Connecting students to careers in your community

Ted Wind: Hey everyone, before we jump in, a quick note. We're going to be at ACCE in New Orleans, and if you're a listener of the show, we would love to say hi in person. Come find us at booth 115. We're also hosting a private afterparty for chamber leaders after day one of the conference. Food, drinks, and a chance to hang out with other folks who are building great chambers. Stop by booth 115 or flag down anyone wearing a diagonal shirt, and we'll get you the invite. All right, on to the episode.

John Nyhan: A chamber president. This is not a retirement job. And I hate to say this, but there are chamber executives around the country that worked their entire life in a great job and decided that before they actually retire, they're going to have this fun job of being a chamber president. Well, I'm sorry. Chamber presidents today need to have like their first job to that sense that I want to make a difference. It's important that other chamber executives realize that you just can't worry about fundraising or membership drives. You need to be part of the community where people know the chamber as a community organization, not as a necessarily just a business organization.

Ted Wind: Welcome back to Beyond the Ribbon Cut, the podcast for chamber leaders. I'm your host, Ted Wind from Diagonal for Chambers, and my guest today is John Nyhan, president of the Hampton Area Chamber of Commerce in New Hampshire and chair of the New Hampshire Association of Chamber Executives. John, thank you so much for joining us today.

John Nyhan: Well, Ted, thank you. This is a great opportunity for us to share the the knowledge that not only I as one chamber president, but to share that out into the chamber world is is a really great opportunity.

Ted Wind: Thanks so much, John. And yeah, it's a pleasure having you on the show. We're really excited to jump into things today. So, to kick things off for listeners who have never been to the New Hampshire Sea Coast, could you paint us a picture of Hampton and the community your chamber serves?

John Nyhan: Sure. The Hampton Area Chamber of Commerce has five communities, close to 18 miles of beautiful ocean sea coast. It is the one of the prettiest areas in the state of New Hampshire. I brag about it all the time. And our chamber has quite a variety of small businesses, a lot in the hospitality and tourism. We drive a lot of tourists here in this community from late April through the end of October. And with my 400 plus chamber members, we invite and we have visitors from all around the country, all around the world visiting our beautiful sea coast.

Ted Wind: That's incredible. And with those visitors, you know, Hampton Beach obviously brings a huge seasonal wave kind of every summer. What does that mean for the mix of businesses that you work with in Hampton?

John Nyhan: Well, we have a probably 35 40% of our business community is seasonal. So we try to focus a lot on them during their season, but we also don't want to avoid our chamber members that are year round because we have quite a variety of memberships from not only hospitality and tourism, but we have retail, we have banks, we have insurance companies, we have manufacturers. Right now we have 45 nonprofits as chamber members. So, we're widespread here in the Sea Coast area.

Ted Wind: That's absolutely incredible. And and as far as kind of the team size that you're using to manage all those members, like how big is the kind of chamber staff here for the listeners at home?

John Nyhan: Well, fortunately, I have a limited staff, but they're a great staff. I have right now five employees counting myself. And then we also have a seasonal staff because we have a information center at the beach for the summer. So that is staffed with three individuals that welcome approximately 10,000 tourists every summer.

Ted Wind: Wow, that's incredible. That's incredible. Love that tight-knit team there. Before we jump into kind of the heart of the episode, obviously I really want to touch on, you know, some of the workforce programs and student initiatives you've been doing at the chamber. But before we dive into all that, I'd love to share a little bit more about you, John, with the chamber folks listening. You came into the chamber world after decent career in HR and kind of the talent development world. How did that path kind of lead you to running a chamber?

John Nyhan: Interesting you bring that up because my entire career has been in the area of HR both domestic and international. My last corporate job I was responsible for eight different countries over 5,000 employees. So I was out of the country more than I was in the country. Uh but all during that period of time my specialty was employment, recruitment, retention and so coming into the chamber world I really felt an important component of the chamber was to make sure that workforce was taken care of. The future of our workforce is highlighted. And so during my time here, my primary focus other than ribbon cuttings and business after hours and tourist and everything is really around workforce.

And that's how I got into really focusing in on career pathways and extended learning opportunity programs, etc., etc.

