Curating Resources to Support Economic Mobility

The Box Elder Chamber brought together community partners to launch a one-stop website to address barriers to economic mobility and promote skills training and employment services available to its rural workforce.

Convening a large group of stakeholders led to many ideas, and chamber CEO Monica Holdaway said the chamber is working to prioritize the ideas and take action in order to build momentum.

“We’re a small community, and the chamber only has two and a half staff members, so we went out and found the resources we already have in the community and put them all in one place,” said chamber CEO Monica Holdaway.

One area that arose during the discussions was the need for more soft skills training. The chamber partnered with Bridgerland Technical College on a series of 10 videos on what it calls power skills, topics ranging from professionalism and dress to critical thinking and problem solving. The videos will live on the new resource webpage, along with an evaluation visitors can complete to prove they completed the course and issue them a digital badge.  

The chamber will launch a new webpage that curates links to various services that can assist rural workers by addressing barriers to workforce participation and upward mobility. These will include state and local services related to housing, childcare, mobility, food resources, employment services and more.  

The chamber will track the utilization of the new resource webpage, as well as the number of power skills training digital badges issued.