Marquette Chamber of Commerce is back in business

MARQUETTE — “From my experience as a city commissioner, I’ve found that there is a lot of communication on the upper levels of organizations that doesn’t necessarily happen mostly because people are busy with their day to day lives.”

Jason Schneider is no doubt excited about his new role. Schneider was introduced as the Executive Director of the Marquette Chamber of Commerce Thursday morning. He created the chamber to help meet the unmet needs of the local business community, mainly in the communication area.

“We want to be able to get businesses talking to each other because a lot of times businesses feel they’re going it alone, and so it’s identifying what their needs are as far as information in the community and being able to supply that to a lot of the local businesses,” said Schneider.

“Something like this has been needed for a long time to meet the needs of local businessmen and particularly meet the needs of people who live here or want to live here, to have questions answered and to help them understand what is available here in town,” said Marquette Mayor Mike Coyne.

The Marquette Chamber of Commerce City serves the City of Marquette, Marquette Township, and Chocolay Township. Several businesses have already jumped on board with the chamber, including the Marquette Food Cooperative.

Matt Gougeon is the General Manager of the Co–Op. He said the Marquette Chamber of Commerce will be a resource hub of information for all the businesses that join.

“There are various municipalities that will be able to collect meeting agendas and minutes, times of meetings. We’ll be able to tell businesses what the various municipal departments do,” said Gougeon.

The Marquette Chamber of Commerce is still in its infancy. There’s a lot of work ahead for Schneider to get the organization to where they want to be.

“As we build our members and as we build our funding, we’re just going to start doing more and more,” said Schneider. “We will be doing social networking events, we will be doing educational seminars. Those are some of the easy things to get into, but it’s going to take awhile to build up. We definitely want to be able to hold events that all of our members and the community at large can be involved in so that they feel they’re a part of something larger than themselves.”