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Vail Daily column: Community engagement opportunities abound

Popular New Year’s resolutions include improving physical and/or mental well-being (eat healthy, lose weight, think positively), improving financial and/or career goals (save money, get a better job) and many other ideas and thoughts around self-improvement. Good luck on achieving whatever resolution you have chosen.

Consider adding a new resolution to your list, one that involves community engagement: Don’t sit on the sidelines in 2017. Vail Valley Partnership has a variety of engagement opportunities for the business community, and we encourage you to get involved.

Economic Advisory Leadership Council



Vail Valley Economic Development has an active advisory council representative of our trade area in terms of industry sectors and geography. It includes a mix of both public and private representation to improve communication and understanding on local economic issues across this common divide. Advisory council member’s expertise and experience across a range of local industries will equip Vail Valley Economic Development with a more complete understanding of our local and regional economy to allow us to continually adapt our programming and marketing efforts to best serve local needs.

The advisory council is a resource and sounding board for the Vail Valley Partnership related to regional economic development efforts. The advisory council will provide advisement on issues at hand to ensure that local economic development activities undertaken by Vail Valley Economic Development are relevant to the needs of the business community and remain aligned to our core mission. The Vail Valley Partnership Board of Governors retains all official organizational decision making powers over the activities undertaken by Vail Valley Economic Development.

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The advisory council has two main responsibilities, one being to provide strategic feedback (provide feedback related to implementation of the economic development plan, focusing both on near-term and long-term challenges and opportunities) and the second being community commitment (helping steward the economic development effort by reinforcing the interdependency of the various communities and municipalities within the Vail Valley service region to position our community as not only a great place to live and work, but also a great place to do business).

Power Groups

Tap into the Vail Valley’s greatest resource: your peers. Connect with a collection of great minds and business professionals across industry sectors to share business challenges and solutions, and to build your professional network.

Power Groups are a curated, facilitated groups of eight to 10 discerning professionals dedicated to connecting with and learning from like-minded professionals in the Vail Valley. Power Groups are designed to help you connect with your peers, establish strong networks and foster professional growth. Discussion topics are selected by members, coordinated by the Vail Valley Partnership and led by a facilitator each month. Three power groups are available, including executives, small business owners and nonprofit leaders.

12@12

The 12@12 program is designed to bring 12 people together to collaborate on new ideas, discuss best business practices and work toward solutions on similar business obstacles. The 12@12 program is intended to provide an open forum for key partners to share feedback on the state of their industries, and to share with us how Vail Valley Partnership can better meet the needs of our members through our programming, events and member benefits. These one-time focus groups help us refine our advocacy efforts and member communications to better meet your needs.

Workforce Housing Coalition

People move out of Eagle County when they reach their early 30s and don’t stop leaving until their early 60s. We are losing people in their peak earning years. Many attribute this, in part, to a lack of housing affordable to these employees. Employee turnover costs local businesses a lot of money and creates other community challenges.

We want to ensure our community can remain competitive to keep locals local and to support our business community. Workforce and affordable housing has long been an issue in Eagle County. Addressing our affordable housing issue is essential to the continued success and growth of our business community across industry sectors.

Workforce housing remains of paramount importance, and we are proud to announce a new workforce housing coalition and invite all interested parties to come together and share thoughts, feedback and solutions to help address this issue. Modeled after our economic development effort, we will bring together public and private partners to identify opportunities and needs. The workforce housing coalition will meet throughout 2017 to help identify regulatory burdens, rental unit vs. ownership mix, potential private industry solutions and the role of public partners.

Make a point to get engaged in one or more of these efforts (or one of our other community programs) to have your voice heard, and to be part of the solution to some of our largest community challenges. Visit vailvalleypartnership.com or contact Vail Valley Partnership President Chris Romer at 970-477-4016 or cromer@visitvailvalley.com to learn more.

Chris Romer is president and CEO of the Vail Valley Partnership. For more information, visit vailvalleypartnership.com or call Romer at 970-477-4016.


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