By Brandon Dietert
2017 Chair of the Board
Chamber is Common Thread in Beloved Local Events
October is a wonderful time to be in Central Texas and New Braunfels since we have so many community activities and events happening almost daily. This past weekend we welcomed with open arms and aired up tires, hundreds and hundreds of cyclists and their friends and families for the Bike MS: Valero Ride to the River 2017. This weekend also was the Gruene Music & Wine Festival that celebrates everything Texas…beer, wine and great music while raising money for the United Way and Hurricane Harvey Relief. These amazing events raised tons of money for some great causes but at the same time brings thousands of people to New Braunfels to support our local businesses and economy.
The common threads with these events is our Greater New Braunfels Chamber of Commerce. The Chamber has helped promote, support and recruit the Ride to the River for years thru the Chamber’s Convention & Visitors Bureau (CVB). The same can be said about the Gruene Music & Wine Fest where our CVB has helped promote and support this event for years. The benefactor of the Music & Wine Fest fundraising also has Chamber ties since the United Way of Comal County started out as the NB Community Fund which was administered by the Chamber of Commerce for years.
I bring this up because this next week (October 16-20) is Chamber of Commerce Week in New Braunfels and Texas. This week is a “time set aside to celebrate the hard work and accomplishments of chambers of commerce and the communities they represent.” Even though most of the work of the Chamber is done behind the scenes, Chamber of Commerce staff, members and volunteers are routinely involved in many different areas of the community that help it thrive and grow. In New Braunfels these include business development, business recruitment and retention, education and workforce development, tourism marketing, community betterment, and advocacy, among others. The New Braunfels Chamber works to support the growth of their approximately 2,400 members while helping to build a prosperous and sustainable community.
During the week, the New Braunfels Chamber will have our Blue Coats performing Operation Thank You. This is our annual event where members of our Blue Coat organization personally visit and hand deliver almost 1,500 copies of the 2018 New Braunfels Business, Relocation and Visitors Guide. This is a fun event for our Blue Coats because they get to visit our members, catch up with old friends or make new ones, and sometimes visit a business or area of town they might not be familiar with.
This is also a great time to thank our wonderful staff for the amazing work they do for our membership and the community on a daily basis. We have a top notch staff and one that is much respected in the state and nation when it comes to visitor promotion, economic development and member services. Not many chambers are left in the country that do all of these areas, and for us to be considered best in class in all of them reminds us how lucky we are here in New Braunfels!
Lastly, we are only a few weeks away from our largest local event of the year…Wurstfest…which happens to be another organization with early ties to our Chamber of Commerce. I would like to raise a glass and say “Prost!” – Thanks for being an integral part of the fabric of New Braunfels!