The Elbert County Chamber of Commerce is encouraging the community to help them celebrate “National Support Your Local Chamber of Commerce” today.
As part of the celebration, Executive Director/President Rebecca Holliday said she wants Elbert County businesses, nonprofits and citizens to know that the chamber if “always here” for anything they may need.
“I always want people to know they can reach out to us,” Holliday said. “We’re always here.”
The local chamber of commerce, housed in the Elberton Civic Center at 148 College Ave., has helped support businesses and promote tourism in Elbert County for over 90 years.
The chamber offers memberships for students, civic organizations, nonprofits, individuals, professionals such as doctors, lawyers and dentists, utility companies, financial institutions and businesses of all sizes.
Memberships are renewed annually and are different prices based on the type of membership.
Regardless of size, Holliday said the same benefits are offered to all memberships.
Chamber benefits include free notary services, health insurance and 401(k) beneits for businesses with two to 50 employees, use of conference room and office space at the chamber office, business referrals, access to design services, business consultation services, networking/educational opportunities, ribbon cutting, event promotions, job posting and more.
Once a month, representatives from the Small Business Develoment Center from the University of Georgia are available to schedule meetings with chamber members in order to offers services such as strategic planning, capital acquistiion, accounting and finance, human resources, marketing, startup assistance, international trade, procurement, legal and compliance issues and business management.
“Everybody that I have gotten to meet that has met with the small business development guy has gotten a lot out of it,” Holliday said. “I think they’re suprisposed. He’s a professional business consultant. They’re incentivized to meet with people. It’s not fluff. It’s been really helpful.”
Holliday said the chamber receives an approximate 10,000 phone calls annually, answering questions on “the businesses, activities, lifestyles and social aspects,” of the Elbert County community.
The chamber is led by Holliday and a board of directors including chairman Kam McClary, treasurer Phil Pitts and board members Michelle Scarborough, Bridgette Matthews, John Drury, Tracie York, Donna Webb, Susan Fortson, Tammy Harlow, Darin Rucker, Haley Oakley, Peaches Diaz, Fritz Bronner, Quinn Floyd, Annie Hill, Mart Clamp and Stacy Heard.
Holliday said Hill is working to establish a charitable foundation for the chamber in order to better support nonprofit organizations in the community. The foundation will be a chamber-affiliated 501(c)(3) nonprofit that is run by a separate board.
“We have a lot of nonprofit members and we recognize that while the chamber of commerce works primarily to help businesses, we also want to help nonprofits and we can do that better with a charitable foundation,” Holliday said.
While the chamber can currently take donations that are not tax deductible, Holliday said the new foundation will be able to give tax deductions and will have greater access to grants and other capital funds to help serve the nonprofits in the community.
Holliday said she also hopes that the foundation will help to enhance the work the local nonprofits are doing by creating a pool of volunteers than be accessed whenever groups need extra volunteers.
A vast majority of the chamber’s current nonprofit membership is through the nearly 130 churches in Elbert County, Holliday said. In February, the chamber started a roundtable discussion with the local faith leaders, also headed up by Hill, to discuss how churches and the chamber could address issues in the community.
The group has met twice since February, focusing their May meeting on food insecurity and will also focus an upcoming meeting on mental health.
In looking at more traditional aspects of the chamber, Holliday said she is working with the Development Authority of Elbert County, Elberton and Bowman, along with the Elbert County School District, to create work-force initiatives in order to better bridge students who don’t attend college directly into the workforce.
After the bombing and destruction of the Georgia Guidestones in July, Holliday said the chamber has had to redirect tourism efforts to “show off Elberton and Elbert County,” and has hired Amy PerezValasco as a part-time tourism director to help with all things tourism.
PerezValasco and Holliday are currently working on creating self-guided tours for the area and helping bring Keep Elbert County Beautiful’s granite as art trail to life. Holliday also said she has helped connect local businesses to the Color the World Project, and four new murals around the county are in the works.
While a list of initatievs people can take to support the chamber can be found in a letter to the editor from Holliday on page 6A, Holliday said the number one thing for members to do in working with the chamber is to “reach out.”
“We have hundreds of members [and] we can’t always know when somebody needs our assistance or needs something specific, but we’re always here to help,” Holliday said. “Don’t ever hesitate to reach out to us. I try to reach out and ask and keep in touch and we try to be proactive about letting people know what we do and what services are out there. I think we have really valuable services if people will use them.”