Ted Wind: I love that. I love that. Part of the thing I think that's so interesting about your story is a lot of times when chamber leaders hear workforce they think they go right to the job fairs and hiring events but you went upstream to students and schools. What made you decide that education and career pathways belonged at the chamber and not just a responsibility of the schools?

John Nyhan: I think as I speak for many out there in the in the chamber world because I've been involved with a number of national cohorts what they call with other chamber members is the fact that a chamber of commerce and I learned this long time ago when I was first hired and that was from a senator from here in New Hampshire when he called me on my first day and he said John he says just remember one thing when you work and play and live in a community, you also have to be 100% involved in that community. And that's something that I've listened to and reminded myself of every single day. And the chamber has to play a role in the community. And one of th those roles is workforce and education.

They come hand in hand. You know, we look at the educational component right now. College enrollment is down. The business community has to play a major role. Just my high school alone, the high school that falls in my jurisdiction, last year they graduated 350 students, 45% of them did not go off to a 4-year college. So the question is to all of us, what happened to those 45%? Where are those students? What are we doing to help those students in career training? And that's where the pathways come in.

Ted Wind: And why is the chamber uniquely positioned to connect those students with local careers?

John Nyhan: I think the chamber is connected because first of all, we're connected with the community. That means the people that live in this community know about the chamber. So there's families involved. The educational system is well known to the chamber because of our involvement with working with high school students and even now we're starting to work with middle school students in terms of career awareness which is that first step between right before career pathway is the career awareness and I think one of the things that the chamber realizes is that we don't want to take over the educational system we want to be a communicator, we want to be a facilitator.

And then when things are up and moving, we want to be an advisor, but we have a very important role because the business community really needs to understand the role of education and more importantly the role of education when it comes to career readiness.

Ted Wind: 100%. I think that's really interesting because I think a lot of chambers might be a little bit afraid to step on toes, especially when it comes to these kind of spaces. But I really like what you said there how you're trying to keep your role focused on being that communicator, facilitator, and then the adviser piece. I think that's really really crucial there. Another piece I wanted to ask on this, you went through the US Chamber Foundation's business leads fellowship in their kind of early initial cohort.

I'm curious if you could share a little bit more about what that experience changed about what you thought kind of a chamber could do, especially when it comes to workforce and this educational development programs.

John Nyhan: 3 months after I was hired at the chamber, I got an email from the US Chamber Foundation. It was a, you know, a group email to everybody in the in the country and it asked if anybody was interested in being part of a cohort that had to do with education and workforce. And that being important to me, I said, "Well, I'm going to try, but they're not going to pick me because I'm only three months into this job and I have this very small chamber in the sea coast of New Hampshire." Well, sure enough, I was selected one of 34 chamber executives from all around the country.

We had a number of meetings both online and on site and it really drove me to say, okay, when I finished this class, I have a mission. And that mission was to take what I learned and turn it into action. and turning it into action to me was very very important. So the first organization I went to was my local high school because I knew that they had what they call an extended learning opportunities program, ELOs. And in New Hampshire there are 62 high schools that have ELOs. So I went to my high school and I said, "All right, how do we work on getting some of these students that aren't going to be collegebound? how do we get them into career readiness programs?

How do we get them out of the classroom into some type of real life training? And they said, "Well, we'd love to work with you." And by the way, the number one occupation that was in serious need of help in the future was the trades program. So, it just so happened that one of our new chamber members was an actual trade school right here in Hampton. And so we brought them in involved and they said, "Yeah, we'd love to train some students from the high school and give them an awareness of electrical, plumbing, heating, etc." So the next thing we had to do is find some money to do that. So I reached out to the New Hampshire Charitable Foundation, told them about the program. They liked it.

They said, "All right, the max we can give you is $10,000." So, the $10,000 went to 10 students and to pay for the New Hampshire School of Mechanical Trades instructors. That program went so well that they wanted to do it again. U so I got another 10,000 and then New Hampshire School of Mechanical Trades said, "This is great. So, we're going to give you 20 students at the cost of 10." So, then we expanded it to five high schools around the sea coast for a second year. And now we're getting a waiting line at different high schools saying we want to be part of this program.

