history buff of any sort. So you know, little tidbits like that just really geek him out. So plastic? Well, why don’t you tell us a little bit more about the Alabama Regional Chamber and just kind of how you guys are structured scope of work, you guys are involved with size of the chamber staff budget, that sort of thing to kind of set the stage?

Donny Jones 5:33
Absolutely, we’re, uh, we’re sometimes a little cold, a little different as a chamber, we’re actually the West Alabama Chamber of Commerce, we serve as nine counties on the western part of the state of Alabama around seven counties. So square foot mileage is about 7500 square miles, our chamber has around 1300 members, and those are all business members, we don’t do individual memberships, representing about 65,000 employees. One of the things that is a little different is we’re the Regional Chamber of Commerce. So today, you’re talking to the executive vice president. Also, we’re the regional workforce Council, Alabama has seven regional councils across the state of Alabama, which is really a sounding board for workforce for industry. We are housed within the chamber, there were the fiscal and managing agents for that. And we’re also the regional workforce board, if you’re familiar with WIOA, and the federal dollars, so and I’m the Executive Director for both of those organizations. So we really have two large boards that work together, our Workforce Board, which is called the West Alabama Works Board, and then our chamber of commerce board. And so simultaneously, we’re always working together and actually who we are, as an organization is one of the largest collaboratives, when it comes to meeting the needs of businesses through that our budget on the chamber side is roughly about two and a half million dollars. And then on the workforce side, which is in combination, it would be close to $4 million organization. So we’re at right now 24 employees, 15 of those employees actually are full time workforce specialists. So as you can see, workforce is the largest portion of our organization. And really, we focus on that as one of our primary objectives to deliver services to our business community, because as you know, workforce is the largest issue that a lot of our businesses are facing. So that’s a little bit about our chamber. And in our services, yeah,

Brandon Burton 7:48
that workforce is always important, but right now is definitely you know, cuts the workout for you with the workforce shortages and just, you know, shifting in the economy in that in that front. But as we focus in on our topic for our discussion today, we settled on the idea of talking about next level of chambers and and this topic intrigues me because chambers are constantly looking to see what’s the next thing that we need to do to be relevant, right? How do we as we look to the future, how are we being relevant? How are we making an impact in our communities, and I feel like we’re going to be touching a lot on that and our conversation today so we will dive in deep on this as soon as we get back from this quick break.

Visit ChamberNation.com to learn more.

Hey, this is Donna. Yiftee community cards are free for you, free for your members and they bring lots of new sales and foot traffic into your local shops and restaurants. But don’t take it from me. Here’s Siobhan from Truckee, California to tell you about her program.

Siobhan Kenney 10:25

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Donna Novitsky 10:56

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Brandon Burton 11:09
All right, Donny, we’re back. So as I mentioned before the break, we’re talking about next level of chamber. So tell me what does that mean for you guys there, West Alabama. And as you guys have looked at this scenario, as just, you know, staying relevant and and keeping the chamber in the forefront of the community there. What’s the approach that you guys are taking?

Donny Jones 11:30
Well, let me maybe the best way to tell you this is is the tail of an opportunity that I had this past week to have dinner with one of New York, New York Times bestselling author, Andy Andrews. I don’t know if you know that in traveller. Yeah, absolutely. And the butterfly effect and all that. So, so we were having dinner, he was speaking to a group and, and he said this, he said, you know, the difference, you know, and a lot of people are reading the book, Good to Great. And he said nothing against that book. But everybody is using that now as the Bible of you know, How to Win Friends and Influence People, as 20 years ago. And he said, you know, the problem is, is many of us are trying to go from good to great doing the things that we do, and have always done but doing better and doing better than our competitor. He said, What happens if an organization actually actually looked at doing things completely, in a different way, and looking at it a completely different way of doing business? And he said, That’s really where he’s coming from, as he was saying that I was like, wow, that is exactly what our chamber of commerce, and our focus has been, for so many years, you know, it was, you know, go to chamber Institute and learn more about what other chambers are doing and best practices. But if you really look at that 90% of the time is the best practices of the same things that you’re doing, just trying to find a better way of doing it. And so what we looked at is we said, you know, what, what is our number one key issue for our members out of our 1300? Members? What is the number one issue? And as I’m speaking to different groups across the country? That’s one of the things I asked that question. And I’ll be in a group and I’ll say, How many of you guys as chamber professionals, and your chamber? How many of you do a capital campaign? In a majority of, you know, middle, middle sized or larger chambers do some type of capital campaign, they’ll raise their hand? And then I’ll say, How many of you, in this room did a survey of your business community as you were doing a capital campaign? Well, everybody raises their hand, right? And then I asked the question, how many of you was workforce? One of the key components and an underlying issue that none of them could solve? And had an answer for? A No, everybody kind of look around, look at each other. And then, you know, you’d see hands go up really slow, but most of the hands came up. And then I asked the simple question. How many of you, if that is the number one issue in your community, or one of the top three, have the majority of your staff focused on meeting that need? Not one chamber, except our president that’s in the room, usually, when I’m speaking raises their hand. Because when we look at we’re talking all the time to our small businesses and our industries that we we help and we say, listen to what your customer says, and then meet that need. But yeah, as chambers, we try to get our members to do what we think they need to do as engaging into our organization instead of going out and doing what they need and actually being the voice of business. Now, I’ll be honest with you, Brandon, one of the things as I’m talking about that, it raises the hair on a lot of chamber execs Next, because they’re like, well, by God, what so that’s what we’ve always done. And that’s how we’re gonna do it. I’m like, That’s great. That’s why dinosaurs died. That’s right. So if you look at membership organizations, not just chambers, but when you look at, you know, trade organizations and everything, everyone is struggling with membership, and the digression, I guess, of membership. And then also, you know, we also have best practices don’t know if anybody’s been to their state organizations, or ACCE or US Chamber. And you know, they’ll have a session that says, best 30 ideas, and 30 seconds, or whatever it is. And so they’ll go in there. And there’ll be 100,000 ideas of how to do the same thing the same way, but just put a different makeup on a pig and make it look different. But it’s the same deliverable. And, you know, there are some ideas, and I don’t mean to cut that short, because you can get great ideas, I love those sessions. But at the end of the day, when you look at your structure of the chamber, you know, are you still doing the same things? And so as you see these national trends of of less sponsorship dollars, of being more innovated, how do you, you know, I had somebody one time, say, you know, what, if, if I could sponsor my toilet paper, I put a business’s logo on there, we’re just trying to find more ways that our golf tournaments at our chamber and sessions at this than the other to do those kinds of things. And what it’s doing is, you can only do so much with a product. And then what happens is you degrade it so much that people aren’t really wanting to buy, right. And so what we’re looking at, and what we have done is said, You know what, we’re gonna focus on the number one issue. And in our region, it was workforce development. And so we still do the bread and butter place, don’t get me wrong, we still block and tackle, we still do the networking events, we still do the chamber and sessions, we still do the directories, we do all those things. But our focus really is on helping our businesses grow. And one of their biggest issues in a community where our unemployment rate right now is 1.8%. You know, and our companies are growing, and they’re bleeding at the same time. And so we’re really focused on that. So 15 of our staff members, or really 17 of our staff members are focused every day waking up, meeting that one need. And education and workforce development is where we really focus on, right.

