®
oundtable:
Chambers of Commerce Chamber leaders discuss business support within their regions as well as trends underlying their economies.
Adrienne Cole
President & CEO Greater Raleigh Chamber
How has the chamber helped the business community to face the challenges of the last year? The Raleigh Chamber is the largest nonprofit organization in the Greater Raleigh region and we serve a large membership base of small and large businesses. Our approach to assisting our members was immediate and we worked to meet them where they were. We shifted to a virtual setting, refocused our efforts on response and, eventually, recovery as well as supporting those companies that found themselves in a rapid growth mode. Two of our largest initiatives in response to the pandemic resulted in the creation of a rapid response website with 24/7 monitoring of questions from the community and critical resources for funding, PPE, PPP and informational virtual events. Additionally, we worked in partnership with the business community and local government leaders to raise money to support our small business community. How is the Chamber helping to ensure companies have access to talent? We’ve been focused on growing and nurturing our local talent pipeline and driving talent recruitment. We launched the Work in the Triangle platform (a talent attraction website) in 2011, with a 2.0 version coming in fall 2021. The platform is geared toward recruiting and retaining talent in the market. It’s our goal to help companies access a diverse talent pipeline. We are surrounded by tier-one research universities, three historically Black universities and colleges and numerous colleges and universities that are producing world-class talent. It’s very important to work with all those partners to make sure our companies can source the talent they need today and in the future. 26
| Invest: Raleigh-Durham 2021 | ECONOMY
Geoff Durham
President & CEO Greater Durham Chamber of Commerce
What economic wins would you point to that reflect economic diversification in the Triangle area? There is a tremendous amount of pharma manufacturing that comes along with our primary industry clusters like life sciences, biotech and the healthcare research space. Last year, Eli Lilly made a huge investment announcement of almost $500 million in their pharma manufacturing. They will be located in the Durham side of Research Triangle Park. Biotech firm GRAIL is another one that is now starting to hire in the park. When talking about diversification, we’re primarily focused on the diversification of our strong life sciences industry. There is a significant level of expansion into gene therapy work. That subcomponent of the broader life sciences is expanding rapidly. The other industry cluster that we are watching is our clean tech and how that continues to evolve. Embedded as a partner industry is our ag tech. The history of agriculture is strong in North Carolina, especially considering that this region is so driven by our three tier-one research institutes. The ag tech piece is continuing to evolve and grow. What will the revitalization of the Durham American Tobacco campus mean for Downtown Durham? The re-activation of the American Tobacco Campus is one of the largest new-market tax credit projects that has ever been done in the state of North Carolina. That project was the catalyst for a significant portion of what we are seeing around the rest of our Downtown community, centered around the redevelopment of old warehouses. This adaptive reuse is really what established Durham and put it on the map.
