Fountain Inn’s new chamber director connects company, community
3 min read
For as very long as she can try to remember, Marnie Shwartz-Hanley has been trying to generate a perception of neighborhood. For just over a month now, she’s been doing just that in Fountain Inn, popping in and out of the businesses on Key Street just to say howdy as she walks by.
Taking the career as president of the Fountain Inn Chamber of Commerce wasn’t wherever on her radar right until a colleague introduced the position emptiness to her focus.
“I started out out as a quite business ‘no,’ simply because I was satisfied and I did not want to go to a scaled-down chamber and not have the personnel and assist that I had,” she claimed. “I finished up stating indeed mainly because it frightened the daylights out of me.”
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So here she sits at the setting up on Depot Avenue, surrounded by welcome-to-town swag baggage, shots of her relatives and a nameplate on her bookshelf designating her the “Executive Rockstar in Cost of Fabulosity.”
A West Pelzer resident who spent time functioning for the chambers of commerce in Simpsonville and Greenville, Shwartz-Hanley has lived in the Upstate approximately 35 years.
Along with her a long time of chamber experience, Fountain Inn administrator Shawn Bell mentioned Schwartz-Hanley delivers a wealth of chamber experience to the town.
“She has these types of a great personality and has a ton of power,” Bell claimed. “She has now strike the ground working and we are enthusiastic to have her in our great neighborhood.”
At first from New York, she fell in appreciate with the area following going right here with her adoptive mom and dad in 1984.
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“I went back again up to New York for about six months and understood it was not some position I truly needed to invest the rest of my lifetime,” she recollects. “I actually like the mountains, I appreciate the tree frogs, I adore the peace and quiet. I like on the lookout up at the sky and looking at the complete universe.”
She refused to depart the location and sooner or later confident her significant school sweetheart of a husband to transfer in this article in 2006.
She jokes she experienced to import him.
“When I came below in 1984, I got a lot of, ‘Y’ain’t from around here,’” she stated.
Just as the rhetoric towards her has adjusted, so has Fountain Inn and Greenville County in general, she reported.
“There’s a great deal of alter coming, and I like that we’re doing a great deal of planning since development for growth’s sake is most cancers,” Shwartz-Hanley mentioned. “We never want it to be cluttered, we really do not want visitors conditions where we simply cannot get from a single position to one more.”
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Scheduling for that expansion usually means currently being all set to welcome new enterprises with open arms and connect them with methods that now exist in the local community — her favorite part of chamber operate. Generating confident smaller corporations and substantial producers are in the “appropriate rooms” as a staff members of 1 has been her largest problem due to the fact she took the career on Could 3.
Maintaining the cozy Key Street sense — the road she walks to lunch and check out users of her board of administrators — is crucial to her and the people of Fountain Inn, she mentioned.
“I might are living in West Pelzer, but I operate in Fountain Inn now, and I really like it here,” she said. “And I’m fiercely protecting of it. I want to make positive we’re escalating at a great rate but we’re preserving the identical character.”
— Caitlin Herrington, community reporter and lover of alliteration, handles federal government and progress in the Golden Strip. Stick to her on Twitter @GVLnewsCat.
