ASK Salt Spring: Answered - Ep. 38 Matthew Quetton

Episode Date: June 13, 2024

Ask Salt Spring Answered talks to Matthew Quetton, new Executive Director of the Salt Spring Chamber of Commerce about new directions and a new business directory.

Okay, we're here with Ask Salt Spring Answered and I'm here with Matthew Quetten, who is the new executive director of the Salt Spring Chamber of Commerce. Welcome, Matthew. Thanks very much for having me. We had a pretty interesting discussion today, and I think the message to me was that you're looking for a new direction for the chamber. Can you just explain a little bit how you plan to go about that? Sure. Yeah, I mean, I think the chamber has done a terrific job in the past, addressing primarily, I think, that sort of role in promoting tourism. Historically, you know,

the visitor center and the work that it's done, it's primarily been focused on tourism. And then I think a number of changes over the last few years, COVID in particular, and the launch of the Southern Gulf Islands Tourism Partnership has seen some changes in the Chamber's role in relationship to tourism and tourism patterns generally. So now we're looking at, you know, I think representing, you know, moving beyond tourism and representing businesses across the island of all sectors. You know, the Tourism Partnership does a great job of off-island marketing. And we see our role in sort of convening the business community on the island, representing more sectors and helping businesses find the resources they need on the island and helping residents find the businesses that they need. Right, and I think one of your first steps has been setting up a Salt Spring directory of businesses. Yeah, that's right.

Very exciting. We just launched it this week, so just going through the soft launch and kind of initial sign-ups. But yeah, it's live at saltspringdirectory.com, and we have about 200 businesses in there now who've been our chamber members over the last year, and we're actively helping them each to claim their listings and update their business hours and business descriptions and so forth. And then we'll be excited to open up registration in the directory to all businesses

on Salt Spring. So we'll have everything from a basic registration in the directory to all businesses on Salt Spring. So we'll have everything from a basic free listing for non-chamber members all the way up to multiple listings for businesses who have several locations. So there's room for everybody in there. And we're keen to make it sort of the go-to online resource to help you find what you need on the island. So how many members are there right now in the chamber? Yeah, there's just a little over 200 right now. And yeah, it's interesting. I was kind of looking through our database in sort of preparing it for the new directory. And there's about 600 businesses that we've had as members over the last sort of five or six years. And work we've done with Bruce Cameron at Return on Insights has helped us learn that there's probably somewhere around 1500 businesses

on the island. So yeah, we're very keen over the course of this year to see what we can do to flush out the directory. And we'd love to get everybody listed into the directory and make it a super valuable resource for locals and for visitors. Now, you said you see business as a force for good and it's a way that business can reinvigorate the island. Can you talk a bit about that? What do you see that? Yeah, I mean, I came out of the sort of startup space in Vancouver

where I was exclusively working with impact-oriented businesses addressing health, sustainability, inclusion challenges, those kinds of things. startup space in Vancouver where I was exclusively working with impact-oriented businesses addressing health, sustainability, inclusion challenges, those kinds of things. So working with impact investors and B Corp people and other folks who, you know, further afield have been positioning business as a force for good for almost a decade now. And so as we see, you know, things like climate change and data security and, you know, succession and different issues that we're facing on the island. Yeah, we're very keen to support the business community and being key players where the chamber isn't only valuable to business members, but the business

community can be a sort of incumbent partner in innovating the changes that we think could benefit the island as well. Right. Now, we had a very, I say, outspoken person who was very much concerned with beautification of downtown Ganges and transportation and many other things. And I think, I thought it was interesting you said that basically that the chamber that's not really your job is the beautification but you you see your job as a facilitator to help others do that work right yeah i think it's a very important part of you know developing a good civic environment in ganganges and on Salt Spring. There are lots of improvement projects that need to be done, everything from more garbage cans to street

cleaning to graffiti removal to, you know, and proactive things like banners and lights and plantings. Like there's lots to be done there, to be sure. I guess my point was, you know, the Chamber's done some of those projects in the past, sort of a little bit piecemeal. We just recently finished putting in some garbage bins outside the Visitor Center. But it kind of gave us insight that, you know, that's not typically what Chambers do. And it's not really representative of what our core competency is, or where I think we can be most valuable in convening the business community and sort of stewarding the chamber could support and sponsor and help bring the businesses into partnership with and help bring CRD into partnership with

so that there could be an entity whose exclusive mandate was to develop and maintain and improve the civic environment around Ganges in partnership between the businesses and and the CRD right now you said I think that it's you know it's sort of kind of a two-way street here that pure business doesn't work here there needs to be a sort of a social partnership going on with between business and and the community and vice-versa right so really you're correct me if I'm wrong, but your focus is on building relationships between business and the community, right? And yourselves.

