Renovo Community Trade Association’s First Small Business Expo Inspires Local Youth to Build Careers in Clinton County
By Kevin Rauch
FARWELL – The Renovo Community Trade Association hosted their first annual Small Business and Entrepreneur Expo at the Bucktail Middle/High School on Thursday afternoon first during school hours for the 11th and 12th grade students and then in the evening for the public to attend.
The event was created to help people, particularly at this event, younger adults, to understand that if they have a talent, skill or idea that they believe could cultivated someday into a career opportunity, that the RCTA has a myriad of options and connections to develop that dream or goal into a reality, right here in their hometown.
A dozen tables and booths offering a vast range of opportunity and education welcomed those that attended the event.
RCTA Chairman Kyle Stewart said that he had no doubt Thursday’s expo was just the first and that it has been a goal to try and get more younger people to realize the potential in western Clinton County and to not necessarily make moving away after graduation their top priority.
“We want to create a better outreach for the young individuals, look at my class for example, only four or five of us stuck around, we’d like for young people to realize there are opportunities here” Stewart said of the agenda. “We don’t want to defer kids from going to college, but, we want to allow them the opportunity to create a small business, to stay in the area and to create a better tax base, the whole purpose of the RCTA is to create economic development for the area” Stewart continued.
“We have tourism, we have forest and recreation, all these different subcommittees where we talk and track about what’s here, what will be here in the future and then we want to be able to assist people in taking advantage of these opportunities” Stewart added.
“We have people from the area already doing this, the area has AIRbnb’s being built from people who grew up here, a brand new one was just built in Farwell, Greg Lucas has a lodge that he’s able to rent for $800 a night on top of Dry Run, nowhere else in the county can say that they have the ability and scenery to that that right now” Stewart pointed out.
“We just want to let the students know that you may not know what you want to do but we have options here” Stewart said of taking the expo to Bucktail. “Say you want to open a bakery, Tom Keiffer from the Small Business Development Center from Penn State University and his team will literally come into the area and does a full study on everything related to the potential success of a bakery for free, you just need to be registered to the state for $125.”
“We recognize that the economic partnership focuses on big industry coming into the area and one of the things that made us want to organize an event like this was to help small business, that really Is the heartbeat of the community” RCTA Board member and Clinton County Commissioner Angela Harding said.
“When you have those mom and pop shops and entrepreneurs that invest in the community, that makes it even more appealing from the outside for things like tourism, industry and all of these other things” Continued Harding. “We’re trying to reverse the typical ‘let’s hope for economic development’ but rather let’s start with small business and grow the town from the bottom up.”
