Chamber speakers emphasize community
The circle that connected several speakers at last night’s Fayette Chamber of Commerce annual awards dinner was community. Radio personality Jack Bogut expressed it in his humorous anecdotes, offering a half-dozen “human hyperlinks’ to prove his statements; Joe Carei, Herman Buck Award winner, and Bill Blaney, named Citizen of the Year, emphasized it in their acceptance speeches.
“Community is what we are all about,’ Blaney said. “We were put here to be a group, not an individual. We were put here to be givers and not takers, to live in our community and not in isolation,’ he added.
Carei took it further when he professed his “platform and my soapbox’ to be working hard to encourage young people in the community in their endeavors rather than discourage them or advise them to leave the area.
“The only way we will get the ones back who have already left is to show the ones still here that we support them,’ he said. “We need to allow young people to try to do things. We need to encourage and support young people who are just starting out,’ he said, relating how a civic group’s officers waited for two years before holding its meetings at his former Brownsville restaurant “to make sure I was going to stay in business before they made that commitment.’
Blaney and Carei emphasized how important it is to volunteer and be involved in community projects and functions.
Blaney credited his parents with his work ethic and his brothers in the family business, Blaney Farms, for allowing him to be as involved in community as he is.
Blaney is an ordained elder in the Presbyterian Church USA and a member of Pleasant View Presbyterian Church. He is on the board and executive committee of Fay-Penn Economic Development Council and the advisory board of Penn State Fayette, the Eberly Campus.
He is also a board member of the Uniontown Rotary Club; officer, board and executive board member of Chestnut Ridge Counseling Services. He also has worked as a volunteer advisor for the Fayette Business Adventure at Penn State and with the Foundation for Free Enterprise, among many other activities. The Citizen of the Year award recognizes volunteer community service.
Carei, an active member of the Fayette Chamber, founded and is current president of the Fayette Opportunity Network, which helps local young people. He and his wife, Stacy, who introduced him at the awards dinner, own and operate Caileigh’s Restaurant in Uniontown. Carei is also a colorectal cancer survivor as well as a kids’ cooking camp founder. He is president of the Laurel Highlands Chapter of the Pennsylvania Restaurant Association. The Buck award is presented to someone under the age of 45 who has given tirelessly of their time, uncompensated, to the community.
Muriel J. Nuttall, Fayette Chamber executive director, noting the chamber is celebrating its 80th year, said that while the business community may have changed in those decades, the chamber’s mission has not: It is to serve its members and help maintain a strong and vital business community.
“Our growth over the past five years has been incredible,’ she said, adding that membership has soared from 230 to more than 500.
On his comments, Bogut used humorous stories from his past to emphasize his six human hyperlinks: joy, fear, judgment, respect, survival and humor.
“You can always spread the word you want to spread with those hyperlinks. We can click on those hyperlinks to get to stories that bring us all together. If we can use stories that illustrate each of these points, then we can share something together.
“So let’s tell stories to each other and hit on those hyperlinks.’