Unfortunately, but fortunately, the state of New Hampshire received, like every state, a whole lot of what they called ARPA money. And so I went to the individual here in New Hampshire that would had the jurisdiction of allocating out, told him about the program. He loved it. He went to the governor. The governor loved it. The executive counsel loved it. And lo and behold, within one week of bureaucratic meetings, we received close to $350,000 over a three-year period of time to train 260 students into the trades. Uh we were able to expand into eight schools.

And the bottom line is that after the program ended, we put to work over 50 students into a trades program making anywhere from 60 $80,000 a year. So, it was a great program. Um, you know, we're still right now in the process of looking at funding to continue the program. Um, but it works. And I think one of the things that I'm proud of is that we actually have a statistic at the end of the program. I can say that we spent 350,000. We trained 260 students. A lot of them might go off to a community college to learn particular trade, but we also placed 50 students in jobs right after high school. So that to me is a kind of a proven fact.

Ted Wind: That's absolutely incredible. And this is all part of the kind of like broader this is the pathways program correct that you're running. Y so a piece with that I mean as you mentioned I think first off that's an incredible story and I think something a lot of chamber leaders at home listening in can take a lot of confidence in the fact that you didn't have to start it with 50 members and state 50 students and state funding like you slowly built it up 10 students at a time 10 students at a time 10 students at a time until you know it was able to be noticed by the New Hampshire government I think that's really really incredible there.

The other piece that I want to touch on is a program like this has a lot of cooks in the kitchen, right? Schools, trade schools, employers, the state. How do you get everybody rowing in the same direction when you have so many stakeholders in a big program like this?

John Nyhan: I think one of the things that we get involved with the schools because they want to identify opportunities through their guidance counselor office to say look it Johnny or Jane they're not going to be equipped to go to a four-year college but we want to do something for them so that when they graduate from high school they're not just you know going home and hanging out at home. So that's an encouragement from the school. the trade schools. They're true believers of out of out of classroom training, meaning not to train somebody in philosophy or in art culture. Not saying that those are bad, but they want to train something that really has a meaningful career in the future.

So, they're on board because of that career training. And then of course the employers, a lot of our trades people, for example, here on the sea coast are familyowned and the owner is now in its 50s or 60s and they're looking to expand, but they don't have anybody to hire because nobody at that age wants to continue. So their future is the future workforce of young adults wanting to be electrician, wanting to be a plumber, etc. So let's take the state of New Hampshire. I mentioned to you that there were 62 ELO programs around the state of New Hampshire. There are 26 CTE, what they call career training. Now this is not just a New Hampshire issue. It's countrywide.

There is what they call a Perkins Act, which is a right now $1.4 billion is allocated for the '26–'27 school year. That's across the country. New Hampshire only gets 7 million of that. And it's my role now is to say, okay, we need to really have the state government and then also our federal partners to realize that money needs to be increased in programs like this because that's going to be the future of our workforce.

Ted Wind: 100%. I think there's also this maybe this like disconnect a bit between parents who you know maybe have been taught that college is the only path for their students. Is that your job as the chamber to make the case for trades careers or is that kind of the universities and the high school's jobs or

John Nyhan: I think it's a combination Ted and why I say that is that one of the most important components of a career program like this is parent engagement. They need to buy in on that. Jane or John might be better off going into a career readiness type of program rather than spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on a 4-year college program where they're going to graduate and be unemployed and yet have 200 $250,000 of tuition that they have to pay back. So parent engagement is really important.

The other part of it I think is that they also need to understand which right now our school systems throughout the state and for that matter across the country has to do a better job in making an awareness what we call data assessment testing so that families can better understand testing results that the kids go through from grade three grade eight and then also in their junior and senior year in high school that there is no real understanding of what the assessment value is to really lead the parent to think that well maybe John or Jane isn't ready for college so let's let's look at an option for this because that data right now is so confusing it's not written in layman's terms and so that blue collar parent that works it working so hard gets this report from a school and has no understanding how to read it, no understanding what the results is, and they can't even tell one way or the other about their child.

You know, is that child underlevel school at grade level or over grade level? There's nothing in the air. So, one of the things that I've been working on over the last couple of months is working with the commissioner of education here in the state of New Hampshire to look at how do we get data out into the families that's understanding how can we get the community along with the business community to bring the parents out into a gymnasium and say, "Okay, here's what you should really understand about data and accountability and assessment."