Brandon Burton 17:32
So as you’re explaining all this, to me, it makes perfect sense. And as I think of chambers across the country, I think sometimes they get a little constrained when they think everything we have to do has to be mission focused. And then they go back and look at their mission statement. And well, our mission statement doesn’t say anything about workforce necessarily, you know, so maybe they’ve pigeon holed themselves too much by defining their mission statement. Rather than being that voice of business, and constantly just looking to see what the, what the next thing is they need to do to help businesses be successful and to build a stronger community. So I guess it may be a word of warning, I guess, as you as you drafted your next mission statement to, to look at that what what’s going to leave you that flexibility to be able to pivot and to be able to listen to the needs of your members. And what’s their number one, number two, number three needs that they’re facing? And how can you as a voice of business, step in to help them solve those issues.

Donny Jones 18:32
That’s exactly right. And, you know, we just, we just finished our five year capital campaign, which is, we don’t do a yearly business plan. We have a five year strategy that we implement every day, and we wake up and that’s, that’s our focus. But this year, we did something different this this next five years. And so when you look at and I’m going to be around a while I’m gonna beat the dead horse right here. But I want to say this. When you look at most business plans, for chambers, you have your vision, you have your objectives, you have, you know, your strategies, and they do their SWOT analysis and everything. And, you know, what we’re doing is we’re changing our entire organization to be here’s our vision. And here’s the deliverables period. Because I’d say at most businesses don’t really care about your strategy. They want to know that you’re gonna get things done. And so people are so tired of plans that sit on the shelf and nobody visits them. And we’ve got a plan and we send it out to all of our members and nobody reads it. They put it in file 13 Because they know it’s the same Oh, say Mo. So what we did was we said we’re going to take and we’re going to create a vision of where we want to go for example, in this category is lead business driven workforce and talent development. The vision is specific. It’s two sentences, and then boom, the deliverables. How many people were going to put to work? How many how many outreach events, we’re going to do all those kinds of things. And when you look at a conversation that I don’t know about other chambers, but we have is that our patriarchs are dying out in our communities. And the new leaders that are coming on board are not Civic, rent minded. You know, it’s not, I’m going to invest, because it’s the right thing to do. They are business minded, and they want to know that they’re getting a return on their investment. And so many times chambers make the excuse, well, we’re not really a chamber that makes your cash register ring, we grow the pie for everybody. And, you know, you say things like, rising tide floats, all boats, and we have all this thing, and this new generation of business leaders are looking at you and saying, You’re full of crap. It’s just all smoke and mirrors, and you would sell blind man glasses. And so they, they think that way. And so what we’re doing as a chamber is we’re saying, look, here’s the deal, we’re hearing what you’re saying, and we’re going to focus on delivering those policies, we’re still going to be an advocacy organization in the voice of business. But here’s what we hear you saying, and and that’s what we’re going to work on. And quality of life is one of those things. So what does that mean? I mean, quality of life for every community is different. Does that mean? Well, that’s like saying, random world peace, we’re gonna solve world peace. And so chambers are out there. And that’s what we’re doing. We’re telling everybody, we’re solving world peace, and everybody’s going, whatever. And so what we’re doing there is saying, this is our vision for what quality of life looks like, for our community. And these are the specific things that we’re going to do for you, as a partner in our community. And so that’s where we’re going is really changing this and changing the topics, instead of trying to sell everybody something that they really don’t want. Because people I think respect chambers, I think people you know, intuitively know that they’re important. But when it comes to, am I gonna pay my employees $2 More than hours so that I can actually keep my employees and keep my lights on? Or am I going to pay a membership fee, because it’s the right thing to do. chambers are beginning to lose that battle. So we have to really become a chamber that is consultant driven information and knowledge based, and actually somebody that’s helping companies grow and meet their needs. And so our niche was workforce developmental now.

Brandon Burton 22:32
Yeah. And I think depending on the community, depending on the chamber, the niche may look different. Absolutely. Workforce definitely is a niche where you can have some, you know, absolute deliverables, and you can have data to back up the work that you’ve done to say, here’s the results of the efforts that we put forth on your behalf. And when you look at the your chamber in general, you guys really are larger on the workforce side, budget wise, staff wise, I mean, the attention is going to workforce, because that’s where you hit while I assume that’s where you have those key indicators, you can go back to to measure success, and where you can go back to investors and say, this is where you’re getting your return. So I’m curious as you as you put that focus on workforce. I know we can talk for hours on this, because it’s something passionate that you’re passionate about. But what are what are those areas and workforce? In your bio had mentioned the K through 12? Programs? You know, I’m sure retention, is there education with employee or with employers? What are those those key areas that you’re focusing on with regard to workforce? Sure,

