About Us
Who We Are
The Livingston/Overton County Chamber of Commerce is a nonprofit, nonpartisan membership organization representing the businesses, industries, and institutions of Overton County, Tennessee. We are organized under Section 501(c)(6) of the Internal Revenue Code as a business league, which means we exist for one purpose above all others, and that is to advance the common economic interests of the businesses that make up our membership and the community that depends on them.
We are not a government agency and we are not a charity. We are a voluntary association of employers who long ago concluded that there are things worth doing for this county that no single business can do alone, including recruiting new investment, training a workforce, promoting the county to visitors, revitalizing downtown, and making sure that the people writing laws in Livingston, in Nashville, and in Washington understand what those laws will actually mean for a manufacturer, a farmer, a contractor, or a shop owner in Overton County.
Today the Chamber serves more than 200 member businesses and organizations and operates four distinct lines of work from a single office at 222 East Main Street in Livingston.
Four Functions, One Organization
Chambers of commerce vary widely from county to county, and in a rural community our size the Chamber often carries responsibilities that in a larger metro would be divided among three or four separate organizations with three or four separate staffs. That is the case here. Understanding what we do requires understanding that we operate four related but genuinely distinct functions, each with a different mission, a different constituency, and a different source of funding.
The Chamber of Commerce serves our members. Economic Development serves the whole county. Tourism serves the visitor economy. Main Street Livingston serves the downtown district. Each is described in full below.
Who we serve: Our member businesses and organizations.
How it is funded: Member dues, sponsorships, and program revenue.
The Chamber proper is a membership organization, and the membership is the reason it exists. When a business invests in Chamber membership, that business is buying into a shared platform for visibility, connection, education, and representation that would be prohibitively expensive to build alone.
Connection and referral
The oldest and still one of the most valuable functions of a chamber of commerce is simply putting business people in the same room on a regular basis. Deals get made, vendors get found, employees get hired, and partnerships get formed at chamber events far more often than at any other kind of gathering in a county like ours. We host networking events, business after hours and before hours gatherings, industry roundtables, quarterly membership luncheons, and an annual celebration, all built around the premise that relationships are the currency of a small business economy.
The Chamber office is also the county's informal switchboard. Businesses, residents, and newcomers call us every week looking for a contractor, a supplier, a meeting space, a permit, a grant, or simply the name of the person who can answer their question, and we make the referral. Our member directory is the first place we look.
Visibility and credibility
Membership provides a listing in the online member directory, inclusion in Chamber promotional materials and newsletters, access to the Chamber's social media reach, eligibility for event sponsorship and advertising, and the ability to post open positions on the Chamber job board. Membership also carries a credibility signal that matters more in a small community than people outside one tend to appreciate, because customers and prospective employees read Chamber membership as evidence that a business is established, accountable, and invested in the place where it operates.
We celebrate our members publicly. Ribbon cuttings for grand openings, expansions, relocations, and anniversaries are provided at no cost to members in good standing, complete with Chamber leadership, elected officials, local media, and photography.
Business education and support
We deliver practical training that small businesses in a rural county otherwise have to drive to Nashville, Knoxville, or Chattanooga to find. Through our partnership with the Biz Foundry and other regional resources, our programming has included the Contractor Business Bootcamp, lunch and learn sessions covering bookkeeping and accounting, marketing and sales, and recruitment and retention, and entrepreneurship competitions that help people test a business idea before they risk their savings on it. We also serve as a connector to the technical assistance that already exists, including the Small Business Administration, the Tennessee Small Business Development Center, USDA Rural Development, and the Upper Cumberland Development District.
Workforce
We work with employers, Overton County Schools, Volunteer State Community College, Tennessee College of Applied Technology Upper Cumberland, and other higher education partners to keep the training available in this county aligned with the jobs available in this county. Our role is to keep employers and educators at the same table, to help students see the careers that exist within driving distance of home, and to help employers navigate the recruitment and retention challenges that face every business in a tight rural labor market.
Leadership development
Leadership Overton, our annual leadership development program, takes a cohort of emerging and established leaders through a full year of immersion in how this county actually operates. It is one of the most important things the Chamber does, because the sustainability of every institution here depends on a continuing supply of people who understand the community and are willing to serve it.
Information
We are the conduit of data that businesses, site selectors, lenders, and elected officials need in order to make decisions about Overton County, including demographics, labor force figures, wage data, available sites and buildings, utility capacity, and educational attainment.
