Business and Economic Development Priorities
The Boron Chamber of Commerce stands at a pivotal moment in our community's economic journey. This strategic framework outlines our commitment to building a more resilient, prosperous, and self-sustaining local economy. Rather than chasing external solutions, we're investing in what makes Boron strong: our existing businesses, our residents' entrepreneurial spirit, and our community's determination to thrive.
Our approach is grounded in a simple truth: sustainable economic development begins with the people and businesses already here. By strengthening our local enterprises, activating our Main Street, and creating pathways to ownership and skilled employment, we're building an economy that works for everyone. The California Multicultural Business Alliance (CA-MBA) serves as our strategic partner, bringing expertise, networks, and resources that amplify our local efforts.
This document presents eight interconnected priorities that form a comprehensive economic development strategy. Each priority addresses a critical need while contributing to our larger vision of a vibrant, economically healthy Boron. From supporting our current business owners to creating innovative capital access programs, from workforce development to nonprofit integration, these priorities reflect our community's values and aspirations. Together, they chart a path toward meaningful, lasting economic growth.
Strengthen Existing Small Businesses
The foundation of Boron's economic future rests with the businesses already serving our community. These established enterprises represent years of investment, local knowledge, and community relationships. Our first priority focuses on ensuring these businesses not only survive but thrive through targeted support, education, and capacity building.
Many small business owners excel at their craft but face challenges with financial management, marketing, operational efficiency, or growth planning. By providing accessible business education and technical assistance, we help owners develop the skills needed to increase revenue, reduce costs, and build sustainable operations. This isn't about dramatic transformation: it's about steady improvement that compounds over time.
The CA-MBA brings critical resources to this effort, including proven curricula for business operations and finance, connections to regional networks of successful entrepreneurs, and access to mentorship from experienced business leaders. These relationships provide Boron business owners with perspectives and expertise that might otherwise remain out of reach.
Success means more than just keeping businesses open. We're working to increase customer flow through coordinated marketing efforts, improve operational efficiency through shared learning, and create peer support networks where business owners help each other succeed. When our existing businesses grow stronger, they create jobs, generate tax revenue, and demonstrate that Boron is a place where commerce can flourish.
Key Objectives
  • Deliver practical business education programs
  • Connect owners to regional mentorship networks
  • Increase local customer traffic and revenue
  • Build peer learning communities among business owners
  • Provide one-on-one technical assistance for growth challenges
Shift Community Activity Toward Revenue Generation
Chamber activities and community events represent significant investments of time, energy, and resources. Our second priority ensures these investments directly benefit local businesses through measurable revenue generation. Every event, promotion, and initiative should answer one question: How does this put money into the pockets of Boron business owners?
Traditional chamber activities often focus on networking, visibility, or community goodwill, all valuable, but insufficient on their own. We're adopting a business-first approach where success is measured in vendor sales, sponsorship dollars captured locally, and procurement spending that stays in Boron. This shift requires careful event design, strategic vendor recruitment, and consistent focus on economic outcomes.
The CA-MBA provides guidance on structuring commerce-driven events that maximize local business participation and revenue capture. This includes best practices for vendor management, sponsorship development, and creating promotional campaigns that drive spending to local establishments. We're learning from chambers across California that have successfully transformed their activities into economic engines.
This doesn't mean abandoning community-building or celebration. Rather, it means ensuring our gatherings also function as marketplaces, our promotions drive customers to local stores, and our initiatives create direct economic opportunities, a powerful combination for small town prosperity.
Activate Vacant Storefronts and Main Street
Pop-Up Businesses
Low-risk opportunities for entrepreneurs to test concepts and build customer bases without long-term lease commitments.
Micro-Business Incubation
Small-scale retail and service businesses that can launch with minimal capital while filling market gaps in our community.
Permanent Openings
Supporting sustainable, long-term businesses that anchor our Main Street and create consistent employment opportunities.