Donny Jones 23:41
absolutely. I’ll give you a prime example. On the K 12 system. We do large regional events, for example, worlds of work that we do, it’s what we call Disney World, steroids for workforce development. So we bring, we shut one of our community colleges down for three days, we bring every ninth grader in the entire region, over 5,009th graders up and they experience all the different job opportunities that we have. And it’s all hands on. And it is a big event. People come from all over the country to actually look at the event and say, how do you all model this? And so we’re in our schools, we’re touching our kids, we’re really all the way down into pre K. We have an educated workforce Academy, where we train all of our superintendents and principals and key leaders in our 12 school systems. We’ve graduated over 470. And they spent an entire year with us learning workforce development in changing the landscape of how educators think about this big topic. Then we’re also involved in our adopted school program, getting industries involved, and ensuring up our education system which is not the best in the country. And so we’ve got a lot of work to do and it’s going to take the into Park community, particularly the business and industry, community to really help shore up our education system. And then another example is bringing those resources. For example, we have this past year, we put over a million dollars in the hands of our industries through our workforce board, and through one grant alone, and we trained over 1100 workers and upskill those workers just in our small region, through our community college system, and being able to fund those kinds of things. We place over 3000 individuals in jobs over the last year, just in one sector. That’s the automotive industry. And then a lot of things into Brandon, here’s another way, and I’m going to chase a rabbit real quick. But how many chambers talk about diversity, equity inclusion, right? Let me give you what real diversity, equity inclusion looks like the 3000 employees that we placed in the automotive industry, because we had Mercedes Benz here, 78% of them were African American, of the 78% 51% were male and 49% were female. So when you begin to talk about what we’re doing for communities, and how we’re trying to be an inclusive community, instead of just having events, which we had our development, diversity, equity inclusion event for the chamber last week, so we still do that. But now we’re having discussions about how we’re really impacting those communities that feel like they haven’t been included. And we’re saying, Look, we’re focusing on your entire community, we’re not talking about these topics, we’re doing something about these topics, we’re making a difference when you look at the difference we’re making on the disposable income and the average, you know, family income for our minority communities, that is growing because of our workforce side. So you know, at the end of the day, I think our society is changing. From a perspective of less, don’t just talk about things, let’s get something done. And it’s time to move the needle. And that’s what our organization is really focused on in our communication is focus on that side of it, you know, not just, hey, look what we’re doing. We’ve done 10 events, this this month, what we’re really focusing on is we’re changing lives every single day. You know, last week alone, we put 100, high school students ninth 10th 11th graders into summer jobs, they’ll actually start in in three weeks, with 20 different employers. And we’re, you know, we’re modeling that out when we’re talking about it. And people are saying, We’ve got people every day that’s calling us and saying, how do we get involved in the work of the chamber because of what you’re doing. So those are the kinds of topics that we’re really focused on.

Brandon Burton 27:56
I love that you can just off top your head, you have these numbers, right? He can tell, you can say, we’ve helped 3000 people and jobs in the automotive sector and then go on to the diversity equity inclusion side, you can say, you know, your percentages of, you know, different races and genders. And those are numbers you can point to and say, here’s how we’re moving the needle. versus you know, we had a networking event, and we had 50 people show up. What came of that I’m sure something good happened. But how do you measure that? Exactly.

Donny Jones 28:26
And that’s, that’s what people want to hear. And what we’ve seen as, like I said, we just finished our capital campaign, the majority of people who increased in some doubled their investment over the next five years in our organization, the majority of those said, we’re investing because of what you’re doing and workforce development because that is key. We’re a huge manufacturing area, even though we have the University of Alabama and a huge healthcare sector. Industry is our big, I guess you’d say employment sector. And so individuals know, you know, that if we don’t solve that problem, because Alabama doesn’t have the largest population. I mean, as I was telling you, 1.8% unemployment is almost like zero. Unemployment, right? So how do we get more people in the participation rate? So we’re doing outreach events every single week. In two weeks, we’ve got what we call our signing day. So all the students that we’ve heard in all these events, you know, our apprenticeship programs and everything is going to look catalogue. Now, it’s not going to have 100,000 People like it did last night on the NFL signing, but we’re going to have a huge signing day and make a big deal that work is valuable. And you know what that resonates with our our, our members or our membership and the businesses and they’re saying you know what the chamber is bringing value back to our community and that is essential, soft skills. It is work is valuable, and we need everybody to be a part of growing In our community. And so it really is, if any of you think about what we’re doing is we’re really doing exactly what everybody else is saying they’re doing, right. But it’s turning that value into, you know, something tangible. And it’s not, Hey, did we do 10 referrals from our website to your community or your business? That’s not what we do. We’re, you know, and so we’re all the time as chamber, folks, we’re like, we gotta tell people about the value of our organization, and we say all these things, but nobody really knows how to do it, besides, create a new flyer with great pictures and people at a networking event and somebody with a governor and a mayor and all this. And so the, it’s the same old, same old. And so that’s why I said, we’re really taking it to the next level. So I’ll give you a kind of a, an analogy of we do things in a real systematic way. So our first five year campaign was called working as one, because we wanted our community to learn that we’re never going to take it to the next level unless we begin to work as one. So guess what the title of our next capital campaign was working.

Brandon Burton 31:17
One’s got to be in there. So working

Donny Jones 31:18
this one. Now, this campaign was actually called all in, because once you get everybody at the table, once everybody is working this one, now everybody has got to be only in to move us to the next level. And so that is really what we’re seeing in our community as people are coming to our chamber and really saying, how do we engage? How do we involve Coulson, you are an organization that’s making a difference. And, you know, I had somebody come to me, actually yesterday and say, I was at church the other day, and I had this family member come, or this church member come to me and say that my kid went to our well 2.0, which it was for graduating seniors, which was four weeks ago, or three weeks ago. And we put 200 kids, and they had 600 job offers, or 200 kids at major industries. And so when you look at that, you know, they were talking about this change this kids laugh. And so now they’re like, how do I get involved? So we’re creating whole new opportunities, where people do engage at a whole different level, because now they’re passionate about what we’re doing. Not just that we’re the chamber. That’s

Brandon Burton 32:31
right. So that leads up very well into my next question, as we start to wrap things up here. I like asking as we frag is for chambers that are listening, who are interested in taking their chamber up to the next level, what tip or action item would you suggest for them to, to consider implementing at their organization?