Yeah, I think the chamber is a very important relationship builder, facilitator, host. I think that's clearly one of our core mandates. You know, there's a phrase out there in the world of social economy. It's a phrase that's being used more in places where there's an effort to marry economic interests with social interests, which many times in the past have been at odds. It's easy to imagine a world where business does something that community thinks is value extractive or not necessarily good for community. And, you know, there's many places in the last 10 years where those two sort of sides of the system have found friendship. The impact investing space and the social enterprise space and the ESG space in the corporate world. I think there's a lot of movements happening around the

world where business is seeing that it's important for it to be a good citizen and to be an influential and positive citizen that can drive innovation into the economy in a way that benefits the social dimension. So, you know, I think the chamber has a role in helping the business community be the good citizens that it can be and facilitating relationship between community and business in such a way that we build a social economy where you know the freedom to operate as a business marries to the social and community needs of the people in but that's very difficult to do particularly at a time when businesses are struggling to survive right and so they have to be concerned with with raising dollars and that kind of thing and i guess the

general public don't necessarily see that as being in their interests, right? Yeah, and I think you hit the nail on the head there in terms of seeing it. I think the more we can do to share the stories of business people and what they're doing behind the scenes to meet the demands they have, which are very similar to the demands that shoppers at Country Grocer have, that the price of butter affects a restaurant owner as much as it affects your grocery bill.

And I think that part of what we aim to do is to help business owners tell the story of, you know, what are the challenges they're having behind the scenes and to maybe break down those silos that sometimes exist between, you know, what people think businesses motivations are and what they're really trying to solve for. You know, we're all we're all friends and neighbors here on the island. There really is no us and them here. You know, we're all part of the same community. And I have the privilege of hearing the personal stories of business owners, as well as the personal stories of people who are visiting, you know, the visitors and the residents who are visiting those businesses. So, you know, what I see is that the lived experience is actually way more

similar than it is different. And everybody's just doing their best to meet the challenges that we're all facing out there. Yeah. Now, of course, the question of housing came up, as it always does, particularly with regards to workforce housing. How is the Chamber going to be handling that aspect of things? It's a difficult one for everybody to get a hold of. Yeah, it is a difficult one. I mean, I think the first step is to acknowledge how big a problem it is. You know, we don't have data on it yet. I'm looking forward to us, you know, it's part of why we built the directory.

We built a pretty significant communications tool into the back end, so that we can survey and talk to businesses and ask them specifically, you know, well, how many employees do you have? And what level of housing security do your employees have? How many of them are housing insecure? How many employees have you not hired because you couldn't find out, right? Like, it gives us the ability to gain much more specific data on it. So I think, you know, step one is acknowledging it. Step two is collecting some data so we can be more specific about what we need to solve for. And then from there, I think it's, you know, working with community partners, both, you know, government and nonprofit and business to see where we can

generate some solutions, some of which might be, you know, easier and nonprofit and business to see where we can generate some solutions, some of which might be, you know, easier to accomplish market-based solutions like helping business owners perhaps buy houses or lease houses for employees. Others may be more complicated that may require longer time and more partnership to pull off. But I think for the first step, our goal is to, you know, develop a much more clear data-driven understanding as to what it is that we need to solve for. Yeah. Now, the question of densification came up, and it's a bit of a red rag to a bull for people on Salt Spring, or it seems to be. What is your view on that?

I think you said that you think there should be more densification in certain areas so that other areas can be preserved. new to Salt Spring. So, you know, mostly what I'm running on is what I've seen in other jurisdictions and what I've seen to date on Salt Spring, which is that, you know, I think our island economy is at a bit of a middle zone where it's, you know, too small to be big and too big to be small. And that there's unquestionably a shortage of sort of middle-income working families on the island. It's very difficult for those people to afford to live here, and with the value of real estate these days out there, that's not changing anytime soon. So what we can do to host more of the kinds of, you know, Salt Spring Solutions talks about the empty middle or the, you know, basically it's the middle of the bell curve that is the biggest problem. And

those folks oftentimes need to be close to where they work. You know, if they have to drive to work, then that exacerbates transportation and parking problems. So in many jurisdictions and municipalities and elsewhere, density is, you know, portioned more in working areas where there are more businesses and more employees and less in further afield regions. And I would imagine that that approach would work on Salt Spring. Obviously, we would need to be conscious of what, you know, what maximum development would look like and how many people we would want to host on the island. But I think that there's opportunity to increase density around Ganges and Vesuvius and Fulford probably and do it in a way that supports affordable housing for the kinds of young families that might be working in those business and enable them to walk to work. It seems to be reasonable that we could

find a middle way that would solve the employment problem, address affordability and not, you know, not result in rampant overdevelopment across the island. I'm sure we can manage for reasonable outcomes across those three goals. Yeah. Okay. Well, thanks very much for coming in. You've been listening to Ask Salt Spring Answered on CHIR FM, the voice of the Southern Gulf Islands.