When I stepped into this role in April, I was excited to have the chance to make a difference in Roseburg and Douglas County. I also knew that to do it, I had to do three things: listen, earn your trust, and deliver results right away. Five months in, this is a plain accounting of how that is going, what we have heard, and where we are headed next.

First, we listened

Early on we surveyed businesses across our county. Most of the people who answered were not Chamber members, and they told us why. The message was consistent: they were not sure what the Chamber did for them, and they were not sure it was worth their trust.

That is hard to hear. It is also the most useful thing anyone said to me this year, because it gave us a clear job. Every decision since has been measured against one question: does this make the Chamber more useful to the businesses of Douglas County?

One piece of feedback came up again and again: membership dues were priced too high. So I looked into it. I compared our dues against chambers across Oregon, and the feedback was right. We rebuilt our dues structure from the ground up so that it is fair, in line with chambers our size across the state, and matched to the value a business actually receives. A chamber membership should be within reach of every business that wants one, from the sole proprietor to the largest employer in our county, and now it is.

We got our own house in order

A chamber cannot ask for trust if it is not doing the work itself. I will not ask a member, a partner, or a volunteer to do something I am not willing to do myself, or that I am not willing to ask our organization to do. So we started with ourselves.

One of our first orders of business was joining the Umpqua Economic Development Partnership as a member. If we are going to ask businesses to invest in the organizations that move our county forward, the Chamber needs to be doing exactly that.

Behind the scenes, we updated our accounting checks and balances. We moved our membership database to a new platform, cleaned out years of outdated contact records, and rebuilt our invoicing, applications, and member communications. We have started the process of rewriting our bylaws, and we are updating our employee handbook and our policies and procedures.

That is the quiet work, and all of it is necessary. It is the difference between a chamber that runs on goodwill alone and one that runs on goodwill backed by systems that last.

For the first four months, I was the Chamber's only employee. On August 1, we hired our first employee, an Office Manager and Executive Assistant, and the Chamber is now a team of two. That is a start, and we will grow from here.

We are also investing in that team from day one. Within weeks of her start, we sent her to the WACE Academy, the same four-year chamber training program I went through, for her first year. Chamber work is a profession with its own skill set, and I want every person on our staff trained to the highest standard in it. That is how we build a Chamber that lasts beyond any one person.

We added more value

Membership should pay for itself. So in August we launched a brand new website at roseburgchamber.com, and it is more than a fresh coat of paint. It is the platform for a whole new set of member tools.

Members now have an enhanced job board, member deals and promotions, a member calendar, and one online portal to register for every event. We built new resource pages for employers, for job seekers, and for businesses. Experience Roseburg now lives on our site, alongside a new page called Make Roseburg Home for the people and businesses deciding to put down roots here.

And there is so much more to come.

We are building relationships

The most important work of these five months has not happened at a desk. It has happened in conversations with business owners, city and county leaders, our economic development partners, sponsors, and the people who have kept our community running for decades. A chamber is only as strong as its relationships, and building those relationships, one meeting at a time, is the job.

That means showing up. I have been at local events, at community meetings, at ribbon cuttings, and in the seats at city council. It also means the early mornings and the late nights that no one sees. That is part of the role, and it is a part I take extreme pride in. If I am asking our community to show up for the Chamber, the Chamber needs to show up first.

In June we launched Roseburg Connect, a networking series, with the Cow Creek Band of Umpqua Tribe of Indians as our first sponsor. Since then Banner Bank and Staples have hosted, and we added a Marketing Mindset Master Class so members leave with something they can use on Monday morning. These rooms are full, and the conversations in them are exactly what a chamber should be making possible.

We grew

Membership has gone from 165 to 209 since April. That is a 27 percent increase in five months, and we are only getting started. Our goal is 400 members. In September, we brought on our first outside membership sales representative to help us get there, and that means more businesses across Douglas County will hear directly what the Chamber can do for them.

The number matters for a reason beyond the number. The larger our Chamber, the more influence we carry and the louder our voice when we advocate for a pro-business Douglas County. Every member who joins adds weight to what we say at City Hall, at the County, in Salem, and in every room where decisions about business get made.

We also secured our first new Chairman Circle sponsor. That level of partnership signals something important: the largest employers and institutions in our region see the Chamber as a place worth investing in.

The numbers matter, but two conversations this summer mattered more.

