Huron: A small town with a big heart

Huron is a small town consisting of a diverse selection of businesses and organizations, from small to large, manufacturing to retail, restaurants of all types and multiple service organizations with various denominations of faith-based churches. All of these businesses and organizations contribute to supporting our residents and each other — and the key to a successful community, especially during a pandemic, is communication and collaboration. The Huron Chamber of Commerce focuses on economic development, community involvement and tourism while providing services, discounts and support to approximately 300 members. Our commitment to our community members and businesses looked a little different during the pandemic in 2020. Even though our physical office wasn't open to visitors, our chamber reacted to the pandemic's effect on our businesses and community members as a call to action. Our chamber worked hard to become the hub for information and get our community through the challenges. We felt it was important to make sure our community knew how to support our small businesses as well as finding new ways to do things that were safe and positive. We created new ways to communicate, celebrate and support our businesses and neighbors. Even though 2020 was a rough year, and we look forward to getting back to the "way things were," 2020 encouraged us to be creative, and we learned new ways to do things that will continue long past the pandemic. The Huron Chamber took the approach of "how do we do things differently" instead of not doing them at all. This way of thinking led us to the community enjoying the Easter Bunny and Santa by Boat events; hosting a Halloween Trick-or-Treat Drive-Thru, in partnership with the Huron Rotary; and providing co-op marketing opportunities to our businesses that might not have been able to afford marketing costs on their own. And we learned new ways to utilize and enhance our use of social media, which allows us to focus and react to specific needs of our businesses and community members. For example, we created the Dine Huron and Jobs in Huron Facebook groups during the pandemic to help our community members and businesses interact and be aware. In 2021, we look forward to applying what we have learned and know that our community has become stronger together. We hope, when our residents look back on 2020, that they can find a good memory or two and smile. We recently celebrated 2020 with Huron Hometown Heroes, giving our community members the opportunity to recognize a resident or business that went over and above in the challenging time. On behalf of the city of Huron, Huron Township and Huron Chamber, we look forward to recognizing those over 40 businesses and individuals soon. #huronstrong: It's not just a picture caption in Huron, it's a way of living.