Writer: Liz Palmer
2 min read October 2022 — As the business environment evolves, supporting key market players, like chambers of commerce, tend to follow suit. Invest: spoke with the leaders at the helm of these chambers in the Triangle to understand how they have begun repositioning to keep up with their members’ shifting needs.
Kade Kimber, President, Harmony: NC LGBT+ Allied Chamber of Commerce
When you’re talking about chambers of commerce in general, one of the biggest challenges is that the long-term model is stale. That model primarily consists of expensive monthly rubber chicken dinners and a repeat of the same programming month after month. That’s not what professionals or businesses are looking for, so clinging to that model only ensures there won’t be long-term survivability. Because our organization when I became president was no different from any municipal chamber in this regard, we as a board knew we had to work to adapt rapidly in order to remain viable. This was particularly true when factoring in the effects from the pandemic. It was even more apparent when hearing feedback from past, current, and prospective members, once we resumed in-person events. In short, it became crystal clear that what had been done for years no longer was enough.
In 2021, the board voted to keep the official affiliation of the National Gay & Lesbian Chamber of Commerce (NGLCC) and act upon it through a shift away from being solely a social group or club to instead being a business and professionally focused organization that utilized social events as a means by which to conduct business and grow the community. Everything that has happened in the year since then has included overhauling membership benefits and corporate partnerships, transforming the programming and events, initiatives to increase accessibility, key relationships we’ve developed at the city, county, state and national level, planning for our 2023 PrideLife Expo and launching a capital campaign to fund the nation’s first LGBT-centric coworking space and entrepreneurial incubator that will be located in Raleigh. It all stems from that singular vote.
Mark Lawson, President, Cary Chamber of Commerce
In tandem, we are always working on ways to help make our Chamber stronger and more innovative. We are the seventh largest chamber in North Carolina. Like all great organizations, you want to constantly be reinventing yourself, stretching and growing. Strategically, we are looking at things where we would like to take the Cary Chamber for the next 60 years. We will be spending some time on that, enhancing our brand and presence, while remaining laser focused to the needs of our existing industries and our business recruitment activities.
CJ Broderick, President & CEO, Greater Durham Black Chamber of Commerce
Practicing equity requires us to ensure that those that are impacted by policies, but have not been given access to participate in the design and development of such policies, be meaningfully engaged in the process. We represent a membership and the broader Black business community that have not been given access to economic and workforce development in meaningful ways. Through the GDBCC, there can be advocacy and engagement in the planning, design and execution of our economic development and workforce development initiatives.
Our goal is to be able to balance some of the non-inclusive and inequitable ways our city and county has done this work in the past. In recent years, there has been tremendous growth in the Durham economy, coupled with tremendous demographic growth. That growth has not unfolded in a balanced way. Our region is facing issues around affordable housing due to economic development policy and practices that were not balanced. We must find ways to ensure that we have meaningful representation to ensure that our practices and policies are diverse, inclusive and equitable.
Liz Simpers, President, Wake Forest Area Chamber of Commerce
We have around 675 Chamber members and half of them are at the entrepreneurial level, so small businesses will always matter. Like most businesses, we must diversify our membership. Small businesses are growing, and we are truly living in the age of the entrepreneur. Our larger community partners, such as the Town of Wake Forest, Wake Electric and Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, are giving back to smaller businesses and helping us maintain a community that is growing.
A couple of years ago, the Chamber recognized that people wanted to give back to the community and a 501(c)(3) Foundation was the way to do it. The Wake Forest Chamber exists to develop business and the Wake Forest Chamber Foundation exists to develop leaders. Led by our executive director, Corey Hutcherson. We offer a variety of programs, such as Youth Leadership Wake Forest and the Career Readiness Academy, and we just launched a program called the Young Entrepreneurs Academy where we are finding a way to give actual seed money to high-school students wanting to start a business. We are finding more and more that our Chamber members want to leave a legacy in town by financially supporting these initiatives. The Foundation allows members to leave a legacy of future leaders.
Matthew Coppedge, President & CEO, Garner Chamber of Commerce
We are trying to make sure that we are bigger than just a membership-based organization, and more of a community player that helps address and bring discussions to the problems. We can’t solve all of the problems, but we can bring together the people who can. Our job is to bring the development community, the town and regional governments, the business community and others together to make these things happen. That’s what the chamber of the future is, to play in this larger scale community economic development role but also find a balance between helping small businesses and figuring out how to educate them so they’re successful as well. It is a very wide breadth of things that we can do and figuring out which things are the most beneficial to focus on is really what we are doing to create the chamber of the future.
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