Leadership Tri-County Program expands
Chamber adds first full-time director for program
POTTSTOWN » The TriCounty Area Chamber of Commerce Foundation is expanding its Leadership Tri-County program.
The professional development opportunity is a 10-month program that brings together business professionals from across the tri-county region to focus on their leadership development, expand their network and to learn more about the region’s communities and themselves.
The first step in the expansion was to name a full-time director of the program. Previously, coordination of the leadership program was done on a part-time basis.
“There was never enough time to put the energy, detail and research needed into advancing the program to another level,” according to Eileen Dautrich, president of the TriCounty Area Chamber of Commerce and a 2000 graduate of the program. She said that over the years she has seen what other organizations have been doing and saw the potential for Leadership TriCounty.
“The time was right to say — ‘in order to do what we always hoped — we need to make the call and take the risk.’ We knew it was time to put someone into the position full-time to get it where we want it to be,” she added.
Jennifer O’Donnell has been appointed director of Leadership Tri-County. She has been with the chamber since 2015, serving as the chamber’s member relations director. In addition to being a 2016 graduate of the Leadership Tri-County program, O’Donnell joined the newly formed Leadership Tri-County Advisory Board last year.
In 2017, she took on the role of Leadership TriCounty director and her first class graduated in June. Continuing her own professional development, O’Donnell is scheduled to graduate in August from the Institute for Organization Management, a four year certificate program run by the United States Chamber of Commerce.
Participants in the Leadership Tri-County program meet once per month to network and to be educated about serving on a non-profit board. They also work on behalf of a nonprofit while going through the program — completing a project to benefit the organization.
Leadership Tri-County graduated its first class of leaders in 1993. There are currently close to 200 graduates, according to Dautrich. The Leadership TriCounty Advisory Board was formed within the last two years, she said, to engage the alumni.
“Now more than ever, we believe this is the ideal time to invest time and energy into the expansion of our 25-year-old program. We are aware of multiple opportunities to create an even more robust educational and leadership development focused program in addition to expanding the community impact that Leadership Tri-County provides to our region’s nonprofits,” Dautrich added.
“We want to make it more powerful for the class, the community, non-profits and employers,” O’Donnell said. “We want to be the premier leadership program and build it out to be the premier program in the region.”
Among the specific enhancements to the program, she said, will be more in depth training for class members, “where it will help their own leadership personally and with their employer and with nonprofits.”
There will also be an expanded board boot camp, which typically covers the areas of governance, finance and fundraising for non-profits.
“We’re going to go a little bit deeper — go into more details to give them a better understanding of how to be equipped for serving on boards,” O’Donnell added.
Once they graduate, each Leadership Tri-County participant serves on the board of a non-profit.
O’Donnell said something else that is planned is to work with the non-profits that submit project requests to the program. That work will be conducted in conjunction with the Non Profit Center at La Salle University’s School of Business.
The next Leadership TriCounty class will kick off in September — and applications are being accepted now, according to O’Donnell. Area businesses that want to have an employee participate in the leadership program do not need to be chamber members to do so.
Businesses interested in participating or serving as a sponsor of the program can contact O’Donnell at the TriCounty Area Chamber of Commerce at 610-326-2900.
The TriCounty Area
Chamber of Commerce is a membership based, business advocacy organization serving more than 460 members in southeastern Berks, western Montgomery, and northern Chester counties.
For more information about Leadership Tri-County and the TriCounty Area Chamber of Commerce visit www.tricountyareachamber.com