By Steve Keenan, The Register-Herald
BECKLEY, W.Va. — As leaders in the region seek to strengthen the economy, Jina Belcher and others say the recent Future Forward Summit and Expo could be a harbinger of positive occurrences in certain sectors in the area.
The two-day summit/expo was presented in late April by the Beckley-Raleigh County Chamber of Commerce, the New River Gorge Regional Development Authority, and West Virginia Hive.
“I think folks are really excited about the content this year,” Belcher, the NRGRDA’s executive director, said late last week. “It seemed like we got a lot more feedback this year on the content, which was great.”
She added, “The NRGRDA and the Chamber put a lot of time into trying to figure out who to bring down. We have heard a lot of follow-up about the development forum the first night, and trying to figure out how we work on revitalizing our downtown.
“I know we’ve talked about it a lot, but in our presentation we provided a playbook of ‘this is how we can do it.’ And a lot of folks have come back and reached out to both the Chamber and NRGRDA and said, ‘OK, we’ve reviewed this playbook, and we really want to figure out how to move this forward.’
