OuttaDeeBox Podcast
OuttaDeeBox podcast is a pre-recorded bi weekly show geared towards supporting former and current inmates and their families in Wisconsin. Our mission is to inform listeners about community resources that can assist them in securing employment opportunities, housing, mental health and substance abuse support, with the goal of reducing recidivism in Wisconsin. We also give listeners and guests the opportunity to share their unique inspirational stories through spoken word and other forms of musical artistry.
OuttaDeeBox Podcast
Building a Future Through Community and Diversity with Christina Williams
What if you could unlock the true power of community connection and celebration? Christina Williams, the executive director of the Sun Prairie Chamber of Commerce, joins us to unravel this secret. Christina sheds light on how the Chamber serves as a vital link between businesses, resources, and customers. She takes us on an enlightening journey of Cornfest, an annual community event that has stood the test of time, serving as a beacon of unity and celebration for a whopping 70 years! From supporting scholarships to advancing health initiatives, Christina reveals how every dollar spent at Cornfest goes back into nurturing the community.
Yet, it's not just about commerce and festivities. Christina opens up about the Chamber's earnest efforts to weave diversity and inclusivity into the fabric of Cornfest. The event has become a cherished tradition for many Latino families, and the Chamber is striving to make it a welcoming haven for the black and LGBTQ communities as well. Christina also offers a sneak peek into other fun ways to engage with the Chamber, like volunteering at Cornfest or joining their lively coffee chat. Please tune in to our heartening conversation with Christina, and discover how the Sun Prairie Chamber of Commerce is shaping a future where everyone feels heard, important, and, most importantly, part of one big family.
What's up everybody. This is your host D-Star here with Christina Williams. Christina Williams, how are you today?
Speaker 2:I'm doing great.
Speaker 1:So you got to meet my lovely wife. I did Rocio. Hmm, yes, she told you about her many, many, many plants.
Speaker 2:Yes, fantastic, it's a little jungle up there.
Speaker 1:It is a jungle in here, so for the people that don't know you, can you tell us a little bit about yourself?
Speaker 2:So I am the executive director at the Sunpray Chamber of Commerce. I came to the chamber as a former business owner, so I had a great deal of respect for the members that are at a chamber. I had been a member of a chamber myself. It gave me a really great perspective, coming into the chamber and understanding what I was looking for when I was coming into a chamber. It was a great fit for me. I've lived in Sunpray for over 30 years, raised my family there. I have four children that have gone through the school district there. My husband and I have lived in the same house in Sunpray area for 30 years.
Speaker 1:Wow yeah, 30 years. So it's safe to say that you are invested.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. Yeah, this is my home and I've lived there longer than I've lived anywhere else.
Speaker 1:What role does the chamber play in the community?
Speaker 2:We view ourselves as a connector. We are responsible for connecting our member businesses with the community, their customers, businesses that maybe they need or businesses that need them, as well as the resources that they may need to be successful in their business.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I can vouch for that because I'm a chamber member. Yeah, and I don't know how long I've been a chamber member. I think I've been a chamber member for about two, three months.
Speaker 2:Maybe longer.
Speaker 1:It was in the spring. It was in the spring because I remember still having to wear a coat.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And now it's record breaking heat.
Speaker 2:Right, yes, it's been a summer.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's been about as long as the summer, right before the summer, and the connections that I've made and the people that I've met have really been lucrative, not only for my business but personally. I feel a really great connection with you. We talk, I tell people, I say Christina, I'm like you know, I talk to Christina like once a week, right, Right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, right, right.
Speaker 1:Working on this cornfest thing. I really enjoy our conversations. Yeah, speaking of cornfest, how did cornfest start and what's its main goal?
Speaker 2:All of the dollars that are raised at cornfest are turned back into our community to help with scholarships and health initiatives and bettering. For starters, cornfest is actually celebrating 70 years and it was started in the 50s, where actually it would be 1953, 70 years ago. Really, it was the community members looking for a reason to come together. So it was these business members that came together and said you know, we'd like to have some kind of a community gathering. So where the Bank of Semperi is wasn't there and it was a park at the time. They hosted a corn boil and invited the community.
