Friday, August 27, 2021 « 5
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August Feature From The Chamber
By: Donna Carlson Executive Director, Estes Chamber of Commerce
Who needs to be at your table? I was standing in the parking lot of the library with Claudine Perrault talking about the need for us to knock down proverbial walls that divide people in this town to create bridges. She had a beautiful idea. A bridge is a great way to connect, but what if we create tables instead? It's around the table where we make things happen, where we connect, plan, dream, listen and form the future together. The Chamber has created a table with the Estes Valley Library District to talk about books that help us thrive in business and dream of other tables to build. In the interest of building a better place to work, live and play in Estes Park, there are lots of tables where things happen. In our Referral Engine workshop we worked out which tables will connect us best with customers under the premise that the work we do to refer others will have a boomerang effect for our business. Case in point, the Estes Park Nonprofit Resource Center (EPNRC) invited the Chamber to the table with the Estes Arts District to collaborate on a grant for Friends of Folk. Not only did our conversation yield a grant for the Arts District, it yielded a new Chamber member and created a bigger table for the arts to create community!
The Art Center created a table around the Estes Valley Plein Air National Paint Out that included sponsors, hotels, and food suppliers who celebrate the creation of art in this magnificent landscape. Looking at my calendar I see many nonprofits bringing business together with the community around a proverbial table -- Pumpkins & Pilsners, Autumn Gold, The Gumbo Dinner… all of these are critical connections in our community that create what I call “we.” It's fundamental to a Chamber of Commerce to gather all the “me” perspectives, connect the dots and then create a bigger “we”! The Chamber is not a person or a board, it's a collective voice of many business and nonprofit members creating a better place to live, work and play together. It's a whole made up of many wholes. Our business community is more than just a tax base, we are the community. Our employees are the people who eat, shop and school in Estes. We are bringing our members around the table to create a stronger, more unified voice of business to leverage: Paid parking revenue put to use in a way that benefits downtown business; The town's vacation rental philosophy formed in collaboration with business owners; A business-led effort to streamline and simplify development planning resources. The Chamber is at the table with Parking & Transit, Town Trustees and the Community Development department to make sure the voice of business has a seat at the table. We've brought Visit Estes Park to the table with the Vacation Rental Council to help us get access to data we need to serve the town's fact finding efforts around vacation rentals and workforce housing. We're also creating more tables this fall for the F&B, retail and healthcare industries and in the spring for the lodging and wedding industries. Who needs to be at your table?