Empty storefronts send a powerful negative message about community health and economic vitality. Our third priority tackles this challenge head-on by reducing vacancies and bringing life back to Main Street. This effort combines immediate activation strategies with long-term business sustainability planning.
The California Multicultural Business Alliance offers proven models for storefront activation, including pop-up business frameworks that lower barriers to entry, buy-local campaign structures that shift spending patterns, and tenant recruitment strategies that match available spaces with viable business concepts. These approaches recognize that filling storefronts requires more than willing entrepreneurs: it requires reducing risk, providing support, and creating customer demand.
Support Business Ownership and New Business Formation
True economic empowerment comes through ownership. Our fourth priority emphasizes helping Boron residents start and sustain their own businesses, creating wealth-building opportunities rather than simply jobs. This focus on entrepreneurship recognizes that business owners not only earn income but build equity, create employment for others, and develop transferable skills.
Many residents possess skills, ideas, and work ethic but lack knowledge about how to transform those assets into viable businesses. The gap isn't desire or capability: it's access to practical startup education, mentorship from those who've successfully launched businesses, and guidance through the complex early stages of business formation. Bridging this gap opens entrepreneurship to a much broader segment of our community.
The CA-MBA provides structured startup readiness training covering business planning, market research, financial projections, licensing requirements, and operational basics. Equally important, they facilitate one-on-one advising relationships and mentorship pathways that connect aspiring entrepreneurs with experienced business owners who can provide guidance, encouragement, and accountability.
This priority also acknowledges that not every business idea should be pursued immediately. Effective support includes honest assessment, helping residents refine concepts, identify realistic markets, and develop the capabilities needed before launching. Patient, thorough preparation leads to businesses with stronger foundations and better survival rates, ultimately creating more sustainable economic impact for our community.
5
Year Business Survival Rate
Our goal for new businesses with comprehensive support
15
New Businesses
Target launches over the next three years
Capital Access for Business, Housing, and Education
Access to capital remains one of the most significant barriers to economic advancement for many Boron residents. Our fifth priority addresses this through an innovative approach that combines Guaranteed Income with Individual Development Accounts (IDAs), creating pathways to business ownership, homeownership, and education that keeps talent connected to our community.
Guaranteed Income provides financial stability, but when paired with matched savings accounts designed for specific purposes, it becomes a wealth-building tool. Individual Development Accounts allow participants to save for designated goals: starting a business, purchasing a home, or pursuing education, with contributions matched by public and philanthropic funds. This structure encourages disciplined saving while multiplying the impact of personal resources.
The business startup component supports entrepreneurs who've completed readiness training and developed viable business plans. The homeownership pathway helps families build equity and strengthen their stake in Boron's future. The education component explicitly includes a return-to-community expectation, investing in residents who commit to bringing their enhanced skills back to benefit local businesses and institutions.
The CA-MBA contributes partner mapping that identifies potential funders and capital sources, plus expertise in designing capital stacks that layer grants, matched savings, and lending into comprehensive financing solutions. This approach recognizes that different stages of business growth and different types of investments require different capital structures. Success requires coordinating multiple funding sources and partners, exactly the kind of system-building work that transforms individual assistance into community-wide economic development.
Workforce Development Beyond Entry-Level Jobs
Skills Assessment
Identify resident capabilities and match them with business needs across administrative, technical, and management roles.
Targeted Training
Provide education for skilled positions that offer career advancement and meaningful wage growth, not just entry-level employment.
Local Placement
Connect trained residents with Boron businesses and nonprofits through internships and employment opportunities that keep talent local.
Education With a Return Pathway
The Challenge
Young people from small towns often pursue education and career opportunities elsewhere, rarely returning with their enhanced skills and credentials. This brain drain weakens communities by removing exactly the talent and energy needed for revitalization.
Our Approach
Encourage education advancement while building intentional pathways and expectations for return. Frame higher education not as an escape but as capacity-building that strengthens both individual and community.
