2025 is the year to discover Grand Forks, and the Boundary Chamber of Commerce is ready to fully embrace the vision as their public image.
Andrew Zwicker, Executive Director of Discover Grand Forks and the Boundary Chamber of Commerce says they’ve noticed an increase in membership numbers with the growing exciting around the branding shift.
“We’re moving a little bit away from our Boundary Chamber of Commerce name and branding, and we’re going to fully embrace Discover Grand Forks,” said Zwicker.
“We’ll still do all the functions of the Boundary Chamber, but what’s been fun is we’re making more of a shift towards a lot more tourism, a lot more tourism marketing promotion.”
“We are trying to drive more tourists in town, more shopping, more room nights, more visitors in town supporting the local businesses.”
Zwicker says the Chamber has been working hard towards the shift, but this year is the year to go full throttle.
“Over the last two or three years, we’ve be doing a few shop local videos, the Lunch of Business promo videos and they got a lot of attention.” said Zwicker.
“And we sort of built on that this last summer. We had Abby, our Canada summer jobs grad student come in and she was showing up at community events, at the farmer’s market, and part of her job was out there making these great videos of all the cool experiences around Grand Forks, kind of those wholesome family, affordable experiences that we like to promote, whether it’s where’s the best swimming hole, where’s the best hike, places to go biking, and what cool businesses to stop into.”
“Those business and those videos drew, we are over 120,000 views for the 12 videos across the summer, enormous numbers.”
“Our next step is really building on that success and establishing Grand Forks as a place to come, a place to check out, a place that’s got a great agritourism scene, a place that’s got great outdoor adventure scene, that’s got a cool little downtown, lots of cool businesses, and it’s a place that kind of often gets overlooked in the tourism world and it is perhaps one of those new up-and-coming tourism destinations.”
What is to come for Discover Grand Forks
Discover Grand Forks is busily preparing events to add to your calendar, including capitalizing on summer traffic.
“The summers are already fairly busy in town and we’re kind of working on a how do we extend that summer tours in the summer spending the room nights a little further into the spring a little further into the fall.”
“It’s really about building on what are those local tourism assets that we already have around the area. We’ve got small local farms, great restaurants, and a great foodie scene.”
Speaking of food, Zwicker says a feast this fall is on the cards.
“The one we’re most excited about this fall is putting on a farmer’s long table dinner.”
“Imagine a big table with 200 people right down the middle of Market Avenue, all kinds of farmers decorations, local food from the local farms, and local chefs, local restaurants preparing it, and a great harvest farmer’s fall dinner down the Main Street.”
And who knows, maybe even some old-time favourites will make a return.
“There used to be this fantastic spring road race happening in Grand Forks but because of cost, liability, organizational element of challenge with volunteers, logistics, it kind of faded off the map.”
“We want to really bring that back because Grand Forks, because having one of the longest snow free bike seasons in the province, we really want to show off that asset with a really early season road biking race.”
“We’re looking at that for probably spring 2026 is one of our big events.”
Stay up to date with what’s happening around Grand Forks by following Discover Grand Forks on Facebook, or for businesses to get involved and get a seat at the table, membership options are available.
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