Message from the President: Spring Cleaning

Message from the President: Spring Cleaning
By: Bob Garrett, GSVCC President & CEO
 
With both the Easter season and Passover wrapping-up this past Sunday, now is the time to focus on some spring clean-up. In my youth, spring cleaning was a yearly ritual which involved switching out our old wooden storm windows with screens and cleaning out whatever we didn’t wear or what we may had worn out over the winter. It was literally a rite of passage into a longed-for summer.
 
In this time of COVID, our collective hope is that we are embarking on a rite of passage into a new decade: a vaccinated, healthy, prosperous, post-pandemic world—the Roaring 20-20s.
 
As with all rites of passage, we must challenge ourselves with this question: Do we slip back, reverting to our old, comfortable ways, or do we move forward, into a new world and toward a better normal? After thinking about this question, the answer becomes stark: This really isn’t an either/or proposition. We must do both.
 
We must embrace the old world, and the old way of doing things. We need to take the good from the past and invent the new. Just like those tough spring-cleaning questions of the past about what to throw out and what to keep, we must first look inward on ourselves and our organizations.
 
But we cannot dwell there. Immediately, we must move forward, move onward, reach outward to build our collective futures together. Reminiscing can be fun, remembering those people and all that we have lost during the pandemic is very important. However, in the long run, getting stuck in the past simply will not work.
 
‘Better Normal,’ is the phrase that I most hear these days around Chamber gatherings. During our annual Economic and Strategic Forecast, we heard Dr. Anirban Basu, who is a highly regarded economist tell us to get ready for the economy to boom later this summer.  The breaking news during last Friday’s Financial Friday-On The Mark on WKOK 1070AM was that the number of jobs created in March far exceeded expectations.
 
Help Wanted signs are as numerous as daffodils these days. Clearly, Better Normal is coming, but we need everyone to be better off. At your Chamber, we are committed to leave no one behind in our shared prosperity.
 
Our best days lie just ahead.