Ted Wind: Mhm. Mhm. And that's something I want to highlight for listeners at home. Like again, with all these programs you've been talking about, you're not just running them, you're actually proving the efficacy of them through studying the data, through bringing in, like you said, the University of New Hampshire to study what are the effects on economic mobility here? How do you measure and communicate the impact of a program like this? like specifically what in the data that you guys got surprised you or maybe wasn't what you were expecting?

John Nyhan: Well, first of all, there's a piece of data that is missing. So, and let me go back to the example of the high school where 45% did not graduate, did not go on to four-year college. There is no data out there right now that says, "All right, what happened to them? So the data needs to follow not only after the last day of the school, but they have to follow it into where that person goes because that's the only data that's going to be important to see exactly what's happening to these kids.

And and I think just results alone when you have kids getting jobs, listening to both the business community, their parents who realize that it's better for them to become a an apprentice in a trades program versus going off and majoring in philosophy. Those are the proven facts. But yet there's still a lot of data information that's missing for us to build a case that this out of school training has to be an important component in an individual's educational plan.

Ted Wind: Mhm. 100%. And I just want to bring it back to kind of working on this work while of course being a chamber. These kinds of programs can take years, if not decades, to really show fruit, bear fruit, and pay off. How do you keep your board bought in along the way? Especially, like I said, when these programs can take multiple years,

John Nyhan: I think first of all, you need for any chamber to get involved in some of the things that I'm involved in, you need 100% support from the board of directors. And fortunately, knock on wood, I have that support. And and one of the things that I think is really important and you mentioned earlier, you know, what advice would I give to chamber executives that advice is yes, it's important that we spend a lot of time on membership drives, on events, and all the other fundraising stuff that we need to do to be able to pay for our chamber operations. But over and above that, a chamber president. This is not a retirement job.

And I hate to say this, but there are chamber executives around the country that worked their entire life in a great job and decided that before they actually retire, they're going to have this fun job of being a chamber president. Well, I'm sorry. chamber presidents today need to have like their first job to that sense that I want to make a difference and I think that's the important thing and I think that's where my board sees where I come from. You know I'm old but I'm not over that right-hand side of the bell curve yet. So it's important that other chamber executives realize that going back to what I said about my senator friend that you need to be involved in the community.

You just can't worry about fundraising or membership drives. You need to be part of the community where people know the chamber as a community organization, not as a necessarily just a business organization.

Ted Wind: And another piece of that is it doesn't even have to just be your individual community. For instance, with the catapult sea coast initiative that you have, you're working in partnership with a few other chambers, right? How does that kind of, you know, multi-chamber network work and could you expand a little bit more on kind of how you got that program started and worked with other chambers and collaboration on that?

John Nyhan: Sure. Catapult would number one is a great great organization made up of young professionals and to be honest with you we're as chambers a little bit selfish because we need to keep these young professionals happy involved knowing that we want to keep them in the state of New Hampshire. We don't want them to graduate from college and go off to a surrounding state or someplace else. We need to keep them in New Hampshire. So we're selfish. So we try to do everything possible to help them because it's a great professional networking organization. They do a ton of volunteerism which is great but it also we have to look at the catapult organization as the future of our chambers.

You know, a lot of folks in the chamber world have that age bracket of, you know, 40 years and older. We need to bring in that 22 to 40 year old individual to say you need to be part of the chamber and let's make Catapult part of the chamber so that you can understand the benefits of both organizations.

Ted Wind: 100%. And I mean that's something we talk with chambers all the time about that, you know, how do we better engage younger members with the chamber? How do we get that demographic in? And I think programs like this are one of those just incredibly incredibly strong ways to actually do that. I'm curious about one event that's related to this in particular. You guys have the Hampton Seafood Festival and that's obviously a massive a massive event. Tons of volunteer, hundreds of volunteers right at that event.

John Nyhan: Yeah.

Ted Wind: Many of those are young professionals. Is that a retention engine as well for you know younger people involved in the chamber or is that do you use that event a little bit differently?

