THE DALLES — Lisa Farquharson, CEO of The Dalles Area Chamber of Commerce, is already changing things up after her recent graduation from Academy, a professional development program for chamber executives from the Western Association of Chamber Exectives (WACE).
Farquharson graduated alongside Angie Waiss, executive director of Skamania County Chamber of Commerce. “She’s just like us. She’s a small chamber, and she has the tourism contract and they only have I think three staff,” Farquharson said.
The Dalles’ chamber runs both services for business and tourism promotion for our region, being what Farquharson called “probably one of the most active chambers in this area.”
After three years of independent study and annual, intensive three-day training sessions — everything from how to legally run a nonprofit, and complexities of finance to the board’s responsibilities — Farquharson’s using some of what she’s learned to alter the chamber’s services for businesses in The Dalles.
“We got into ... are you fulfilling your mission and your vision as a chamber?” Farquharson said. That meant removing ex-officio members from the board, after Farquarson identified the legal implications of their office that no one had noticed before; re-evaluating the chamber’s benefit structure, shuffling and renaming networking events. “For us it’s a year of evaluation, and assessment ... what is it we that we can do that members do enjoy, and benefit from?” Farquharson said. “But the bottom line is, you still need to act like a small business, because we are a small business,” she added.
“Sometimes I think the small chambers are just as or more busy, because we’re still doing the advocacy, we’re still supporting, we’re still promoting and doing all those things for our chamber members. We just have a different number of members to support,” Farquarson said.
She’s collecting potential new programs she hopes to offer in the next few years.
WACE also recognized Farquharson for 15 years in the chamber industry, 11 of them spent in The Dalles.
With approximately 800 members from twenty-one Western states and Canada, WACE is the largest state or regional association of chamber of commerce executives in the United States, designed to “promote and enhance” professional development among them.
“Even though I’ve been in the industry 16 years, things are always changing,” Farquharson concluded. “... You can never stop doing your professional development ... you just never know what’s coming next.”
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