One member told me they had decided to drop their membership. Then April came, they saw a difference right away, and they stayed. They came to the Marketing Mindset Master Class and left excited to put what they learned to work in their business. A few weeks later I ran into them at an event, and they stopped to thank me for the work we are doing. That is what the Chamber is supposed to feel like.

Another business had been a Chamber member years ago and stepped away around 2019. They had also worked with me before, in a previous role. When they heard I was coming to Roseburg, they started a membership application on their own, before anyone reached out. They already knew what a chamber can do when it is run well, and they wanted back in.

Those two stories are why I do this job.

What I brought to the starting line

Five months of results raise a fair question: how did all of this happen so fast? The answer is preparation, and I want to share it, because it shapes everything we are about to do.

Think of a marathon runner. By the time she reaches the starting line, the real work is already done. The early mornings, the long training runs, the years of building strength and discipline all happened out of sight. The crowd sees the race. The runner knows it was won in the preparation. When I stepped up to the starting line in Roseburg this April, I brought nine years of preparation with me, and that is what let us move fast from day one.

This is how I prepared. The two sets of letters after my name, ACE and IOM, are the training runs.

IOM stands for the Institute for Organization Management, a program run by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation. It is the national training standard for people who lead chambers and associations. It takes four years to complete, nearly one hundred hours of coursework on top of a full-time job, and it covers the things this work actually requires: governance, finance, membership, advocacy, board relations, and how to run an organization that answers to a board and a community at the same time. Every year I sat in those classrooms alongside chamber and association leaders from across the country, and every year I came home with something I could put to use.

ACE stands for Accredited Chamber Executive, a designation awarded by the Western Association of Chamber Executives, the professional association for chamber leaders across the western United States. It exists to push chamber executives to keep raising their skills, it comes with a code of conduct, and it has to be earned again every five years. It carries its own education requirements through WACE, including the four-year Academy program, so it represents years of additional study on top of IOM. Consideration begins with a nomination from chamber executives who already hold the designation, which means the people who know this profession best have to vouch for your work. As of this writing, twenty-nine chamber executives across the entire West hold an active ACE designation. Oregon is home to more than eighty chambers of commerce, and three of those executives are in Oregon. I am one of the three.

I share all of this for one reason. I want you to know how passionate I am about chamber work, about partnerships and collaboration, and about being a champion for our community. Chamber work is a profession, with a body of knowledge, a set of standards, and a code of conduct, and I love it. To me it is more than a profession. It is a lifestyle, with seasons of its own. Chamber people have never met a stranger. We see potential in the smallest of ideas and we champion business success. We are convenors of leaders and influencers, and we are catalysts for change. And change is exactly what the Chamber and Douglas County need in order to grow.

I have given nine years of my career to learning what a chamber can do for a community when it is run with intention. Along the way I wrote a book about it, The Chamber Clarity Agenda, a planning system for chamber professionals built on the idea that everyone on a chamber team carries responsibility for growth and that relationship building is real work deserving real time. At the end of September, our team will attend the Oregon State Chamber of Commerce conference, where I will be one of the breakout instructors, teaching fellow chamber professionals from the book and on time management. Douglas County now has a chamber executive who has done that work, and I am pouring every bit of it into our county, because our businesses deserve nothing less.

Those letters are my commitment to hold myself to a higher standard than the one I ask of anyone else, and I am still running. I have my eye on a few more letters in the years ahead, because the learning is never finished. It is the same standard I am building our Chamber to meet. Everything we are doing is designed to bring the Roseburg Area Chamber to a national standard of excellence, with the goal of becoming an accredited chamber of commerce through the U.S. Chamber. There are roughly two hundred accredited chambers in this country, and I intend for the Roseburg Area Chamber to be the first in Oregon.

A new chapter for Douglas County

I am one of many new faces. Leadership is changing across Douglas County right now, in our cities, our institutions, and our organizations, and I am excited about it. New leaders bring fresh energy and fresh ideas, and the chance to build relationships from the ground up, with intention. I want to be a good partner to every one of them.

I will also be honest about something. Since I started, I have been on the receiving end of some comments that were less than kind. Some people will bleed on me from wounds I did not cause. That is alright. I will not always make everyone happy, and part of leading is making peace with that.

Here is what I believe. As leaders and as a community, we will not always agree, and we should not. Good decisions come from hearing different views. What matters is how we disagree. My commitment is to build a positive atmosphere and real relationships, the kind where we can respectfully disagree, talk things out face to face, and move forward together. That is how trust is built, and trust is the only way I see us pushing economic development, business growth, workforce, and the other hard topics forward to real, tangible results. Our county is ready for that. I am ready for it too.