Donny Jones 32:50
Well, I’m the worst person to say this. But one thing I’ve think that I would suggest, is like the old saying that my mother used to say this all the time to me, which as you can tell, I talk a lot and are very passionate. And sometimes I don’t stop and listen enough, because I think I have all the answers. You know, God gave you two ears and one mouth for a reason, son. And chambers forget that sometimes. And so what I would say is if you’re going to check your chamber to the next level, is listen with an open and honest mind and hear what they’re really saying. And see what what the real eco ecosystem around your community is. For us, the struggle was workforce. For some communities, it could be loss of population growth, for some, it could be a need for a new strategy and economic development. Whatever that is. I would say that you listen to that, and then look at how you can become the very best at that. So you become the source of that for your community. But then you look at how do I deliver that if it’s economic development? What am I going to do? What am I going to create? How am I going to sell it? And how am I going to let people know that we’re the ones who do it? We hear all the time chambers say this. And Brandon, I don’t know if you’ve had speakers on here that say we don’t toot our own horn enough. Well, the reason you don’t toot your horn enough is because you really probably aren’t doing anything that’s a really of subsequent, you know, need. We every week. We are on the news every week. And we have four stations and usually it’s at least two of those stations. And that’s one of our goals. But if you look at 90% of those newsfeeds, it’s because of what we’re doing in the lives of people because their interest stories, right? So, you know, focusing on making a key difference and what is ain’t going to do and looking at things totally different. Like I said, you’ve still got to do the bread and butter plays. But if you want to grow your organization, I can say this from, you know, what we’ve seen where we went from, you know, seven staff members to 24. And it was all focused on those deliverables. So every new position that we have hired at the Chamber has been to give outcomes and deliverables not to do programmatic work. And so really look at how do you change in that direction? Yeah,

Brandon Burton 35:30
I love a said that to not only listen more, we hear that sort of tip a lot. But the caveat there of listening with an open and honest mind, because it’s so easy as you hear the needs of of your members or the struggles that they have to become a little defensive, maybe we do that for you, and you try to explain and rather than just listening and realizing maybe we’re not doing it well enough, maybe they don’t know about these things, because we’re not executing in the way that we need to. And

Donny Jones 36:01
I have to confess I was that guy. That’s why I said a lot of times, there’s people that are probably hearing us discuss this today that are actually getting frustrated at hearing me say, because they are so sad. And this is how we’ve always done chamber work. And this is what we’ve been told. And it’s not that you’re wrong. It’s just, you can be good to great all day long. And I would encourage you if that’s what you want to be be that. But what we’re talking about today is going from good to the best. Yeah. And that’s a way of thinking about it.

Brandon Burton 36:36
Yeah, that’s great. So as we look to the future of chambers, we’ve been at it feel like we’ve been talking about this all all interview here, but how do you see the future of chambers and their purpose going forward?

Donny Jones 36:50
Wow, that’s a loaded question. For me, particularly when what we’re talking about is a seat chambers that are going to be successful. Um, you know, I think there’s a place for for every chamber, but I think you’re going to see more chambers becoming more like merchants associations, or actually becoming more like a Deloitte deliverable organization, where their staffs are more like consultants that are actually doing incredible things and working with industry to raise the bar. In those sectors, I think you’ll see a lot of chambers becoming more sector driven, where they’re, you know, what they’re doing for manufacturing might look different than what they’re doing for technology, what looks different than what they’re doing, or healthcare. And they’ll probably have specialists that that focus on those key areas. The other thing is, is, once again, I think you’ll see more of a contractual organization that’s doing real contractual top work. For example, like we’re doing in workforce development, where you know, millions of dollars of our organizations actually to deliver services for the state of Alabama, or for a particular entity or a county or a city. You’ll see more of that. And I think you’ll see chambers being more innovative when it comes to those traditional chamber programs, and have they delivered in different ways. But I think you are going to see the larger chambers actually turn into more of more of that focused. This is our sweet spot. And that’s what we’re going to do, because once you try to become all things to all people, amount one HD, is very difficult for for you to actually have a core focus of your organization.

Brandon Burton 38:44
Absolutely. So as we wrap that, wrap it up here, I wanted to give you an opportunity to share any contact information for listeners who want to reach out and learn more. Hey, you guys are doing there at the West Alabama chamber, what’s the best way for someone to reach out and connect?

Donny Jones 39:00
Yeah, absolutely. If you want to reach out to us, our number here is 205-758-7588 websites that I’ll give you is WestAlabamaChamber.com and WestAlabamaWorks.com. We have hosted, I think 20 or so in the last 18 months, communities that have come in and flown in and done benchmarking trails, particularly on our workforce side. So we’re always open to that because we always learn as much from other Chambers as they learned from us. So it’s a great time to exchange. So if you know chambers are interested in that. We have a staff member that actually focuses on working all the details out and helping chambers, create their benchmarking trips on workforce development and flying in and actually doing that. So appreciate all the time, Brandon, thank you for having us here too. But yes, love to talk to anybody that might have questions. Yeah,

Brandon Burton 39:56
that’s been fantastic having you on the show today. And I think the perspective you bring and the insights the the work you guys are doing is really going from good to best and that best looks different every community. So I hope everyone listening is taking notes on those, those action items they can do to really survey and listen and have that honest heart in mind as they listen to their members to see how you can become the best. So thank you, Donny, for being with us today. I really appreciate it

Thank you enjoyed it.

Brandon Burton
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Clean Energy & Chambers with Ryan Evans

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Brandon Burton 0:00
This is the Chamber Chat Podcast, the show dedicated to chamber professionals to spark ideas and to get actionable tips and strategies to better serve your members and community.

Let’s hear from Becky Womble, President of the Bastrop Chamber to hear about her experience with Community Matters.

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Our guest for this episode is Ryan Evans. Ryan joined the Chamber for Innovation and Clean Energy in March 2019 and serves as the executive director. Prior to being named Executive Director Ryan was a member of CICS National Advisory Board for six years. Previously, Ryan served as president of the Utah Solar Energy Association for three years, which is a trade association he co founded was an executive for 13 years with the Salt Lake Chamber, which is one of the largest chambers of commerce in the country, and served as the Executive Administrator for the Utah State Chamber of Commerce. Ryan is a recognized leader and regional speaker both locally and nationally on renewable energy policy and economic impacts of air quality community engagement and relationship building. Ryan is an IOM graduate, and now serves on the US Chambers National Board of Trustees. Ryan attended the University of Vermont and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in psychology from the University of Utah. Ryan, I’m excited to have you with us today here on Chamber Chat Podcast, love to give you an opportunity to say hello to all the Chamber Champions out there listening and share something interesting about yourself so we can all get to know you a little better.

