An Electronic Publication of the North Central Massachusetts Chamber of Commerce
Inside this edition, you’ll discover the latest Chamber initiatives and success stories from across our region. From economic development projects and upcoming networking events to policy updates and workforce training opportunities, we’re keeping you connected to what matters most for your business and North Central Massachusetts.
June 2026
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Funding to support creation of six job opportunities in Ashby
El Corporación de Desarrollo del Norte Central de Massachusetts (NCMDC) – the economic development arm of the North Central Massachusetts Chamber of Commerce – recently approved a $75,000 loan to Sean Smith, owner of 873 Café Tavern, located at 873 Main Street in Ashby. The loan, which was referred to NCMDC from NewVue Communities, will support the restaurant’s start-up costs, provide working capital and create six job opportunities in the community.
Smith purchased the business after the previous owners closed the restaurant in May 2020 due to financial hardships amid the pandemic. An experienced chef who worked as the Executive Chief and Culinary Director at The Fay Club in Fitchburg, and at Great Road Kitchen and Oyster Bar in Littleton prior to purchasing the 873 Café Tavern, Smith is optimistic that re-opening the restaurant will be good for the town of Ashby.
“The 873 Café Tavern was a successful restaurant and a local destination for years,” said Smith. “With the financial assistance and support from the North Central Massachusetts Development Corporation, I was able to fulfill a dream to open my own business and bring new life to the restaurant.”
The 873 Café Tavern features a lounge, restaurant with fireplace, café, patio for outside seating, and an ice cream bar. Open since late summer, the 873 Café Tavern features a specialized menu of shared plates and comfort foods, all using fresh, locally sourced ingredients.
Como entidad de microcréditos, NCMDC puede otorgar préstamos a pequeñas empresas de hasta $250,000 para capital de trabajo, bienes inmuebles, equipo, inventario y expansión, además de colaborar con nuestros socios bancarios para proporcionar financiamiento puente para la etapa final de un proyecto.
Para más información sobre los programas de préstamos de NCMDC, llame al 978.353.7607 o visite NorthCentralMass.com o ChooseNorthCentral.com.
The statewide unemployment rate rose from 5 percent to 5.2 percent in September, while employers reported adding 11,900 jobs across Massachusetts last month, labor officials announced on Friday.
September’s unemployment rate was the highest in Massachusetts since the 6.4 percent reported in April, and it landed more than 3 percentage points below the 8.9 percent labor officials recorded a year ago.
Job growth rebounded somewhat from the revised figure of 3,400 positions reported in August, though the pace of growth remains middling. Since May 2020, Massachusetts has added 474,700 jobs, clawing back 72 percent of the losses experienced in April 2020 amid the COVID-19 crisis.
The largest industry-specific gains in September occurred in education and health services (6,400 jobs), other services (5,300), trade, transportation and utilities (3,900) and leisure and hospitality (3,300). Construction, professional and business services, and government all shed positions last month.
Gov. Charlie Baker has been pushing lawmakers to invest a substantial portion of state government’s $4.8 billion in remaining American Rescue Plan Act funding toward workforce training and other economic development initiatives.
Legislative leaders are still working on an ARPA spending bill, which is expected in the new few weeks, and have also yet to produce a plan to allocate $1.5 billion in unobligated tax revenues left over from fiscal 2021. – Chris Lisinski/SHNS
Compelling greater investments in behavioral health and addiction treatment services figures to be a main tent pole in a health care bill that the Baker administration plans to put before the Legislature in the coming months, Gov. Charlie Baker suggested Wednesday morning.
Speaking to a virtual conference of the Providers’ Council, the governor said his administration plans this budget year to “continue our commitment to increasing access to behavioral health services, which I think everybody would agree coming out of this pandemic are a bigger and more important issue than they’ve ever been before.”
Then, for the second time in about a month, he recounted his 2019 health care bill that was never seriously considered once the pandemic set in.
El legislation Baker filed in October 2019 would have required, among other things, that health care providers and insurers boost spending on addiction services, behavioral health, primary care and geriatric services by 30 percent over three years.
“We continue to believe that these are areas that, for a bunch of reasons, many of which are driven by federal policy, are underinvested in and we need to do a much better job of recognizing and appreciating that investments in those areas not only improve the quality of care for people, but in many cases will also reduce the total cost of care because they’re designed to help people stay healthy,” Baker said Wednesday morning in his remarks to the Providers’ Council.