Speaker 2:It was a great way, like I said, for the community to come together and over the course of a couple of years it grew a little bit more. They decided that it needed to stay around. So they looked at businesses in the community and tried to decide who could take over the planning of this, because these business owners were trying to build their own businesses. So to take time off to do this every single year was difficult. They looked around and they're like oh well, you know, the chamber chamber has staff. We'll give it to the chamber.
Speaker 1:And since you've been at the helm, you understand why they did that.
Speaker 2:Yes, yeah, I really do. So it was born, the chamber owned cornfest and put on this festival the Stokely Canning Company. They decided to donate the corn and they would boil the corn and they would deliver. It, moved it down to Angel Park I can't remember the year exactly, but and so they would just deliver it. Well, the canning company was where the nitty gritty is right now, and so it was really a really easy transition to take it over to Angel Park across the railroad track, and when the canning company closed, they gave the canning equipment just enough to do for Cornfest to the chamber. And so we own a huge industrial boiler and these steaming vessels where the corn gets steamed for the festival.
Speaker 1:Cornfest has done a lot for the community. As the community grows, we're trying to be more inclusive to everyone in the community. Can you tell us about the culture celebration and why it was created?
Speaker 2:So we've done a lot with Cornfest to try and engage the diversity of our community. Two years ago we had La Movita start coming in on Sunday because the Latino community Shout out to La.
Speaker 1:Movita.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely. The Latino community. The maze is such an important part of their culture and so it was a natural fit to have them come in. And it's really become a really big Sunday event for so many Latino families to come out to Cornfest and celebrate with live music and contests et cetera, so on. It's become a family event for so many. They'll come out and they'll just hang out all day. So it's really been fun.
Speaker 2:But we thought, well, what can we do to further this?
Speaker 2:So this, with the help of some business owners in our community you and certainly our one we listened and we said, okay, what can we do?
Speaker 2:We really want to embrace our black community and give them a platform for sharing with the world their culture and to celebrate the fact that we have such a great community, and we just really want the black community members to feel welcome and we want them to have a space where they can go. Oh, look, they're playing music that I know and I love, and they're. You know, I'm seeing more of people that I know and I'm comfortable with and trying to merge those two things so that we can bridge a gap that exists. You know, we just want everybody to feel welcome and loved and valued at the festival and this really gives us a great platform for that. We really want to start the dialogue, continue the dialogue and have it be a two-sided conversation. So, you know, shout out to you for really seeing that and bringing it to me right and saying, hey, I have this vision, and really challenging me to think outside the box.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. I'm just doing my civic duty. Yes, for my community.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely, and it's a great community.
Speaker 1:It is. That's it. That's all it is. Yeah, so what is the main message that the chamber and the city would like the black community to know?
Speaker 2:I can't speak specifically for the city.
Speaker 1:And not to cut you off. Yeah, that is a great point. One of the common misconceptions is that the chamber and the city are one in the same, when in fact they are two separate entities. Yes, the chamber is its own entity and the city is its own entity. They might have some of the same interests, of course, yeah, but they're not necessarily intertwined to the fact where, if the chamber goes left, the city is going to go left. Yeah, I'm pretty sure there's a lot of projects that you wanted to do or things that you wanted to get done that the city, you know, wasn't 100% on board with as quick as you wanted them to be, or they've just flat out said no.
Speaker 2:Sure, we've really worked hard to build a relationship with the city and that's really been done for the benefit of our members, right? Because if we have a good, solid working relationship with the city, if we have a business that comes to us with a concern or an issue, we are able to sit down, we have that immediate connection with the city and we can call them and we can say, hey, you know, this is a concern or something that's happening. But we had a member call us and say we heard from the city that it's going to take, or we've we're hearing rumors that it's going to take six to eight months for us to get a permit. And we're we can't wait that long. We have the equipment we need to get this done and that permit can't hold us up. We need to get moved out.
Speaker 2:Is there anything you can do for us? And I actually made a phone call to the city and I said, okay, who do I need to talk to? What do we need to do? And what I was able to do was I was able to connect the business with the exact person that they needed to talk to so they would know exactly how to submit all the paperwork in a way that it would be approved, and what happened was, instead of that business needing to wait six to eight months, they were able to get it done in four weeks.