Ryan Evans 3:12
Thank you, Brandon, appreciate the opportunity to be on the chamber chat podcast. Listen to you a bunch of times. And this is great to actually be able to speak with you and speak with the Chamber Champions listening in today. Something fun for me, I guess, in terms of interest for me, I’ve been in the chamber and association industry for just over 20 years now. It’s kind of crazy how that journey started. I was an entrepreneur. Prior to being in the chamber industry, I own my own restaurant, I was a trained chef at one point when that when I left that partnership as a lot of restaurants don’t, you know, have the tendency to fail. I was one of those. One of those cases, started looking for a job that would maybe help given or maybe work given my managerial background, but not something that actually I didn’t want to start from scratch again. So I started looking for sales positions, knowing that at least that way, if I worked hard, I could make money. And sure enough, the Salt Lake chamber was hiring at the time. And little did I know that that would lead to a 20 year career after starting they’re making $13,000 An hour plus or $13,000.

Brandon Burton 4:18
Are they still hiring? Let me sign up

Ryan Evans 4:22
1000 a year plus commissions and I made it work pretty good. But yeah, 30,000 hour would be one heck of an opportunity. That’s right. So I know that that all steamrolled into, you know getting into clean energy and eventually this role here where I get to meld both the clean energy world and the Chamber history that I have, and it’s a great relationship. So it’s been great. Absolutely. It’s

Brandon Burton 4:44
like your background has been perfect for this union to bring into the chambers for innovation to clean energy very much. So speaking to that, tell us a little bit about the chambers of the chambers for innovation, clean energy, just kind of The size, the scope of work staff, just give us some perspective of where you’re coming from, with the organization to kind of set the stage for our discussion today. Absolutely, thank

Ryan Evans 5:10
you. So chambers renovation and clean energy as we affectionately like to call it, CIC II, as you alluded to Brandon, we are a national network of about 1300 chambers and economic development associations across the country, doesn’t mean we work with every single one of those every single year. But those are the groups that we stay in touch with quite a bit that we work with. Our whole role is to help advance the clean energy economy, at chambers innovation in clean energy, we’re not an environmental group, we’re not anti anything, we are strictly clean energy experts, and help to look to educate chambers on how they can capitalize on this growing segment of our economy, how they can be better involved in promoting good clean energy policy, how they can what what they need to know, to better understand the technology that exists and how to get past a lot of the misinformation that’s out there, whether Pro or negative regarding clean energy, we do a lot of best practice sharing of what chambers are doing across the country. And then we’ll get in and we’ll even advise chambers on particular public policy issues at the state or local level that they may be experiencing. firsthand. So again, we you know, our whole role is to work with chambers. And we do that for free. We have funding in place that allows us to work with any chamber anywhere. Typically, I mentioned 1300. But typically we work with we try to work in about seven or eight priority states at one time. And he states where we spend a little extra time, given that they’ve got more opportunity for clean energy or more challenges being presented for clean energy. And so we sort of rotate that out on on any given year. But as of right now, the states where we spend most of our time are Ohio, North Carolina, Florida, Arizona, Colorado, South Carolina, Virginia, and in some work in the Northeast as

Brandon Burton 7:04
well. All right, well, that definitely helps give some perspective as to the kind of work you’re involved with and the the approach you take with some of the these chambers and 1300 chambers that you work with. As we focus our discussion today. I’m kind of halfway joking. But when I say we’re going to talk about clean energy and chambers, even if they don’t think that it matters or something that they care about at the moment, we’ll talk about why it does matter. And how your local chamber can get involved, why you should be involved, what opportunities are out there. And we’ll dive into this discussion much deeper as soon as you get back from this quick break.

Visit ChamberNation.com to learn more.

Donna Novitsky 9:33
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Brandon Burton 10:27
All right, Ryan, we’re back. So as I alluded to, before the break, today, we’re diving into how chambers can get involved with with clean energy, why they should care, maybe that’s a good starting point, as far as why chamber should care about focusing on clean energy. And then you mentioned a couple items, you know, before the break is to, you know, the economic impact and things like that. But talk to us a little bit about why chambers should have clean energy on their radar and be intentional about trying to promote clean energy in their communities.

Ryan Evans 11:02
Sure, thank you. You know, honestly, this conversation would have been pretty different five years ago. But now, I think there’s no doubt that anybody, you know, nobody has a doubt that we are in the midst of an energy transformation in the United States of America and across the across the globe, really, we are, over the last several years, clean energy speed between solar and wind have been responsible for more than 90% of new electric generation built across the country. So in other words, we still have a lot of our electricity coming from natural gas, which is the number one on the fossil fuel side. And again, we’re not anti anything, we’re all of the above, we just truly know that the Clean Energy Economics will win out in the end, as natural gas started to actually overtake coal. Many years ago, when coal was the workhorse for electricity, then it became natural gas. And it still is natural gas. But now it’s really starting to shift towards more renewable energy sources. So that’s sort of number one is that we’re looking at the future of America being very much powered, whether it’s 100%, like some people think, or at least very high into the 80s, a 90%, by some sort of cleaner energy than we have now. So that’s a significant number one. Number two, your members care about their utility bills. That’s one of the highest costs of doing business in any state. So what is your electricity and heating bills look like? And where is that source of that pain point coming from? In most states, that’s still natural gas. And for a long time, natural gas was a great lower cost option for communities. Now, however, we’ve seen, especially in the last two years, the fluctuation within the volatility of natural gas pricing. So a lot of corporations are really being attracted to the fact that solar and wind are now the cheapest form of electricity you can get. And when you enter into a contract for these corporations that again, are members of chambers all over the country, they’re locking into those price points that they sign these contracts for, for anywhere from 20 to 35 years. So there’s absolute predictability in their electrical costs going forward, at least for that segment that they’re getting from clean energy. The other factor that I’ll mention is it just brings it back to home wherever you are, there are clean energy jobs being created on a regular basis. There are more people in employed in the solar industry alone than all of fossil fuel industries combined. That’s just solar. That’s not wind, that’s not electric vehicles. That’s not batteries and energy storage, and energy efficiency. So clean energy is a job creator, like no other. And then it brings home capital investment, it brings home economic opportunities and tax revenues for communities. So there are lots of reasons why chambers should engage or at least be interested, and at the very least be willing to provide good information to their communities, because there’s just there’s a lot to it. And a lot of voices get heard. And I think it’s given the amount of opportunity and challenges there are, it’s just important to at least be a good provider of information for your members and your community as a whole.

