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New location.
Same mission.
The Sarnia Lambton Business Development Corporation, helping promote entrepreneurship locally with coaching and cash since 1988, recently changed its name to Community Futures Lambton.
“We are still legally the (SLBDC), but we’ve changed our operating name,” said CEO Sarah Reaume.
It’s an aspect of a broader rebranding for the Fed-Dev-funded agency that’s also part of the Community Futures Network of Canada, Reaume said.
“It gets us out of the acronym soup,” she said, referring to other local economic-agency acronyms that start with ‘SL’ in Sarnia-Lambton.
“A lot of times people were very confused about who we were, who they should or might be speaking to,” she said.
Plans are to continue providing loans for small and medium businesses, and offering entrepreneurship support through various programs, she said.
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“What is new…. is to take that messaging back out into the business community and make sure people know who we are and what we offer,” she said.
The four-employee agency that’s loaned $50 million over more than three decades, and helped maintain or create 10,000 community jobs, also recently moved out of its former-school-building headquarters on Durand Street, Reaume said.
The agency’s board of directors decided in the winter to step back from property management and sell, Reaume, said
Community Futures then bought 346 Christina St. N., a building Sarnia’s heritage property register lists as built in 1887 and architecturally significant for its wooden veranda and small-pane windows.
“Our staff and board team are absolutely delighted with this space and this location,” Reaume said after moving in late July.
“It still keeps us close to the downtown core and we’re still very passionate about being in the central part of the city and being part of the vibrancy that is downtown.”
The agency is also working on new programming, with announcements planned for the fall, she said.
“Lots of firsts and lots of new beginnings.”
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