The Niverville Chamber of Commerce held their annual general meeting and awards night earlier this month at the Heritage Centre. The May 12 event featured business owners from Lynn & Liana Designs, who spoke about their small business success story manufacturing Manitoba-made wood and resin cutting boards and serve ware.
Local businesses were honoured with various awards. Negash Coffee won for Outstanding Customer Service, ShopGym Inc. was highlighted as the Most Outstanding Business, and John Schmidtke, owner of Niverville Bigway, was awarded the Alex Fast Senior Memorial Award for volunteerism.
The event was also the Chamber’s opportunity to formally introduce Kylie Matechuk as the new executive director and welcome Sara Matwychuk, owner of Talk to the Tail dog grooming service, to the board of directors.
The event is open to the public and approximately 30 people attended. It was available to attend via video conference for convenience and also to accommodate those members who couldn’t be there in person due to health reasons.
Matechuk says that see would like to see the number of attendees grow, along with the community’s awareness of what the Chamber does to serve its members.
Overall, Matechuk is understanding of the low turnout. She says it draws attention to how reluctant many people still feel about rejoining in-person events post-COVID.
“I thought it was very successful for an AGM, but ‘tis the season,” she says. “It’s spring, and there’s going to be some cold and flu going around. The Heritage Centre did an amazing job on the charcuterie boards.”
Matechuk says that she has planned several new initiatives for the Chamber to tackle in the near future, including changing how they operate the AGM and Chamber awards. She would like to see a successful business present a case study and open new opportunities for networking using the annual event.
“We had charcuterie on Lynn & Liana’s boards, which was just phenomenal,” says Matechuk. “I would like to do that going forward, to promote a business at all of our events. [Lynn & Lianna’s] story is so wild. They started up just before COVID and they were able to, because of COVID, completely maximize their business in a time when there were uncertainties. They couldn’t attend trade shows, and their numbers still jumped astronomically. So they were there to inspire some of our businesses that maybe have been feeling a little bit down or feeling like manufacturing is down, and maybe give them some inspiration.”
Lynn & Liana’s operation is based out of Steinbach, but in the future Matechuk plans to line up guest speakers from Niverville to keep the focus local.