Last month, the governor recalled the same 2019 bill and said that his administration is “going to go back at this one” in a sweeping health care bill he expects to file by early next year.
When he signed last session’s health care law, which included a few of the policies he proposed in October 2019, Baker told the News Service that he expected to return after the pandemic to “some of these issues that were probably too big and too complicated to deal with in the context of what the last year was like.”
Legislators are interested in tackling health care, but their level of interest in Baker’s ideas remains to be seen. Senate President Karen Spilka named mental health parity legislation as one of the items on her fall agenda and House Speaker Ronald Mariano has said he’ll be looking to pursue “a number of different health care issues” this session. – Colin A. Young/SHNS
Join us for Connect North Central
Friday, November 20, 2026
8am-9am View
Event
Joint Mayor's Meeting
December 4, 2026
Chamber members are provided with the opportunity to engage with the Mayors of Fitchburg, Gardner, and Leominster who provide updates on projects and other things happening in their Cities. These events are by invitation only, please contact Travis Condon for more details. View
Event
Future Leaders of North Central: Annual Holiday Party & Ugly Sweater Competition
December 8, 2026
Bull Run Restaurant
215 Great Rd. Shirly, MA View
Event
Chamber members are provided with the opportunity to engage with the Mayors of Fitchburg, Gardner, and Leominster who provide updates on projects and other things happening in their Cities. These events are by invitation only, please contact Travis Condon for more details. View
Event
Massachusetts is exploring the future of natural gas used in homes and businesses and by large commercial and industrial customers. We’d like your thoughts.
Whether you live in Massachusetts or run a business here, the future of natural gas impacts us all. That’s why we would like your input on a plan to ensure a safe, reliable, and equitable transition to the future of energy in our state.
The Massachusetts Department of Public Utilities (DPU) directed the Massachusetts gas companies to explore pathways for a clean energy future – for you and our future generations. This includes the critical goal to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2050. Our part in achieving “net zero” includes removing the same amount of greenhouse gases we produce or avoiding them altogether through new technologies, to reduce emissions that contribute to climate change. These new technologies could impact home appliances like heating systems, boilers, gas stoves, and water heaters and a variety of commercial and industrial equipment that use natural gas. That’s a big job, and one that needs the public’s support and input to succeed.
Here’s how to share ideas and get involved:
Attend a live webinar to learn more and provide your feedback. Please register below for one of the sessions to reserve your spot, attendance is limited.
Pictured L to R: Barbara Mahoney, President & CEO, LCU; Kristen Cote, Marketing Specialist, LCU; Carolyn Read, Executive Director Habitat for Humanity North Central Massachusetts; Craig Madonia, SVP Lending, LCU.
Leominster Credit Union’s recent Shred-a-Thon raised $1,000 for Habitat for Humanity, North Central Mass.
LCU’s Shred-A-Thon is a free event open to the public. Each year LCU partners with Habitat for Humanity, and participants may make a donation to the organization. The event was held at LCU’s North Leominster branch where many members and non-members stopped by to have their sensitive documents shred on site by the secure shredding service, New England Security Shredders.
“This was our most successful Shred-A-Thon to date,” commented Barbara Mahoney, President and CEO. “We were pleased to be able to hold the event this year, where due to COVID had to postpone the events last year and this past spring. LCU’s semi-annual Shred-A-Thons are a great community event and assist in preventing identity theft, by offering a secure venue to shred confidential documents. The generous donations collected went to a great organization, Habitat for Humanity.”
A ribbon-cutting ceremony was held last month to celebrate the opening of Solvus Global’s new Center for Scaled Innovation in Manufacturing at 272 Nashua St. in partnership with North Central Massachusetts Chamber of Commerce and the city, attracting local and state officials as well as interested parties.
Solvus Global CEO and co-founder Dr. Aaron Birt addresses the attendees of the ribbon cutting ceremony held in October to celebrate the opening of Solvus Global’s new Center for Scaled Innovation in Manufacturing in Leominster. (COURTESY NICOLE BOYSON/SOLVUS GLOBAL)
Solvus Global is a technology-solution provider for materials and manufacturing founded in 2017 specializing in the areas of additive manufacturing, machine learning and sustainable materials processing. Headquartered in Worcester, it now operates out of three locations — research and manufacturing facilities in both Leominster and Worcester and a collaborative center in Webster.
