The Pagosa Springs Chamber of Commerce is pleased to be presenting the ‘Pagosa Proud’ Community Celebration video series, starting on Monday, March 8.
Typically, every year the Chamber hosts the community awards, honoring individuals, organizations and companies in our community through the Citizen, Volunteer, Non-Profit and Small Business of the Year awards. However, then came 2020 and a huge curve ball was thrown into the mix.
How do you pick just one person, one group, one business that didn’t face challenges, didn’t have employees on the front lines, didn’t go over and above what is normally expected, didn’t have people go the extra mile to volunteer their services or finances, didn’t think outside the “business box”?
The Chamber usually hosts these awards at our Annual Meeting and Community Celebration. However, since that event was cancelled this year, we didn’t have the opportunity to celebrate our community.
Therefore, the Chamber decided to do things a little differently to match “the year different – 2020”. Instead of one, we choose 5 different sectors that represent a broad spectrum of our community and those industries we felt were heavily impacted. The sectors chosen were Health Care, Education, Non-Profits, Government and of course, Business. Within each sector, 3 businesses or organizations were selected as examples in our community of business success, dedication, thinking outside the box, and impact. The businesses were chosen from small to larger industries; nonprofits that made an impact in a variety of ways and showing ways that our government agencies handled the needs of the community throughout the year. Of course, there are way more businesses that could have been chosen than we ever had time to video tape. However, we wanted to show examples of dedication, resiliency and creativity.
The five-part video series will kick off on social media on March 8. This will be ‘Proudly Pagosa’ week. Each day during the week a different sector will be honored. Thanks to the partnership of Pagosa Local News, the video series can then be viewed at locations around town hosting the Pagosa Local News or on their feeds all month long. The videos will also be archived on our social media sources.
We hope that people will share these stories of hope and resiliency through their own media sources. Look for the notices as we come up on unveiling these videos. As many of us adapted to change this past year and have now permanently implemented new procedures that came about because of the COVID year, who knows – this new celebration may also become a permanent fixture to replace the traditional community awards.
Nothing is constant but change, and we will be interested to see how the community feels about this process.
We hope that you will enjoy this celebration of our community as we recognize just a few of the awesome businesses and individuals that we have here in Pagosa Springs.
We are Proudly Pagosa!