It has taken several years for the Economic Development Commission to evolve. It began as a subcommittee of the Master Plan, a small group of dedicated citizens and business leaders who recognized the paramount need to help grow the businesses in Tamworth. The Commission was created to provide economic tools to existing businesses, as well as means to attract new businesses interested in our area. 

“A happy and healthy community is not a fairy tale. All you need is a seed.”

Eventually, directed by a large majority of those who returned the Master Plan survey, the Planning Board formally requested that the Board of Selectmen appoint a group to dedicate their efforts toward the further economic development of our town. Thus, the Tamworth Economic Development Commission (TEDC) was born.

TEDC commissioners meet on the second Tuesday of every month and are constantly exploring new paths that can be taken to accomplish our goal of supporting local businesses while encouraging healthy new business growth. The public is welcome to attend these meetings.  See below for accomplishments that have taken place so far. And, stay tuned for more!

The Tamworth Economic Development Commission strives to attract, grow, and retain businesses in Tamworth by…

Supporting new and existing businesses:

• • Promoting a supportive climate and required resources attractive to business.

  • Coordinating and hosting town economic development events with local businesses, professionals, and organizations.

  • Supporting the local employment base

  Helping to enable business growth:

  • Making realistic recommendations to the town that enable the well-being and growth of its business base.

  • Identifying and partnering on other initiatives supportive of strong core business capabilities.

  Coordinating regionally to support the town’s business base:

  • Coordinating town economic development activities with surrounding towns

  • Working with regional and state resources, programs and initiatives to support the town’s business base.

  Educating and enhancing opportunity awareness for local businesses leaders:

  • Identifying local, state, or federal initiatives and/or programs available to enable local business success.

  • Hosting economic development events to help publicize and educate business leaders on opportunities that can support the health and wellbeing of the town’s business base.

  (Adopted February 2021)

The TEDC wants to encourage the development of new business among those entrepreneurs living in our town. To that end, we are gathering potential finance resource information on a local, state and federal level that may prove helpful to certain kinds of start-up enterprises.

The NH Economic Development team has asked us to come up with three or four suggested businesses that would be ideal in our town, keeping in mind our natural resources… we have lots of wood here, a beautiful setting, and offer strengths from our rural workforce.

Please contact us if you have an idea you would like to explore, so that we can connect you with appropriate development resources.

After TEDC was formed, its primary focus was to grow and strengthen existing Tamworth businesses, and we took on three projects to better accomplish this goal. The first was to make visitors aware of the various offerings they can find here. Our fresh-off-the-presses brochure and rack cards, strategically placed where visitors will find them, will help those businesses dedicated to the tourist trade…lodging, dining, gifts, museums, nature trails, amusements, etc.

Our second project was to promote local businesses and services to those most likely to use them—other Tamworthians. With this in mind, we sought to categorically list every business in town, along with appropriate contact information, so we all can easily refer either to this handy, efficient list on our website or, very soon, to the hard copy we will make available to every household in town. We hope that whenever any of us needs a product or service, we will first look at THE LIST and Keep it Tamworth-Local!

For our third project. We took all the information we gathered for the brochure, rack cards and business list and put them on a website, easily accessible by locals and visitors alike. That site has now been passed on to the newly formed Tamworth Visitors Council (TVC), which evolved out of the TEDC to bring together the many tourism-oriented businesses in our community. Their mission is to create special events and cooperative marketing opportunities for those businesses. Please check out www.tamworthusa.com to see the result. 

Most recently, the Commission has encouraged the State of NH to provide additional incentives for economic growth in the town. As such, all of Tamworth has been granted inclusion in the ERZ (economic recovery zone) designation by the State, which provides tax incentives for growth-oriented businesses. More info on the program and our involvement can be found on the ERZ page.