Chamber Dir. shares 'hiring local' plan

Moultrie News 5/1/25

Concerns of increased traffic and sustainable business practices were brought up in the April 23 Mount Pleasant Rotary Club meeting with featured speaker Rebecca Imholz, Executive Director of Mount Pleasant Chamber of Commerce (MPCC).

Imholz’s visit with the Rotary Club was generally about introducing the Rotarians to her organization and the various ways the chamber tries to build up local businesses. The chamber’s main goal — “We are trying to get people who live here to work here,” Imholz said.

With well-established programs in partnership with the Town of Mount Pleasant and local business owners to incentivize residents to participate in the local economy, the chamber’s current goal is to help local businesses now to hire locally as well.

When asked by a Rotarian about ways the chamber can help alleviate the traffic in town, Imholz referred back to this goal.

“From a chamber perspective,” Imholz said, “We feel that one way we can help address [traffic concerns] is to let businesses, especially if they are moving from outside the area, know the staffing resources that are right here — the people that are available that they can hire.”

The chamber added a job fair to their 15th annual Expo to help connect Mount Pleasant business with Mount Pleasant labor. The Expo will be held Sept. 18 from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the Omar Shrine Convention Center.

“[The job fair is] a grassroots way to address this issue because it is not an easy fix,” she said.

Rotary members asked Imholz about what the chamber is doing to educate businesses on green business practices to which she answered that the organization has not formally addressed issues of conservation and the environment, but continuously makes chamber members “aware of what’s going on,” she stated.

“We were working with the Town, I was talking to my business members — ‘what do you need from us?’” Imholz said. “‘We need people to come back and shop again in our stores.’ So we have this free campaign.”

The campaign is split into three parts, beginning around the winter holidays for Shop Where You Live getting people to buy gifts from local vendors. And later in the new year with Dine Where You Live which gets people to dine at local restaurants during a traditionally slow hospitality season and concluding with Get Fit Where You Live encouraging people to exercise at local businesses. The effort concludes with the Cooper River Bridge Run.

Another chamber update Imholz shared with the club was very personal to her. Now that the MPCC is operating out of a brick and mortar as of August 2024, they are able to have dedicated meetings for Veterans and Veteran-owned business owners they call Veteran Business Community Connect.

Six Rotarians raised their hands when asked how many Veterans there were in the room.

“That is a dear cause of mine — my father served in Vietnam,” she said. “My family going back to World War II has always served in the military, so having a program for our Veterans, our Veteran-owned businesses is really important.”

The Mount Pleasant Rotary Club meets every Wednesday at 12:30 p.m. at Mount Pleasant Presbyterian Church.