Speaker 1:Wow.
Speaker 2:So that's the value of what we can provide and that's why we have such a close working relationship with the city.
Speaker 1:So what is the main message that the chamber would like to send to the black community?
Speaker 2:We've worked really hard to create an environment where all of our minority business owners are welcome, so we've really gotten to know some of the individuals over the black chamber. I had a great conversation with Jessica from the Wisconsin Latino chamber before she went off and did her thing, which I'm so excited for her family that she's now working on a more national level and is able to really advocate for, so that's really exciting. But we also recently started working with the LGBTQ community, so we're really trying to create a space that everyone's feeling welcome in, and part of doing that is when we have anybody come in and it's just anybody. We have a lot of connecting events. We have a lot of networking events every week. Every week, every Friday morning from 8.39 30, coffee and chat yeah, absolutely, and it's a great place to really get to know people personally.
Speaker 1:Shout out to Action Jackson.
Speaker 2:Action.
Speaker 1:Jackson set the attendance record for his sponsor coffee chat.
Speaker 2:He really did. Oh my goodness, I think we had almost 50 people there. It was crazy and that's incredible, considering when we first envisioned coffee chat, we're like it was just a small group of eight to 12 people checking in making sure everything was going well and talking about the challenges that they were having in their business. And to go to you know, almost 15 people. What a fantastic day to. It's just such a fun time to really engage with people and it gives me the opportunity then to introduce them to others Our business community, our members in Sun Prairie. There's just something so special about all of them and when you come to coffee chat, we have some regulars that are there and they will just literally wrap you up into the event. Before you know it. You're talking to everybody there's. You know, and that is by design. I did not want a chamber where people would come to an event and sit on the edge trying to break in and leave the event because they just couldn't break into a conversation.
Speaker 1:It's definitely not like that Coming to coffee chat and people are wanting to know who you are, what your business is and how can they collaborate, you know, or hey, do you need any services in this? Or call me if you need any office supplies or furniture or any.
Speaker 2:You know what I mean.
Speaker 1:Like they want to do business, you know. Shout out to Bob too. Shout out to Bill. Bill is hilarious.
Speaker 2:He really is. He's such a great ambassador.
Speaker 1:And he is an ambassador of the chamber. Steve, I like Steve too.
Speaker 2:No, steve's great, yeah, and Steve is on the city side, so yeah, he's an alderman right. He is and that's really important too right. We have our city officials engaging with the chamber and wanting to engage with our business members in these environments. That's really important for people to understand that they really do want to know and they really do want to advocate. They wanna know what we need to do to make this community inclusive and welcoming and a safe, warm place for everybody.
Speaker 1:So what are some of the misconceptions that you would like to clear up regarding the reputation of the Sum Prairie Chamber of Commerce?
Speaker 2:All I can do is speak to the chamber and what we're doing right? We are focused on the future. We really want to create that space that people feel like they're heard, like they're important, like they really matter. We are doing what we can through personal relationships, through outreach, through connecting with people who can help everyone understand that that's where we're headed in our business community, and if our business community can do it, then our entire community can do it right. So we're setting that standard of we want everyone to feel like they are a part of this community.
Speaker 1:Awesome. I really think that you're really speaking from the heart and speaking truth, in fact, so thank you for that. So what's next for the chamber and how can people get involved?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so what's next for the chamber?
Speaker 1:Cornfest.
Speaker 2:Cornfest. You know it. You know it. So, yes, we are actually for us. We are actually looking for volunteers. So you want to get involved? We have some really fun things that people do, our community members do and any members can come in and do it. I don't have the volunteer roster public, so people reach out through us and our member businesses have it. So you know anybody wants to do it, they can get the link through the member businesses. But to get involved at Cornfest I have signed up Genius for serving hot corn. Now that sounds like okay. What do we do with that? It's literally you're the ones that are, as people are coming in to get their hot corn. They're so excited about this hot corn. It's crazy. You know the servers are actually picking up corn and putting it in the tote. They're taking it off a conveyor belt and putting it on the tote. So we have those types of positions we have. Helping with uncooked corn. We sell a lot of uncooked corn because it's really inexpensive. We do a brown paper bag. It's you pick, can't husk, but you pick. It's 10 bucks for a bag, really inexpensive. So we have people there that are helping pull the corn out to the edge of the trailer. They're helping to pick up garbage. They're selling the bags so that people can pick their own corn.
