Hello members and friends of the HPG Chamber,
As I turn over the board Presidency at the end of the month, I want to thank all of you for the honor of being chosen to serve my hometown chamber. While 2021 has been a challenging year for us all, the H/PG chamber has made strides in achieving our mission to aggregate business, local government, and other enterprises to develop ideas and bring solutions to our community.
I’m happy to share that we appreciate your renewals in 2021 and are seeing robust early renewals for 2022. If you haven’t had a chance to renew your membership for 2022, please know that staff is on hand to help if you want to do it before the end of the year.
This has also been a wonderful year for new members–almost 50 new businesses have joined us in 2021.
Here are seven more highlights of 2021:
- Hundreds of you came back together safely to play golf, attend roundtables and grand openings, accept in-person meetings, and party on the James at the annual mixer in October.
- Five of you helped with our advocacy effort to establish a convenient veteran service location in HPG.
- Staff advocacy brought Business Comcast to an industrial area that needed high speed internet and we added public WiFi at the Visitor Center.
- Staff creativity brought us the excitement of a new branded trail to and through HPG. We also worked alongside others to bring a new live music event to the area, which will continue in its third year in 2022.
- Eighty of you, so far, have answered our workforce survey, which will be summarized and distributed in the new year.
- We employed interns from Longwood University, Richard Bland College, VSU, and John Tyler Community College, and couldn’t speak more highly of the experience. We will be working with our members in 2022 to explore diverse internship opportunities with you.
- We adopted a highway to be sure a major gateway to HPG is kept litter free! Next clean up of Route 10 will be next year.
My parting words are to ask you to consider volunteering for something through the HPG Chamber in 2022. We have so many opportunities to get you engaged with philanthropy, networking, and local government, and leadership. We all do more when we work together to support our local communities and economies.
Wishing you all a joyous Christmas and a remarkably successful next year,
Lacie
