Art of Business

The Ulster County Regional Chamber of Commerce and Ulster County Tourism are partnering to host the inaugural Ulster County Black Business Achievement Awards and Community Connect on June 15 from 5pm to 8pm. The event will be hosted at Ulster Savings Bank corporate headquarters at 180 Schwenk Drive, Kingston.

The Orange County Chamber of Commerce is wrapping up a busy season and is settling into a new home to start the new year. The Chamber is leaving its Goshen headquarters and setting up shop at the John Blake House, a late-18th-century house on Homestead Avenue in the village of Maybrook.

When it comes to the small business community in Orange County, there are few organizations better positioned to provide support, recognition, and growth quite like the Orange County Chamber of Commerce. And even amid the continued pressures of the pandemic, the organization’s commitment to meeting the needs of small businesses has remained as strong as ever thanks to the new leadership of Heather Bell-Meyer.

From hip and happening Newburgh to historic West Point and quaint and cozy Warwick, Orange County is home to a robust community of businesses and organizations of all sizes. Providing county-wide support and resources for such disparate voices may seem like a difficult job, but it’s one that Heather Bell-Meyer, newly appointed President and CEO of the Orange County Chamber of Commerce, is approaching with energy and enthusiasm for the future after the last year of the pandemic.

In the summer of 2019, Liz Glover Wilson had just opened the second location of her burgeoning Gardiner yoga studio and wellness campus, Stone Wave Yoga, in Poughkeepsie. Like so many other small business owners in the Hudson Valley, she had no way of knowing that only months later her entire business would fundamentally change. With the pandemic’s economic and personal challenges constantly at her door, however, yoga remained the one thing that Glover Wilson knew she could count on. “A lot of the students who stayed with us this last year are hungry to learn more about the yoga tool kit because they’re seeing that it really does work,” she says.

After a decade in the New York City music industry, Brenna Chase realized she was ready to turn the tables and claim the creative role for herself. Instead of music, however, Chase chose to pursue the historic arts of stained glass and gold leaf, and started her own workshop, Willow Deep Studio in Rosendale in 2018.

A showcase of some of the region's women in business.

Through their work designing Passive House buildings and empowering an ever-widening audience from elementary school students to building professionals with the knowledge of Passive House, In Cho and Tim Shields, founders of Kingston and Brooklyn-based architecture firm ChoShields Studio are advocating for a climate positive and socially equitable future. “Passive House is something that we would love to become public knowledge so it’s not just within our specific field,” says In. “It really has to be expanded to everyone. Our goal is to spread this knowledge so that everyone knows exactly what Passive House means the same way you do something as easy as recycling.”

Now more than ever, we need to celebrate the diversity of our locally owned business community. Chronogram Media is supporting BIPOC-and-women owned organizations by donating services and advertising. Each month, we’ll be highlighting some of our partners in our pages and we invite you to join us in supporting them.

Now more than ever, we need to celebrate the diversity of our locally owned business community. Chronogram Media is supporting BIPOC-and-women owned organizations by donating services and advertising. Each month, we’ll be highlighting some of our partners in our pages and we invite you to join us in supporting them.

The small business accelerator program at Cornell Creative Business Center in Midtown Kingston was founded in 2016 by the Arc Mid-Hudson as a way to bring more businesses to Kingston while fulfilling its mission to support its network of approximately 1,700 people with disabilities in Ulster, Greene, and Putnam counties. In exchange for employing people with disabilities, local businesses in the center receive below-market rent plus infrastructure support like advice on scaling its equipment and technology.