What’s it like to navigate the pandemic when you’re the one signing the checks? Three Upper Valley bosses and business owners tell their tale, and why they value our support!

Legendary singer-songwriter Graham Nash (left) backstage with Lebanon Opera House Executive Director Joe Clifford in October 2019. Photo by Nancy Nutile-McMenemy.

For the Lebanon Opera House, the pandemic has been an intermission—a really, really long intermission. As a result of the COVID-19 crisis, LOH was forced on March 13 to suspend all programming by national touring artists, resident community arts partners, and the Lebanon school district. At present, LOH will be dark well into Fall 2020. Due to the absence of ticket sales—upon which, like many in the arts community, LOH relies heavily—the LOH Board of Directors made the painful decision to furlough three of its four full-time staff members in mid-April.

 Executive Director Joe Clifford remains under full-time employment and he’s working feverishly to raise much-needed bridge funds, reschedule performances (including the Grammy-winning Béla Fleck and The Flecktones, on June 2, 2021), issue refunds for canceled shows, and book performances for 2021.

 “As a ‘nonessential’ business whose mission is to build and bind the community through large-scale gatherings (i.e. performances), COVID-19 has struck at the very heart of our work,” said Clifford. “The nature of event planning dictates that we work months, sometimes a year, in advance. We simply cannot afford to cease the planning, booking, selling, and marketing of performing arts events. Of course, we’re operating on COVID-19’s timeline and the ability to host successful public events is no longer guaranteed. At this point, we’re fighting for survival. Our return to ‘normalcy’ will take many months as patrons slowly warm up to the idea of once again sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with hundreds of their neighbors.”

 A donation made to LOH through the TLC 4Ward program will have far-reaching ripple effects. The relative health of LOH’s operations directly impacts Lebanon restaurants, shops, and more than a dozen Upper Valley-based arts groups (Opera North, Revels North, and North Country Community Theatre among them) who set-up residence on the LOH stage each season.

Left Bank Books has been part of Hanover’s Main Street for over 20 years. Owner Nancy Cressman writes: 

Building relationships with book-loving people is the foundation of our mission. Our longevity comes from serving a loyal local customer base and being a welcoming and peaceful spot full of over 9,000 interesting books for locals and tourists alike. Our collection is carefully curated to select authors who are esteemed in their fields. Our collection spans many interests, age groups, and languages. We have contemporary and classic literature, poetry, cookbooks, field guides, history, books by local authors and about our region, children’s books, art books; architecture and music are also well represented, as well as other fields of interest.

The challenge for us at this COVID moment is that we lost three months of revenue while we were closed, but the rent, electric bills, etc, kept coming. Summer is normally our busiest season, but with the Dartmouth students not on campus and tourist travel very curtailed, it means we will be looking to our local customers to support us by buying books. This is a hard ask, because so many local businesses need help in this time, but if you believe the Upper Valley needs a used book store where people can find titles that a bookstore selling new books would not have, and you believe that the retail experience can be one of discovery and friendliness, please consider donating to Left Bank Books. Our store’s model is a wonderful example of local sustainability. We gather books from the community and send them out again to new owners. We purchase books for inventory from library sales, which helps in their fundraising. We believe in reuse—thus we sell used books! We hire local people, including many book-loving teenagers for whom this is their first job. We are small, committed and hyper-local.

April Woodman, owner of 100 Mile Market in downtown Claremont, didn’t have time to respond in writing because she was staffing her store, as she does most business days. Her market, which opened four years ago this May, sells food produced within 100 MILES of Claremont. Pre-COVID, 1oo Mile Market had been slowly building its customer base. “Then the world went crazy,” she said. “We stayed open 37 days straight, we didn’t close.” Sales boomed. “People needed what they needed and there was a giant hole in the supply chain, and we helped fill it.” They had to make upfront investments in additional freezer and cooler space for local meat and dairy, so they are short the capital and time to create an online ordering platform for curbside pick-up. TLC funds would help with that. At present, orders come via a time-consuming jumble of phone, email, and text messages. 

Got a few extra dollars due to pandemic restrictions on your activities? Consider helping local businesses and organizations through TLC 4Ward or patronizing those entities!

A searchable guide to local businesses of all sorts, expert help for businesses trying to survive the pandemic, and a crowdfunding platform that already helped save our local daily newspaper: these and more are part of an overall Upper Valley economic recovery effort in which Vital Communities has played a critical role.

It began when Vital Communities was asked to do what it does best: bring people together from across the Upper Valley to identify problems and create solutions.  At a meeting of municipal leaders in early March focused on the health and municipal impacts of the looming coronavirus pandemic, Lebanon City Manager Sean Mulholland and Hanover Town Manager Julia Griffin asked if Vital Communities could bring together local leaders around economic disruption.

Vital Communities started two weekly virtual meetings, one with people from local Chambers of Commerce and the other involving a broader spectrum, including a bank CEO, a town manager, a few local chambers directors, and economic development folks at the city, regional level, and state level.  “At that time, everything was changing really quickly,” said Tom Roberts, executive director of Vital Communities, “so having a weekly phone call was helpful, just to compare notes, to join together, and to talk about what the needs were.” 

The meetings helped get important new information to local businesses and helped everyone deal with puzzles like the federal Payment Protection Program and safely reopening. “It’s helpful for the different members to be able to ask somebody from a bank what’s going on with this, or someone on the city level about that,” added Tom.  

So far the meetings have given rise to a number of developments that help our local economy in the short term and long, including:

•  the creation of a discussion list for businesses to share information; 
• the hiring of a Pandemic Small Business Navigator shared by Vital Communities and Grafton County Economic Development;
• a new Vital Communities Guide that lists local farms and businesses to keep money local by patronizing; 
• a “buy local” advertising campaign; 
• creating a community crowdfunding platform, TLC 4WARD, to support small businesses. 

TLC 4Ward has already raised over $155,000 for the Valley News and has recently expanded to allow donations to many different local businesses through the site. 

These meetings highlight the value of collaboration and shared information at a time when doubts and questions abound for many. We are stronger when we work together to solve our region’s challenges!