The Vision
Boron residents pursue degrees and training, then return to start businesses, fill professional roles, or invest locally, creating a cycle where education benefits flow back to the community that supported them.
Our seventh priority addresses a challenge faced by communities across rural America: how to support residents in pursuing education without losing them permanently. The solution lies in creating explicit return pathways and cultivating a culture where bringing skills and knowledge back to Boron is valued and expected.
This starts early, with youth entrepreneurship exposure that helps young people see business ownership and community leadership as viable career paths. The CA-MBA provides models for introducing entrepreneurial thinking to students, helping them recognize opportunities in their own community. Mentorship frameworks connect young people with successful local entrepreneurs and professionals who demonstrate that meaningful careers can be built in Boron.
Career pathway frameworks help residents envision how education fits into larger plans that keep them connected to community. This might mean pursuing accounting credentials to serve local businesses, gaining teaching certification to work in Boron schools, or studying business management to eventually take over a family enterprise or start a new venture. The key is framing education as a tool for community contribution, not just individual advancement.
Integrate Nonprofits Into Economic Growth
Boron's nonprofit organizations represent significant economic and social infrastructure that often operates separately from business development efforts. Our eighth priority breaks down these silos by intentionally integrating nonprofits as partners in economic growth, workforce training, and service delivery.
Nonprofits employ people, purchase goods and services, own or lease property, and serve community members who are also customers and workers. When businesses and nonprofits collaborate rather than operate independently, both sectors become more effective. Nonprofits can refer clients to job training and business support programs. Businesses can partner with nonprofits to address workforce barriers or deliver services. Together, they create a more comprehensive support ecosystem.
Referral Networks
Structured systems for connecting residents to appropriate business or nonprofit services based on their needs.
Joint Programming
Collaborative initiatives that leverage both business expertise and nonprofit community relationships.
Shared Infrastructure
Coordinated use of facilities, equipment, and administrative systems to reduce costs and increase impact.
Workforce Partnerships
Nonprofits as training sites and employment pathways for residents building career skills.
The CA-MBA offers guidance on business-nonprofit collaboration models and helps establish referral systems that ensure residents find appropriate support regardless of which door they enter. This integration also positions nonprofits as economic actors in their own right: employers, purchasers, and partners in community prosperity. When the Chamber actively includes nonprofit leaders in economic development conversations, we tap into their deep community knowledge and their relationships with populations who might benefit most from business opportunities and workforce development.
Moving Forward Together
1
Immediate Actions
Launch business education programs, initiate storefront activation, establish CA-MBA partnership protocols
2
6-Month Goals
First cohort of new businesses launched, workforce training partnerships established, IDA program designed
3
1-Year Milestones
Measurable revenue increase for existing businesses, reduced vacancy rate on Main Street, integrated nonprofit partnerships
4
Long-Term Vision
Self-sustaining local economy with thriving businesses, skilled workforce, and residents building wealth through ownership
These eight priorities form an integrated economic development strategy designed specifically for Boron's context and opportunities. No single priority stands alone, each reinforces and enables the others. Strengthening existing businesses creates mentorship opportunities for new entrepreneurs. Workforce development produces employees for growing local enterprises. Capital access enables both business formation and homeownership. Education with return pathways ensures our investments in people benefit our community long-term.
Success requires sustained commitment from multiple partners: the Chamber providing leadership and coordination, CA-MBA delivering expertise and regional connections, local businesses participating in training and hiring, nonprofits integrating economic development into their missions, and municipal government supporting these efforts through policy and resources. Most importantly, it requires Boron residents seeing themselves as active participants in economic transformation: as future business owners, skilled workers, and community investors.
The work ahead is substantial, but so is the opportunity. By focusing on ownership over employment, building on existing strengths rather than chasing external solutions, and creating pathways that keep talent and resources local, we're laying foundations for genuine, lasting prosperity. This isn't about dramatic overnight change. It's about consistent progress, strategic investment, and the determination to build an economy where Boron residents can thrive.