Fast-Growing Chamber Gets in Touch With Businesses Non-Profits Best Business Association: North Valley Regional Chamber of Commerce By SLAV KANDYBA Staff Reporter With a membership of 500 and only slightly more than half based in Northridge or Porter Ranch the Northridge/Porter Ranch Chamber of Commerce simply outgrew its name. Of the board membership, about “50 percent (were) non-Northridge based businesses,” said Wayne Adelstein, the chamber’s president and CEO. To better reflect its growing membership base, the chamber was recently renamed the North Valley Regional Chamber of Commerce. But even though its name changed, the services its members value has not. And the number of members has more than doubled in the past few years. “We’ve got 500 members, up considerably over (about) 200 three years ago,” Adelstein said. And the chamber keeps getting mightier. Approximately over the last year, it has been adding between 20 to 25 members per month, a statistic that Adelstein referred to as a “general rule.” This type of growth didn’t happen overnight, either, Adelstein acknowledges. The year before the chamber added about 15 new members month not too shabby. But now, a full three years since Adelstein has managed the chamber, the 20-year “actively engaged” veteran of the Valley’s business circles thinks his leadership has come to fruition. “There’s a shared vision among the board members and the staff that it is in sync with what the business community indicated to us its needs are,” he said. “We try to develop programs that satisfy their needs.” It was through simply talking to business owners that the chamber conceived and executed the idea of publishing a newspaper. Businesses wanted targeted advertising with a more significant return on the investment. The newspaper was first published in September 2003, and has a monthly circulation of close to 38,000. “A lot of the growth has come from the business community calling us to advertise,” Adelstein said. Among those businesses was Windsor Leasing, a commercial real estate brokerage based in the city of Calabasas. “This chamber really seems to be servicing my needs,” said Christian Hayes, a Windsor vice president. Hayes joined the chamber in February at the suggestion of a friend who told him that the Chamber was “on the move, on the grow.” Hayes went to a “cluster lunch,” one of the chamber’s staple weekly events, which bring together a group of 20 to 30 businesspeople, and joined the chamber.