Monthly Piece Published in the Reading Eagle - December

Thank you MVPs! 

A mission is a “strongly felt aim, ambition, or calling.”

A vision is an “inspirational statement of an idealistic emotional future of a company or group.”

The mission of the TriCounty Area Chamber of Commerce is “leveraging the power of membership to provide valued membership services and proactive leadership for the tri-county region.”

The vision of the TriCounty Area Chamber of Commerce is “the tri-county area has a strong sense of place – quality of life, economic opportunity, and generations of leaders- to support the region’s businesses and communities.”

For a non-profit organization, your mission and vision drive the focus and the purpose of the work that you do. As a chamber our Member benefits should align with our mission and vision as well as the purpose of holding an event and the topics that speakers would present on at those events should also align with the mission and vision that has been agreed upon for guiding the organization.

In 2021 we, as well as all our Member businesses, were trying to figure out how to recuperate from 2020 and succeed in 2021. A major revenue stream for our organization is from events that we hold and we did not hold events for ¾ of 2020 and we were uncertain what the event calendar would look like for 2021. However, we continued to offer other opportunities, some virtual, but also maintained member benefits and exposure opportunities for our Members.

With our ongoing programming, we wanted to stay true to our mission and vision but needed the appropriate resources to do so. To assist our organization in providing support to all our Members, starting with January of 2021, we decided to offer an opportunity for Members names to be associated with almost everything we were doing, offering, event we were having, etc. We developed our Mission and Vision Partner program, our “MVPs” as we liked to call them. These companies would be MVPs to our organization, providing us with financial support when we needed it. Our first MVP opportunity took our MVP support from January through June; we had 16 very generous Members participate in the MVP program. Our 2nd round of MVPs provided support starting in July and their support is continuing till the end of this calendar year 2021; our second round featured 13 of the original 16 from the first round.

Each of these companies made a financial contribution to our organization in exchange for sponsorship of our REACH program, our educational seminars, our Chamber Chat show on Facebook Live, and they benefitted from marketing on our website, our event registration pages, in our ongoing email communication with our Members, and had exposure on our social media pages. They were the steel keeping our organization strong through tough times!

It is important for me to recognize these incredible businesses that went above and beyond and supported our organization being an MVP!

Tompkins VIST Bank 

The 1st Round also included support from Boyertown Oil & Propane-Cool Crew, Keller Williams Realty Group, and SimplyPEO.  A huge thank you to these 3 additional TriCounty Area Chamber of Commerce Members for their support!