The Prince Albert and District Chamber of Commerce has officially unveiled Chamber HQ, a new business start-up centre created in partnership with Community Futures.
The centre is based out of the Chamber’s new downtown location on 54 11th Street East—the former home of the Canadian Red Cross office. Business leaders and curious residents got a look at it for the first time when the Chamber held their grand opening on Wednesday.
“It feels great,” Chamber CEO Patty Hughes said. “This was a lot of work in the last couple of months to be able to get this all together. It came together so smoothly for such a short time period, and we really want to thank a lot of our business partners who helped make that happen, and we wouldn’t have been able to do that without them.”
The new start-up centre provides rentable conference rooms, office spaces, mingling spaces, and special rentable room for recording podcasts.
Even before she joined the Chamber, Hughes thought Prince Albert could use a business centre similar to what other communities have. She said it gives people working from home more options if they need to rent space for a few days, or even a month.
“Since the pandemic, a lot of people had that remote work environment, and now they have found coming out of it, they actually need more of a hybrid model,” Hughes explained. “People don’t want to go to other people’s houses to meet with them and stuff like that. We’re providing a professional business environment where people can come in and rent an office from us on a short-term basis … to be able to make things work for them, to meet their clients, etc., in a professional environment without having to have that long-term commitment.”
All Chamber offices and staff have moved into the building along with the Chamber HQ. Hughes said the downtown location offers them more convenience and flexibility.
“We work with City Hall, so we wanted to be in close proximity to City Hall. We wanted accessibility, and we also wanted the space that just had the right vibe to it for what we were wanting to accomplish,” Hughes said. “This building, initially, when we walked in really just fit all of those factors quite quickly.”
Hughes added that there may be a few more minor cosmetic changes in the months ahead. The Chamber paid for extensive renovations to the building’s interior, with an exterior paint job scheduled for this summer.