Solvus Global co-founder and CEO Aaron Birt said the goal of cSIM is to create a place where innovative manufacturing solutions can be scaled from their research and development facility in Worcester and demonstrated in full production environments.
“It’s really a showcase of how government, industry and academia can come together to solve major supply chain challenges that we face as a country today,” he said.
Birt said two primary products will be coming out of the cSIM facility.
“One will be specialty powder materials that serve the cold spray industry, a growing community that specializes in both 3D printing and repair of legacy parts that are worn out or damaged,” he said. “The second is what we call production of large format additive components, which are parts at least one foot by one foot by one foot that are typically made of specialty materials like Inconel or titanium. We will be fabricating, treating and finishing these parts for our customers across the defense and industry sectors.”
Christine Nolan, director of the Center for Advanced Manufacturing at the MassTech Collaborative based in Westborough, said cSIM is important for the greater community, as it will benefit those beyond Leominster as well.
Christine Nolan, Director of the Center for Advanced Manufacturing at MassTech, speaks at the ribbon cutting ceremony held last month for Solvus Global’s new Center for Scaled Innovation in Manufacturing in Leominster. (COURTESY NICOLE BOYSON/SOLVUS GLOBAL)
“Companies like Solvus show local students that today’s manufacturing jobs are not the repetitive or dirty jobs of the past but are high-tech careers that call for teamwork, an interest in cutting-edge digital tools, and critical thinking,” she said. “North Central Massachusetts is full of innovative, high-tech manufacturers like Solvus, places where Massachusetts students can find rewarding career opportunities once they graduate.”
MassTech Collaborative jointly manages the Massachusetts Manufacturing Innovation Initiative, or M2I2, grant program along with the Commonwealth’s Executive Office of Housing and Economic Development. During the ribbon-cutting, Nolan announced a new $1.6 million M212 grant to Solvus Global and its partner, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, which will support both an infrastructure investment, establishing a first-of-its-kind, fully automated robotic Arc-DED (Direct Energy Deposition) manufacturing line, along with an apprenticeship program spearheaded by Solvus and partners WPI and the national manufacturing institute ARM Robotics.
As part of the award, Solvus will establish an apprenticeship program with local technical schools such as Worcester Technical High School and Mount Wachusett Community College, and program curriculum facilitated by WPI will be established which highlights key skills needed by the advanced manufacturing workforce.
“The commonwealth’s support for this program is investing in infrastructure but also in a training program, which taps into educational institutions that have strong ties to the manufacturing sector including schools like WPI, Mount Wachusett Community College, and Worcester Tech,” Nolan said.
Solvus Global CEO and co-founder Dr. Aaron Birt addresses the attendees of the ribbon cutting ceremony held in October to celebrate the opening of Solvus Global’s new Center for Scaled Innovation in Manufacturing in Leominster. (COURTESY NICOLE BOYSON/SOLVUS GLOBAL)
She said Solvus Global’s cSIM and the apprenticeship program aligns well with the region’s historical manufacturing roots.
“Massachusetts and the North Central region in particular have a long history of manufacturing leadership,” she said. “We’re now leading when it comes to advanced manufacturing, where manufacturing meets high-tech innovation. Through the M2I2 grant program we’re making critical investments in the tools, training programs and partnerships that will help keep our ‘Made in Mass.’ manufacturing sector in this leadership role for decades to come.”
As CEO of Solvus Global, Birt said much of his job “is setting up the vision for our future and helping to pull together the high-level people and resources necessary to make those visions a reality” through projects such as cSIM.
“Our goal is to be in full production with these innovative manufacturing solutions by the end of 2022 while at the same time serving as a resource for the region to support reskilling our workforce for the next era of manufacturing,” he said. “It’s something that we and many of our partners are passionate about and so we’re looking for ways to work together to create an environment that’s supportive of both the people and the industry.”
Miembro Destacado
Custom Cleaning Service of Peabody
When the workday ends and the lights go down, Custom Cleaning Service of Peabody, Inc. gets to work. “We operate as our clients’ silent partner after business hours,” says Adam Paicos, of Templeton, who now serves as Director of Operations and oversees the company’s expansion into North Central MA. “We are not often seen, but we ensure facilities are clean, secure, and ready for business each day while serving as the eyes and ears for our clients when they are not on site.”
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