New Year Celebrations and Reflections

By John Bwarie CEO, Alhambra Chamber of Commerce

Make sure to put the Lunar New Year Festival on your calendar for January 29! Starting at Main Street in downtown Alhambra, you’ll nd a blocks-long event with two stages, dozens of booths, entertainment, cooking demonstrations, a wellness pavilion, and lots of giveaways. Join the entire community and visitors from all around Southern California as we celebrate the beginning of the year of the rabbit. In the Chinese culture, the rabbit is considered the luckiest out of all the twelve animals in the zodiac. It symbolizes mercy, elegance, and beauty which is a wonderful way to imagine the possibilities of this new year.

As we look to a prosperous future, we can look back at 2022 with pride as a community. The year started out with an omicron surge that delayed the promised “opening up” of our community, and we used that time to continue to retool how we could support our business community. We focused on small business growth and sustainability, with a focus on those unique only-in-Alhambra businesses. We began last year with a successful Lunar New Year Festival, the only public lunar new year festival in the San Gabriel Valley in 2022. We also launched our restaurant support initiative, including Restaurant of the Week, AlhambraEats. com food website, our restaurant relief grant program sponsored by Wells Fargo, and Alhambra Eats Discovery Weekend.

We also launched our Asian Business Leadership Council to support AAPI business growth and entrepreneurship, as well as our Nonpro t Council, which developed the Alhambra Cares campaign and continues to nd ways to support the service sector in Alhambra. We continued to host mixers via Alhambra Connects, provide technical training online and in person, and developed one-on-one support to help businesses start or grow in Alhambra.

While often we share news of grand openings (or in the case of

Target this year, grand RE-openings), the Chamber is about building a stronger, resilient community in Alhambra. When we celebrated our President’s awards in March and installed our new board in September, our community came together to celebrate what makes us able to thrive in the face of pandemic, in ation, regulation, and other disasters. We are stronger as a connected community, as a group of diverse individuals and businesses working to be the best City for future generations.