Mike McInally

The Corvallis-Benton Chamber Coalition walked away with one of the top two awards at the Oregon State Chamber of Commerce annual meeting over the weekend.

The Corvallis chamber was honored with the 2009 Chamber Outstanding Achievement Award. The award, one of just two the state chamber gives each year, was for work led by John Sechrest, the Corvallis chamber’s economic development director, to create the Willamette Angel Conference. That conference, you’ll recall, gave mid-valley startup companies a chance to compete for a top prize of $125,000 in funding. A Corvallis company, CenterSpace Software, won the top prize.

Sechrest and the Corvallis chamber were also honored for developing programs such as the angel conference, which help support the chamber’s “business ecosystem model,” a blueprint for economic development.

Full disclosure requires that I tell you that I serve on the board of the chamber, but this was good news for the chamber, and for Corvallis, that I wanted to share.

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