CHAMBER CORNER
Meet Your Neighbor Chris Gonzalez is our neighborhood lender By Heather Maxwell, Anthem Area Chamber of Commerce Meet Anthem Area Leadership Academy’s program director, Chris Gonzalez of All Western Mortgage. He’s much more than our neighborhood lender.
Why did you decide to move to Anthem?
Chris Gonzalez with his wife, Jill. They have three children: Josephine, 6, James, 4, and Miles, 2. (Photos courtesy Chris Gonzalez)
My wife and I lived in the North Phoenix area off Carefree Highway over 12 years ago. We enjoyed the sense of community and feeling of living “in the hills,” as I called it. Fast forward to now. We decided to move to Anthem in 2015 for our family. The water park, numerous playgrounds, St. Rose Church and sense of community drew us here. It reminded me of Maryland, where I grew up, having a small-town feel.
What do you do for work and why do you do it? I am a residential mortgage loan officer and have been since 2012, helping people understand how they can purchase a home with their current finances. Since that time, I’ve heard a lot of stories about why people buy a home and how happy they are to have that opportunity. What I’ve concluded is homeownership is so much more than owning the actual structure or building a financial future. Owning a home is about family and having a place to call home. I believe firmly that homeownership is a key for families to build and grow, and want to ensure everyone has a path/plan for owning a home.
Why did you join the Anthem Area Chamber of Commerce? My intentions for joining the chamber were grounded in getting to know people in the community and finding things to do where I could give something back. I grew up in a small town and was always taught to give back to the community—that it is
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a civic responsibility. After speaking with chamber members, I learned the chamber was an organization I could rally around and give back to the community. There’s so much that the business community does to create what we have in Anthem.
What kind of things have you done in the community with the chamber? In 2017, I helped run the Anthem Young Professionals annual charity cornhole tournament, which coincided with the Daisy Mountain Veterans Day Parade. I met a lot of people in that process and made a lot of friends. In 2018, I was a member of the DMV parade planning committee and coordinated the community picnic and annual charity cornhole tournament. Last year, I coordinated the cornhole tournament again in conjunction with the com-
munity picnic following the parade. This year, I am serving a one-year term on the Anthem Area Chamber of Commerce board of directors and as the Anthem Area Leadership Academy program director.
Tell us about your “home” and what you do for fun. Jill and I have three kids—Miles, 2, James, 4, and Josephine, 6—and two Dobermans. During off time, we are heading up to the Grand Canyon, playing at the water park or playgrounds, camping, walking the dogs, or driving to San Diego and back within 24 hours just to go to the beach. We are busy most of the time and love taking road trips with the kids. It’s something we both remember growing up. Living in Anthem, there are no shortage of things to do with the 17 there calling you out to take a drive.