Brandon Burton 14:32
Right. So it’s been a couple of years ago now but our electric provider, I’m in Texas in our electric provider, we’re part of a co op and each year they do a brisket dinner, you know so we can go and as a member of the Co Op, they provide the brisket dinner, they do a little dog and pony show about the work they’re doing and at this particular dinner I was at they put up on the slideshow, this solar farm that they had and like, Wait, that’s like, right around the corner from my house. And I had no idea that the solar farm was there. And sure enough, I’m pulling up the Google satellite images, and it’s, you know, probably a mile from my house, and had no idea. But if it was a natural gas plant or something else, like, other things would definitely stand out, and you would notice, but um, just the clean energy can make such an impact in a community without being, you know, super noticeable. But so I think that our Electric Co Op did a good job of explaining that. But as far as the chamber goes, he said, you know, most importantly, even if it’s just sharing, you know, accurate good information with their community with their members. Obviously, we can point them to you to your organization to get some that that good information to share. But as the chamber looks to get involved and say, Yeah, this is important that we create jobs in clean energy, because that’s where the future is going. Or it’s important for us to help lower those utility rates for our member businesses, and for just our community in general to be able to thrive more and have more discretionary income, all these different points that you touched on the job creation. If a chamber wanted to get involved, where do they start with being able to try to move the ball try to move the needle, so to speak in their community?

Ryan Evans 16:27
There’s, there’s quite a few places you can start. And actually, I want to jump back really quick if it’s okay, Brandon, and just common, Texas, just because you brought up Texas and you brought up two things that I’m pretty passionate about. One is realistically, most solar installations you don’t notice. So you’re absolutely right, there’s a lot of misinformation that they’re obstructive that they’re an eyesore. But yet, most times people have no idea that they’re within a mile or two of their home, because they have that low profile, and you can put up trees around them, you can put up shrubs and bushes around them. So I appreciate and love the fact that you didn’t even notice not necessarily. But then also just on Texas really quick. It’s Texas is one of my favorite stories to tell because even though they have been traditionally one of the the number one oil and gas state in the country, and they are known as an oil and gas state and Houston particular huge oil and gas market, right. Yet, Texas is the number two state in the nation for most solar installations in terms of size of those installations combined. And number one, as far as wind, this is a state that truly embraces the all of the above energy form, you know, mentality in an incredible way. And, you know, chambers, like the Greater Houston partnership, for example, are all in on this all of the above factor and even looking at new technologies like carbon capture, and all these other great things that we see out there. So I just want to throw my you know, throw a shout out for taxes just in terms of, you know, that typical state that has learned that they don’t have to just be dependent on that fossil fuel economy that there is this huge other opportunity out there for the state and for electrical ratepayers and whatnot.

Brandon Burton 18:07
I will say if you ever drive between Abilene and San Angelo, you will see the wind. As far as your eye can see, you will see windmills. So

Ryan Evans 18:16
yeah, there’s a lot of places around the country that are like that, where you just see them. But a lot of cases, there’s really not much else there. So they may as well, Saturday. Right, right. And you know, as far as how you get involved, there’s lots of ways number one, I guarantee that almost every single chamber in the country has some sort of clean energy industry a company within their membership, it may not be a solar installer, it may not be a manufacturer of solar or wind turbine parts. But it might be somebody who supplies workforce to that it might be a company that is a fencing company that puts up temporary fencing around renewable energy installations as they’re going up. So there’s, it’s incredible the supply chain that exists out into the clean energy world. So one, look at your own membership and see who’s there and see what the important issues are to talk to your utility. I always recommend you, you know, work with your utility on clean energy, because ultimately, they’re going to be the one that does a lot of it outside of the private companies that develop. But don’t also take the utilities word for it completely ask questions, look for what might be the best opportunities for your entire region and start a business Coalition for you know, that looks at sustainability and clean energy by starting a committee like that. It’s amazing what you’ll learn from your members in terms of what they’re doing to either procure clean energy on their own or through the utility, what they’re doing internally to improve their emissions outcomes so they’re more sustainable. It’s it’s pretty impressive to see what businesses do and it’s one great thing chambers can do is promote what their businesses are doing. Proactiv basis as well, that’s that’s just a great thing. Another thing that you can do, if you want to get involved is reach out to us, of course, I’m not going to give a sales pitch there. But that’s what we do. If there’s, you know, we’re happy to chat with any chamber anywhere all the time, just to say, hey, here’s the hotspots that we see, maybe this is a chance for you to engage. And lastly, look in your state for some sort of a state level clean energy or solar industry association. So prior to, as you mentioned, in the my introduction, I was the president and founder of the Utah solar industry association, we worked with chambers all across the state, trying to help educate them on solar policy and clean energy policy and how they can help protect the jobs that, you know, we’re being built by this industry within the state. So look to those associations and bring them as partners or ask them to be members, so they can kind of make sure your members are informed on the hot topics of the day regarding the clean energy industries. Yeah.