Roseburg Forum returns September 28

Our membership luncheons are coming back with a fresh name and a new look, and the name has a story. Going through the Chamber's records, I came across typed meeting minutes from 1925, the year the membership luncheon was first formed. They called it the Forum. This September, more than a century later, we launch our new luncheon as the Roseburg Forum, with intentionality behind it: new formats, new faces on stage, and more opportunities to meet. It will be an entirely new experience for attendees, and every new member will receive one free ticket to see it for themselves.

Thank you to the Cow Creek Band of Umpqua Tribe of Indians, our new season sponsor, for making this possible.

To those who held season tickets or table sponsorships, you will be honored through the end of 2026. A new pricing structure begins in 2027. A better experience means better quality, and better quality costs more to produce. Better program, better value, stronger Chamber. Win, win, win.

Straight talk on 410 SE Spruce Street

There is a lot of misinformation and rumor circulating about the Chamber building, so let me be direct.

Yes, the building needs work. We are going through the proper procedures to review exactly what that work is. No large projects have been started. The only work done so far has been sanitization and purging old items that were contaminated. Once we have a full scope of work, we will sit down with the City of Roseburg and come up with a plan.

In the meantime, the Cow Creek Tribe has graciously welcomed our staff into the Umpqua Business Center, directly across the street from the Chamber. We are also in conversations about reimagining what the Chamber building could be, and we will share more once we have a clearer picture. Everything we do here will be in the best interest of the business community, and I am excited about the possibilities.

Project Leadership launches in October

For more than three decades, Project Leadership has developed the people who go on to lead our community. This October, the program returns reimagined, with a stronger civic leadership focus that prepares the next generation to serve on the boards, commissions, and councils that shape our county's future. Each class will take on a hands-on community project and leave something real behind. Leadership is not something we wait for. It is something we grow.

What else is coming

Candidate Forum, October 12. Candidates running for office in Roseburg will be invited to share their vision for our community and respond to questions that matter to the people they hope to serve. The event is free and open to the public. Seating is limited to 100, and admission is by RSVP. More details are coming soon.

Economic Forecast, November 17. Dr. Christopher Thornberg of Beacon Economics will keynote. He is one of the most respected economists in the country, and his forecasts are followed by business and government leaders nationwide. We are working with our economic development partners to help underwrite the cost of bringing him to Douglas County. More details are coming soon.

The Roseburg Business Impact Awards, February 11. The RBI Awards, for short, are a reimagined program to honor the businesses in Roseburg and Douglas County doing the work to make an impact. Approximately ten awards will be presented at a black tie celebration of business in Douglas County on February 11 at Seven Feathers Casino Resort. This is the event everyone who is anyone will attend. The nomination process will be announced as soon as it opens, and sponsorship opportunities and tables will be available. Watch for more over the next several months.

What the Chamber needs from you

I have spent this whole article telling you what the Chamber has done. Now I am going to ask for something, because a chamber cannot do this alone.

Join, or come back. If you have been waiting to see whether the Chamber was worth it, this is your answer. Join us. If you left, come back. Your first Roseburg Forum ticket is on us.

Show up. Come to a Connect. Come to the Forum. Come hear the candidates. Bring someone who has never been in the room. The strength of our Chamber is measured by who is in the room, and we want you there.

Tell us the truth. When something is not working, say so. When you need something we are not offering, tell us. The survey we ran this spring changed how we operate. Your feedback will keep changing it.

Send us your people. Nominate a leader for Project Leadership. Point a young entrepreneur toward the Chamber. Tell a business doing great work that the RBI Awards exist. You know who deserves a seat at the table better than we do.

Invest. Sponsor an event, host a Connect, support a program. Every dollar that comes into our Chamber goes back out as value for the businesses of Douglas County, and we will show you exactly how.

Grow with us. We are rebuilding a lot at once, and we are learning as we go. What I can promise is that we will listen, we will adjust, and we will keep moving.

The bottom line

Five months ago, our Chamber was a fresh start. Today it has systems that work, events that fill rooms, a membership that is growing, and partners coming to the table.

If you are a business in Douglas County and you have not been part of the Chamber, or you left and have not looked back, I would ask you to look again. We have done the work to earn a second look. Now we would like to earn your membership.

Stronger Business. Stronger Community. Stronger Roseburg.