The Okotoks & District Chamber Of Commerce will have a new President when they meet for their AGM on January 20th.

Natural High Fitness Owner Andrew Gustafson and former Vice President will take over from President Amber Chapman who has finished her two year term with the Chamber.

Gustafson says he's excited to get started and hopes to improve the Chamber's reputation even further.

"One of the things we want to improve on is advocacy," he says. "We have in the last two years increased the amount of Advocacy that we've been involved in significantly and we want to continue to do that, our involvement with the Alberta Chambers has improved, we want to continue to improve our relationship with the Alberta Chambers of Commerce as well as the Canadian Chambers of Commerce."

Gustafson adds that the Chamber is also hoping to continue it's strong relationship with local politics whether its Civic, Provincial or Federal, which he says is already strong but can always be better.

"That's not true in every municipality and so we're proud of that number one, and number two we want to continue to maintain that along with our economic development team," he says. "We are in this point of growth in Okotoks, that businesses are still growing, the Chamber of Commerce is still growing so one of our goals with that has to be to increase our staffing presence in town."

There are more than 400 businesses members with the Okotoks Chamber and Gustafson says in his time working on the Board of Directors, being a volunteer and a Vice-President has helped him make great connections in the business community.

"There's been a lot of learning because we have such a great board, there's a variety of different minds there, there's people from various different industries and having conversations about advocacy and policies and how we can support economic development, it's been a great learning opportunity for me and I'm looking forward to learning more."

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