A Year In Review

A message from outgoing president, Amanda Wiens

A Year in Review- 2023

The purpose of the Niverville Chamber is to both advocate and to provide support to our members. We strive to serve as the voice of business in supporting a growing economy and thriving business community. I want to start off by thanking our members for continuing to trust us with this important initiative. We couldn’t do the things we do without our members and their support.

This year, the theme of our AGM & Dinner is growth. It felt like a fitting theme for our membership, the community of Niverville as a whole, and for our local Chamber as well.

In February and March, last year, we held a two day strategic planning session that was run by Shelley Morris of Morris Wrighton Association Management. Our focus for the planning session was to create a scalable foundation for our local chamber so we had the ability to keep up with the growth we’re seeing in our business community. We wanted to ensure we could continue to serve our legacy members, and serve them better, while building capacity to be able to serve the ever growing membership base as well. This led to the creation of several committees that took on the tasks of recreating our event schedule, increasing opportunities for sponsorship and involvement from our members, rethinking our branding and communication channels, and increasing our ability to advocate to different levels of government on behalf of our membership.

You may have noticed an increase in events, and the size of the events we are hosting and looking to host this year. You may have seen our new membership brochure, that details all the benefits of membership with the Niverville Chamber, or the Sponsorship brochure, that details our events over the next year and what opportunities are available for your business to get involved with them. You may have been contacted for feedback on one of the many initiatives we have taken on this year for advocacy. Or, you may just feel like you’ve heard the Niverville Chamber mentioned more than you used to. All of these are products of the hard work our board members, and staff, have been putting in this past year on these committees. Each board member is on at least one of those committees, and I’d like to thank them for the countless hours I’ve seen this past year, where they have put in work to ensure that we have built that foundation that can continue to serve our growing membership moving forward. And to our Executive Director, Bre-Ann, who has been sitting in on almost every single one of those meetings since she joined us in June- thank you for keeping us organized and for the tremendous amount of work you’ve done.

I’m just going to end my report with a few of the highlights from 2022. It was so fantastic to see so many of your faces at our first big event of the year, the BDC Sponsored Wine & Cheese Night. We saw a tremendous turnout last March to both network, and to hear from Pierre Cleroux, BDC’s Vice President of Research and Chief Economist, who spoke on the risks and opportunities presented by the current economic environment. In August we were able to host our annual golf tournament at Old Drover’s Run here in town. This is always one of the highlights of our year, especially when the weather was as lovely as it was this year. In September we were able to host Chuck Davidson, the President of The MB Chamber of Commerce, and our MC for the next portion of our evening, for a full day tour of our community. Chuck spent the day meeting with businesses and hearing about the needs, goals, and barriers our business community is experiencing. In October, the Chamber in partnership with The Niverville Citizen, hosted and moderated the Candidates Forum to give the Town Council candidates, and the citizens of Niverville, a venue to hear about and ask questions of each candidates’ platform. Finally, in November, it was fantastic to see so many of you once again at our Beer, Banter & Biz Chamber Mixer that was hosted at a Niverville Nighthawks game. If your business is in a position to rent that room out for some team bonding, I would highly recommend it. Finally, as many of our businesses know, commercial recycling saw a lot of changes this year with the closure of Eastman Recycling services in October. We are excited to announce tonight that Bristal Hauling, the Town of Niverville, and the Niverville Chamber, have been working hard over the past few months to find an alternate solution to support our businesses. Bristal Hauling has put together an extremely competitive commercial recycling program, and the Town of Niverville has agreed to provide subsidies to Niverville businesses to bring the cost even lower. Thank you Bristal Hauling and the Town of Niverville, for your collaboration on this project. We will be sending more information out on this in the next week or so. So please watch your email for details. And I would also like to thank the businesses that worked with us throughout this process, to help us understand the impact this had on their business and what they were looking for in a program moving forward.

So, to our current members, we are excited about serving you this coming year. And to our future members, be sure to track down one of our board members, or our Executive Director, later tonight to ask about what membership might look like for your business.

--Amanda Wiens, Outgoing President Niverville Chamber of Commerce