John Nyhan: No, of course. Well, first of all, we're going on our 36th year of our seafood festival. It's the largest festival in the New England states. We have it over three days. We average about 80 to 100,000 people that will come to Hampton Beach for that weekend. We have over 500 volunteers that we need to operate a variety of different things within the festival. And we draw a lot on people at all ages. And one of the things that we love is the young groups that join and not only you know young professionals like Catapult, but we draw from the high schools where for example we have a group of volunteers that help with traffic control and that's the high school ROTC.

Well, they dress up in their uniforms and they look very important. And so that one of the things that is beneficial to us and to the community is that as part of the volunteer programs, we give out close to $30,000 in donations to these different groups that volunteer their time for that weekend. It's a great festival. It's great for our community. It's a big economic development project for us. It keeps businesses open after Labor Day. And the and the great thing about it is that our reputation is now that we have people contacting us in January, February of each year. Can you tell us when the seafood festival is? We want to get tickets in advance.

Can you tell us the hotels that we can stay in? So, we're getting people as far away as Texas and Arkansas coming to Hampton Beach strictly for the seafood festival.

Ted Wind: Wow. Wow. That's absolutely incredible. And I'm really just in awe of all the incredible events and programs you guys, despite being a smaller chamber, have been able to put on. I think that ties nicely into one of our last questions here. You know, especially the chamber leaders listening at home. These events sound incredible. These programs sound incredible. But the first question is always, I'd love to do this, but I don't know where to begin. For the smaller chamber leader listening at home, if they were looking at starting a early workforce development education program like this, where should they start?

John Nyhan: Well, I think one of the things and I'm proud to be the chairperson of a statewide association of chambers. So right now in the state of New Hampshire for example we have 32 active chambers and part of our program is that every quarter we have professional development courses that we give not only to our executives the chambers but their staff be it membership or event coordination or whatever.

So I would suggest that small chamber executives first of all look up to see and be involved in statewide chamber organizations there's a wealth of knowledge out there but also I think you know when you talk about the US chamber and also the association of chamber executives the ACCE both organizations are a wealth of knowledge I can't tell you how much I have benefited in my eight years both not only with the chamber but also with ACCE they're not competing organizations they're out there both helping the chamber organizations I associate those two organizations with AI because I can write to the chamber or I can write to ACCE and say tell me about this and it might not be as fast as AI but I do get a really positive response

Ted Wind: I love that. I love that. And speaking of ACCE, I want to make sure before we wrap up that we give the listeners at home who might be attending a chance to learn a little bit more about the session that you're going to be leading. So, if you want to share a little bit more about that, it's called ACCE Foundation Showcase Education and Talent Development. What should listeners at home know about that talk and who should be in the room?

John Nyhan: Well, one of the things I'm excited about is, and this is not your typical session where you get up on a stage and you get anywhere from 50 to 100 people sitting down in chairs and stuff. This is kind of like a what I call a trade show job fair where there's going to be four or five of us spread out in a room and we each will have our own little table and people will walk around and want to know about what my thoughts are about this and that. So although it's not going to be a speech because it's going to be a challenge when people will come up and I'm in the middle of something and somebody else will come up and so I kind of jump into all kinds of conversations.

So, I have a great young staff here that's going to help me really be able to give a dynamic 45 minutes of what I think are key points for people that want to know about more about career pathway programs, ELO programs, Perkins or whatever. So, I'm I'm excited about it. It's going to be a great experience for me and I hope that the takeaway will be that when people leave that session they'll go home and say I want to do something like that.

Ted Wind: I love that. I love that. I think you know the stuff that we talked about on this episode plus that session is maybe there's no better preparation for a chamber leader listening at home to be able to actually go in and you know launch one of these programs themselves. I re again I just want to say thank you so much John for coming on today. This was a really fantastic episode. What I love most about this entire story is just it shows that chambers don't have to wait for someone else to build a talent pipeline in their community. You know you can start you can go first as the chamber.

So again, if you want to learn more about the incredible Hampton Area Chamber of Commerce and John and the great work he's been doing there, you can check out their information at the link in the description below. And to everyone listening, thanks again for tuning in to Beyond the Ribbon Cut. We'll see you on the next episode.