For more than a century, the Greater Shreveport Chamber has worked to grow this region’s economy and champion the businesses that call it home. Today, Greater Shreveport stands at an inflection point. We have real assets working in our favor — research institutions, a growing entrepreneurial ecosystem, and a business community eager to expand. The question is no longer whether we have the raw material for growth, but whether we can align it fast enough to compete with peer regions across the Southeast and beyond. Here is what we believe comes next.
Close the workforce gap before it closes off opportunity. Every conversation with a member business eventually circles back to talent. We hear it from manufacturers, healthcare systems, and startups alike: the jobs are here, but the pipeline to fill them isn’t yet deep enough. That’s why programs like Caddo Works — which connects Caddo Parish Public Schools students with local employers for hands-on career exposure starting as early as middle school — matter so much. Introducing an eighth grader to a real workplace today shapes the workforce we’ll have in five years. The Chamber’s role is to keep expanding these employer-education partnerships and make sure every graduating class leaves with a clearer line of sight to a regional career, not just a diploma.
Treat childcare as economic infrastructure, not a side issue. Our recent Caddo Parish Childcare Market Analysis made something clear: workforce participation and childcare availability are directly linked. Parents who can’t find reliable, affordable care can’t fully participate in the labor force, and employers feel that gap in every unfilled shift. Strengthening regional competitiveness means treating childcare capacity with the same seriousness we bring to roads, broadband, or industrial sites — because for working families, it functions the same way.
Turn our research institutions into a startup engine. Between LSU Health Sciences Center, LSU Shreveport, Centenary College, Southern University Shreveport, and the biomedical research happening at BRF, this region has innovation assets that many mid-sized metros would envy. The Entrepreneurial Accelerator Program is already helping promising ideas find investors and reach market. The next step is scaling that pipeline — more mentorship, more early-stage capital, more visible pathways from lab bench to local business — so that the ideas generated here stay here, rather than commercializing in Austin or Atlanta.
Make sure growth includes everyone building it. Minority-owned businesses are a growing share of our regional economy, and their success is tied directly to ours. Continuing to invest in programs, recognition, and access to capital for minority entrepreneurs isn’t a side initiative — it’s core to a competitiveness strategy, because a region that only opens doors for some of its business owners is competing with one hand tied behind its back.
Keep public policy working for, not against, business. Regional competitiveness is won or lost partly in city halls and the state capitol. The Chamber has worked closely with the City of Shreveport and the MPC to streamline business processes and improve the Uniform Development Code. The Chamber will keep advocating for business-friendly policy, predictable regulation, and incentive structures that make Shreveport-Bossier the easier choice compared to neighboring states and metros courting the same employers.
None of this happens through any single institution acting alone. It requires the schools, universities, city and parish government, and the private sector pulling in the same direction. That alignment is a role for the Chamber — and it’s the work ahead.
Dr. Tim Magner, President, Greater Shreveport Chamber of Commerce