Speaker 2:We also have parade volunteers. I need a lot of parade volunteers. So we have the parade on Wednesday night and the block party afterwards. I overlap the parade and a band downtown. The parade starts at six, the band starts at seven.
Speaker 2:The parade is probably gonna be another hour and a half parade this year, so there is that overlap hoping to draw people downtown. The band that we choose is they are last year and this year it's the same band, but they're a local grown band. They're all high school graduates of Sumprey High School that are part of this band and they sing songs from all years 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s. They're across the board the parade. We have people that need to stand at corners and make sure that cars know they need to turn around. We have barricades or cones up but we're making sure that people are behaving at the corners and also helping with the parade lineup as the parade floats, come in and entries, helping with them, check in, with the check in process to make sure we have them on the list. All of these things take a lot of people.
Speaker 1:It's an incredible number. What about businesses? How can businesses get involved?
Speaker 2:To become a Chamber member. We have an online application at some prairiechambercom. When you get there at the very top toward the right, it says Join us. You can click that, you can fill it out and just go through the whole application. Our membership is based on the number of employees that you have, and that's by design, because when you apply to be a member, all of your staff can take advantage of the benefits that the chamber has to offer.
Speaker 2:We have educational opportunities that maybe you know you want some of your staff to take advantage of, or you want them to do networking, so you can enter them in as representatives and then just hit submit. You can pay with credit card online or, if we don't, we get an email anyway and it says, hey, they haven't paid. We reach out and we're like hey, is you have any questions? What can we do for you? And so our sole proprietor is $175 for the year. The most that any company would pay is $675.
Speaker 2:And that is for businesses that have over 30 employees. So a small business, one to five employees, is $255 a year and for that you can come, take advantage of all of our opportunities and you also get an opportunity to be in our community guide, so the Sun Prairie community. We don't have yellow pages anymore, so the Sun Prairie community guide is pretty much the closest thing that we have out there to a yellow pages and it goes across the city so people moving into town. Realtors are giving it out to them, they're in the hotels, so visitors they're getting them. It also gets distributed across the Midwest so we have a network of other chambers, tourist locations, so the tourist places in between the roads as you're going up the highway. We have them in a lot of those places as well throughout the Midwest. So Minnesota, iowa, illinois, yeah, across Wisconsin, and it just continues to grow.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it does. It's growing rapidly yeah, and come kind of like a hotspot in the Madison area because some prairie like has everything now, you know, you really don't actually have to go into Madison if you don't absolutely need to? Right, yeah, absolutely. People actually come to some prairie to go to the movies, right, even though they have a movie theater, you know, at East Town Mall or wherever.
Speaker 2:Actually come to some prairie yeah, absolutely Every amenity is available.
Speaker 1:And that's kind of by design from the chamber Right.
Speaker 2:Um, yeah, so our economic development is is actually through the city. We work very collaboratively with them. Prairie Lakes was actually a farmer that wanted to sell his land and he had this vision, so that's really where that kind of came. But the city had to be on board for that. And then, of course, the chamber supports in any way that we possibly can. We have a lot of members over there in Prairie Lakes, including the movie theater.
Speaker 1:Including the movie theater.
Speaker 2:They might be at cornfest, probably yeah.
Speaker 1:So how can people get in contact with you?
Speaker 2:So they can give us a call at the chamber or I'll give your phone number is 608-837-4547. Or they can email us at info at sunpraichambercom and they can go to sunpraichambercom for any information that they would like to know more.
Speaker 1:Well, Christina, thank you for coming on the podcast. I really appreciate it.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much for having me. This has been fun. You're great to chat with.
Speaker 1:I'm Dee Star. Until next time, guys.
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