Brandon Burton 20:58
So I don’t mean to keep going back to stuff to this example, in Texas. So chambers are known for being conveners, right. And as I see a lot of this land, like with these wind farms that we’re talking about, not only are they wind farms, but they have their oil rigs that are going, they have their cattle that are grazing on the fields. And so they’ve got multiple streams of income using this land that’s very agricultural based. And if a chamber can see and recognize these opportunities, be that convener to make some introductions to help introduce some of these clean energy capabilities. On to that, that rancher or that person who has an oil rig set up or whatever it may be, I mean, we’re talking things that are very hyper focused in Texas, for sure. But other parts of the country, the land may be used for something else, but it could also be used, in addition to for wind or solar. So that convener make those introductions. Yeah,

Ryan Evans 21:58
no, that’s a great point number one. Yeah. So always and chamber should know this. And they do know this. And mean, chambers are conveners of the voice of business, the, you know, the, they’re the convener of the business communities, and realistically for their whole community. So there is an opportunity just to talk to people about what is possible. And yeah, in Texas, you will often see wind turbines right next to oil rigs, and maybe cattle grazing as well. In Ohio, you may see a solar installation, where, you know, maybe 5%, of a generational farm is being utilized for solar energy along with 5% of another farm nearby them and 10% of another farm nearby them. But those, that five or 10% of the farm property is actually giving annual revenue anywhere from 100,000 to $300,000. A year to those farm owners. And a lot of cases, it’s helping keep farmland in a family name and helping them not to have to sell it off, or because it’s a lease arrangement, or even turn some other land into a subdivision for homes. I mean, that’s, that’s just and once you put homes in that property’s gone with a solar installation for, you know, for example, in a rural farming community, typically those panels have been in the ground for, you know, 30 to 35 years, but at the same time, like you say, you’re farming on the rest of your property, you can still do some agriculture underneath the solar panels. And a lot of case you can still graze animals like sheep throughout an entire solar area. So yeah, there are lots of other ways that you can promote the land and utilize the land for economic or just community benefit.

Brandon Burton 23:40
Right. And from the farmer perspective, I say, you know, there’s a lot of government subsidies for farmers to either not grow a crop or to grow, you know, more, you know, mono cropping, you know, which has its own issues. So to be able to introduce another stream of income for these farmers could really help them actually farm what they need to and want to farm versus what the government’s paying them to do. And it gives them a lot more freedom. Absolutely. And

Ryan Evans 24:07
if you get farmer start on this, a lot of them are going to tell you, this is a property rights thing. If I want to put solar on my farm, I want to put solar on my farm, and they get pretty passionate about it speak out in lots of different state houses across the country on their property rights. And it’s don’t get in the middle of a farmer and their property rights. I’ll tell you that much right now.

Brandon Burton 24:25
That’s right. So for chambers that are listening, I’d like to hear maybe a an innovative example or two where you’ve seen whether it’s a chamber stepping into introduce clean energy policy or just implementation of some sort. What are some of these innovative things that you’ve seen across the country as as people try to lean more heavily into clean energy? Yeah,

Ryan Evans 24:52
there’s, I don’t know if I can go to innovative on how chambers participate, but I can give some really Good examples of how chambers have engaged. Okay. Oh. And that’s it’s just sometimes tough because chambers are generalists for the most part, right, they need to know a lot about a lot of different industries. And so sometimes it’s really hard to dig really far into one particular topic or subject matter. But you know, in the case of chambers, one thing that we are always encouraged by is when we see coalitions of chambers that stand up for clean energy. So we’ve seen it in Ohio, when Chambers as a collective whole, all stood up and spoke out against negative anti renewable energy legislation a few years ago, in the Northeast, and now in the southeast, we’re seeing a lot of rallying by chambers to support the possibility of offshore wind development, off the coast of the East Coast. And we’re beginning to see a little bit of that in the, in the south er, in the in the south, and in the West, and the Gulf Coast and off in the Pacific Ocean, off the coast of California, and Oregon and Washington. So we see a lot of this convening and working together. We’ve seen everything from electric vehicle ride and drive and demonstrations, to clean energy industry, hosted forums and conferences, all around renewable energy and sustainability. We’ve seen energy tours. So in Utah, where I used to live, the Salt Lake chamber had few years in a row had done energy tours, where they took their members out to various energy installations. And one of them was all about clean energy, taking them to wind taken to a solar farm, etc, etc. In and, you know, clean energy, sort of a broad topic, but, and even just a couple of weeks now, the St. Pete chamber in Florida is doing a sustainability and resilience tour, they’re going to take some of their members down to see how, amongst other things, clean energy benefited certain areas to keep the lights on, as well as other resilience efforts from some of the other communities that they can bring back to St. Pete to learn from so that they are a more resilient, more resilient community for future storms. So lots of different ways that chambers have been engaged, whether it’s op eds, whether it’s events, or just, you know, fighting for good policy at a state house or the federal level.

Brandon Burton 27:29
Very good. Those are all really good examples and ways that chambers can definitely get involved. So this question may be coming from left field for you. And if you don’t want to answer it, we can edit it out. How have you seen any integration with with Bitcoin miners? And no, there’s been a lot of talk about the energy consumption of Bitcoin mining. And then Bitcoin miners trying to make the argument with clean energy and using some of these resources to offset some of those carbon emissions and whatnot. I’ll be

Ryan Evans 28:09
honest, you may want to edit this out, I don’t know Brandon, I can give a little editorial on that. It’s, it’s a tough sell, because it is high high energy usage. So we, however, did see you know, in for a little bit in Miami, we started talking about it because the local government in Miami was really trying hard to attract some Bitcoin industry there. But that energy usage was really tough, because, you know, Florida can only expand so much in terms of their energy development, their energy usage, etc. And, you know, one of the selling factors was they have such a huge nuclear, new as nuclear energy is such a huge part of their overall energy resources. And, you know, the Bitcoin it was trying to sell that, but all of that energy was already being utilized for something else. So all of this would have just been, they would have had to develop new energy. And at that point, you’ve for the most part, it’s going to make sense to build solar. So I think in general, when it comes to Bitcoin, it’s great. There is an opportunity there, but it should not be done trying to sell it as utilizing existing resources. I think in a lot of ways. If you are going to law and try to get some bitcoin manufacturing and mining going on in your communities, you really do need to look at how are we going to provide new generation to, to supply that particular operation? Yeah. All right. Well,

Brandon Burton 29:40
we’ll we’ll see what we do with that. So I’d like to ask everyone I have on the show, if there’s any tips or action items that you’d be willing to share with those listening, if they wanted to maybe get involved more with clean energy in their communities or We’re maybe something totally off topic, but for these chambers who want to take their organization up to the next level, what would you offer for them?

