As Quinte News continues to look back on 2025, one of the chief roles for the Belleville Chamber of Commerce over the past year was to effectively communicate with businesses and make sure policies reflected the needs of the local community.
Chamber Chief Executive Officer Jill Raycroft says they joined the Social Action Working Group with 16 other chambers across the province who are seeing the same issues with community safety and challenges with mental health and addiction.
“The residual impact on homelessness and working with Loyalist College to develop a report that compares some of those initiatives that aren’t being tracked and how we may be able to put forward policy resolutions and recommendations that ask the government to expand the scope of the type of programming that they’re willing to support for the agencies who are there to do the work.”
Raycroft says the chamber remains a voice for all members, whether large or small operations.
A big change for the chamber was stepping back from coordinating some major city events like the Santa Claus Parade, Canada Day and waterfront festivities.
Raycroft says it’s allowed them to become involved in different opportunities including the Ontario Career Lab.
The program focuses on supporting Grade 9 and 10 students trying to identify a career path through small group conversations (five to six students) rather than large presentations.
“It’s such a neat way to talk to students who are still concerned and feeling that career pathways are linear. Like they’re thinking about job titles as opposed to skill set. And they’re thinking that if they make the wrong choices now, that will land them in a job they might hate eventually and what happens to them if they make a mistake.”
The Career Lab kicked off last spring with 250 career coaches visiting 13 schools across Hastings and Prince Edward Counties,meeting with over 1500 students and sharing 90,000 minutes of conversation.
The program continued this fall.
