Special Board of Aldermen Meeting Page 6
March 21, 2016
| am particularly enthusiastic about this, | have been working with them since its inception and | think it’s a
great coalition program for the City of Nashua.
President McCarthy
Tracy | wonder if you might address how the Chamber is reacting to the coalition.
Ms. Hatch
As | said, the Chamber is very focused on an economic development and a thriving and vibrant business
community, not just in Nashua but in Greater Nashua and across the state. |’ve been involved in the One
Greater Nashua Coalition since | took the position as the head of the Chamber and believe passionately in
what the coalition is trying to achieve, not because it’s a charity because it’s not but because | think it is in the
best interest of our community as a whole and particularly the business community. Our Board of Directors led
currently Paul Hebert for another five days; we have created a strategic plan for the Chamber for the first time
in a bit that specifically and explicitly incorporates the ideals and ideas of One Greater Nashua. We have
seven tenants, seven strategic areas that we will be focusing on that map in many ways to some of the things
that you have heard about this evening. For example, if you ask businesses in our community what the most
important issues that they face to their success, one of the top two invariably is going to be access to a skilled
workforce. The slide that Jared showed earlier that showed the non-white population of adults in Greater
Nashua was kind of really centered on Nashua itself, it wasn’t very explosive. Contrast that to the map on the
right hand side those 18 and under who are non-white; those are the employees and the employers 10, 15 and
20 years from now. If we don’t reach out today and welcome them in this community and that they have a
future here then we are saying that 20 years from now that we don’t want a robust business community. We
have built into the piece about access to a skilled workforce, the work that we are doing through One Greater
Nashua. Capitalizing on our diversity, that is one of our strategic points in the Chamber’s strategic plan. We
cannot be a vibrant, robust and attractive community that others, particularly young people want to come to if
we turn our back on the diversity that exists today and is only going to grow in the future. Those are two
examples of how the Chamber of Commerce has affirmatively and specifically incorporated the ideals and
objectives of One Greater Nashua into the work that we intend to do over the next three to five years.
Alderman Lopez
| want to say for the record that the chart that is presented here which says adults as a minority as a
percentage of the population and then children as a minority percentage, it’s my guess that this is representing
the comparative percentage. You could glance at this and be confused and say okay why are all the adults’
right there and the children are everywhere? What it is really saying is the ratio. If you have one person who
is Hispanic and one person who is white then they compare but if you have a large family of five children who
are Hispanic and then one child who is white; | think that’s what the chart is depicting but | wanted to double
check.
Unidentified Speaker
That is correct.
Unidentified Speaker
That is another factor that | think was interesting that we looked at this kind of statistical underpinnings. We
talked about the negative migration for Nashua and actually for the state as a whole, had there not been an
influx of foreign born individuals into our state, the state would have seen the population decline overall. We
only have grown because of non-native people coming into our community. Again, if we want to see our
population shrink and we want to have less opportunity for children and we want to see jobs go elsewhere