Ryan Evans 30:07
Thank you. Yeah, I’ve got a few things. So number one, if not every chamber is engaged in advocacy. And I understand that, at the very minimum, though Chambers as the voice of business and conveners in their community should look to be a good source of reliable information. And much like a lot of other things in the world, there’s so much misinformation put out in the world about clean energy. There are so many groups that are not local, yet, they’ll bring in people from, you know, from far away to come in and fight renewable energy projects in small communities, and make it seem like this opposition is so loud, we call them NIMBY groups, so not my backyard groups. So if nothing else, I think it’s really important that chambers look to be sources of good third party reliable expert information. So that those that actually live in the community can, you know, can really look at the facts and say, We want to make a good informed decision. So that’s, that’s sort of number one. Another just sort of tip and maybe a tidbit that I want to throw out there. There is, you know, chambers by nature tend to really love bipartisan policy. That’s sort of how we work right, we bring people together so that we can find the common ground, what’s best for the business community, what’s best for an economy, an advocate for that, whether it’s coming from the AR side, or the D side, it doesn’t really matter, we try to find the best possible policy for business businesses in our state. You know, and we certainly saw a really good example of that in the bipartisan infrastructure package that was passed two years ago, phenomenal is twice something 20 years in the making, it’s something we should all be proud of in the chamber industry that we’ve all fought for it. And that’s going to lead to everything from bridges and roads, but also to transmission lines for more utilities, for more electric vehicle charging infrastructure out there in the world as we make this transition. So there’s lots of clean energy angles on that. But the tidbit that I want to share that, yeah, I built it up to get to it. There was, you know, not a lot of chambers love the fact that the inflation Reduction Act was passed on a partisan basis. And I understand that, and I completely agree, this is a tidbit that I think is really important for people to understand. If you take away all of the other aspects of the inflation Reduction Act, and only look at the clean energy provisions within that which, you know, amounted to about a $379 billion package way, way less than what that quote unquote, green New Deal was being presented as many many years ago. But that particular legislation, just the clean energy provisions, almost every single major component of that policy has a history of bipartisan support. And a and a lot of them have a proven return on investment for that type of state tax incentive. As a lot of people say that inflation Reduction Act is really carrot heavy, and very stick light, meaning it’s all about the incentives trying to you know, trying to drive innovation and spur this new aspect to our economy, rather than penalizing and putting out more regulatory efforts that none of us really like to see in the world. So again, just I think it’s really important that something that I’ve been very passionate about is saying, if you just take out those clean energy aspects, you will see that so many of them either had bipartisan support, or suggested by and promoted by Republicans versus the Democrats that voted for the package. So really just go beyond the talking points of partisan and say, Ah, actually, there’s some really great stuff in here that’s proven value, and has proven to be supported by both sides of the aisle and people across the country.

Brandon Burton 33:56
Right. I appreciate you sharing the tips and tidbits with us there. As we look to the future of chambers, and I see a lot of the work you’re doing is future leaning. But as we look to the future of chambers, how do you see the future of chambers in their purpose going forward?

Ryan Evans 34:15
I think chambers have a more important role now than they’ve ever had before. We’ve, you know, been building up the chamber industry for 100 years, you know, over the last 10 years, I think they’ve gotten more and more influential. Really, there’s so much within the industry that’s really looking to lift up chambers, whether it’s a rural chamber, a State Chamber, a Regional Chamber, whatever it may be. But I think now is maybe more important a time than ever, because there is so much that at least that I see legislation that tends to move from state to state and Statehouse to statehouse and so it’s an opportunity not only to really stand up for your business community and those things in your state or your region that you see as important to your quality of life. But it’s, you know, it’s really this chance to look and say, Hey, what’s happening over in this state? And is that going to come to my state? Because chances are these days it is. And I bring up things in my own mind when I say this, but things like dei policies, so you know, something that the Chamber world has been super passionate about, and very much engaged in terms of advocating for more dei within their communities within their businesses and building up certification programs around Dei. Yet, in a lot of states, we’re starting to see anti from various administrations and now maybe state houses of the legislature, we’re starting to see sort of pushback on that dei work. And it’s, you know, this isn’t even in the world of clean energy for me, but it’s really important to chambers, and therefore, it’s sort of just a good example of things to look for, that you can learn from other states, what they’ve already gone through and say, Hey, is there a good chance that’s going to come to my state? And how do I either fight it off or engage it depending upon what the policy might be? How do we best represent the business community, rather than being caught off guard, let’s make sure that we’ve got our best arguments upfront and ready to go to help be, you know, again, that longtime voice of business for our community and represent our members the best we can. I

Brandon Burton 36:27
love that perspective. And that’s really one of the greatest opportunities of living in the United States is you’re able to look at other states and the models that they do and, you know, be in these individual laboratories and saying, This is what worked well there. And this is didn’t you know, and as we apply it in our communities in our state, this is why it could be good, or why it would be a disaster and really be able to make a good argument based on facts and data. So I think that’s a great perspective. Well, Ryan, this has been a for me at least, it’s been a fun conversation. It’s been an eye opening conversation, I’m sure for many, but for any listeners who wanted to reach out and connect with you to learn more about what the Chamber’s been have raised innovation and clean energy can do and, and how you can maybe work with them, what would be the best way for them to reach out and connect? hit

Ryan Evans 37:16
our website, which is ChambersforInnovation.com. Feel free to email me directly my email is revans@chambersforinnovation.com. More than happy to chat with anyone, whether it’s just a question, you want to do more, you’ve got something that you’re just not sure about whatever the case, the issue may be, and again, this can be anything from electric vehicles and electric vehicle charging, to offshore wind supply chain to solar and wind, whatever it is, if we don’t know the answer within our team, we certainly can point you in the right direction to some some great experts out there in the world, that can be a really good news resource for you.

Brandon Burton 37:57
That’s awesome. I will get that in our show notes for this episode, as well. So people can pull that up and get in contact with you. But it’s been great to have you on the podcast. Ryan, I appreciate you setting aside some time and and to share some of these insights with the Chamber champions that listen and to really help sharpen their focus on why focus on clean energy in their communities is important. So thank you for being with us today.

Ryan Evans 38:22
Thank you, Brandon. I appreciate it.

Brandon Burton 38:24
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