Who we serve: The entire county, whether or not a business is a Chamber member.
How it is funded: Public appropriation and partnership with the City of Livingston, Overton County government, utility providers, and supplemented by grant funding.
Economic development is a fundamentally different job from member service, and it is worth stating the difference plainly. Chamber membership work is about strengthening the businesses that are already here and already invested in us. Economic development work is about growing the size of the local economy itself, and its beneficiaries are every resident of Overton County, including those who will never attend a Chamber event and every business that will never pay us a dollar in dues.
The Chamber carries out this work in partnership with the City of Livingston and Overton County government, and it breaks down into four areas.
Business recruitment
We market Overton County to the manufacturers, distributors, retailers, and developers who are making location decisions, and we work to make sure that when a project comes looking, this county is on the list. That means maintaining a current inventory of available sites and buildings, keeping community data accurate and accessible, building relationships with site selection consultants and commercial brokers, representing the county at industry and retail recruitment conferences, and working alongside the Tennessee Department of Economic and Community Development, the Upper Cumberland Development District, and the Middle Tennessee Industrial Development Association.
Retail recruitment is a distinct and increasingly important piece of this work. Every dollar an Overton County household spends in Cookeville or Crossville is a dollar of sales tax revenue and local employment that leaves this county, and closing that gap requires actively pitching this market to the retailers, restaurants, and service providers who have not yet looked at us.
Business retention and expansion
The great majority of new jobs in any community come from employers who are already there, which is why we spend deliberate time with existing industry. We visit our major employers, we ask what is standing in the way of their growth, and we work to remove it, whether the obstacle is a workforce gap, a permitting question, a utility constraint, a road, or a state incentive program they did not know existed.
Site and infrastructure development
A community cannot recruit what it cannot deliver. We work on the underlying readiness that determines whether Overton County can compete for a project at all, including industrial and commercial site development, utility and broadband capacity, the assembly of developable land, and the designation of tools such as Opportunity Zones that make private investment financially viable here.
Public partnership and staffing
The Chamber staffs the Joint Economic and Community Development Board, the body required under Tennessee law that brings the City of Livingston, Overton County, and the business community together around a shared economic development agenda. We also pursue and administer the federal and state grant funding that makes projects possible in a county with a limited local tax base, including programs through USDA Rural Development, the Appalachian Regional Commission, the Tennessee Department of Economic and Community Development, and the Historic Preservation Fund.
Who we serve: Visitors to Overton County, and the businesses that depend on visitor spending.
How it is funded: A dedicated tourism development fund established through a formal multi-party agreement with our public partners.
Tourism is an export industry. Every visitor who spends a night at Dale Hollow, fills a tank in Livingston, eats a meal on the square, or buys a fishing license here is bringing outside money into the Overton County economy and helping to support businesses and public services that residents alone could not sustain. That makes destination marketing an economic development function rather than a hospitality nicety, and it is why the Chamber treats it as a separate line of work with its own funding, its own strategy, and its own advisory board.
Overton County has genuine tourism assets that most rural counties would trade a great deal for. The backwaters of Dale Hollow Lake reach into the northern end of the county and are home to the largest federal trout hatchery east of the Mississippi River. Standing Stone State Park protects 855 acres alongside an 11,000 acre state forest. The Cumberland Plateau rises to the south. Downtown Livingston offers a historic courthouse square that has anchored community life since the 1800s, a city park, and an outdoor performance stage.
Our tourism work includes the following:
Destination marketing. Promoting Overton County to visitors through advertising, digital and social media, the county's visitor brand, printed and online visitor guides, and partnership with the Tennessee Department of Tourist Development and regional tourism organizations.
Destination development. Marketing only works if there is something to market, so we also work on the product itself, including wayfinding signage, trail and outdoor recreation development, heritage tourism interpretation, historic markers, and support for the marinas, outfitters, lodging providers, and attractions that serve visitors.
Visitor services. Serving as the front door for people trying to plan a trip here, answering questions, and connecting visitors to lodging, dining, recreation, and events.
Governance and stewardship. The county's tourism program operates under a formal multi-party tourism development agreement among the Chamber, Main Street Livingston, and our public partners, with a segregated tourism fund and a Tourism Advisory Board guiding how those dollars are invested. That structure exists specifically so that tourism revenue is accounted for separately from Chamber membership dollars and is spent on tourism.
Who we serve: The historic downtown Livingston commercial district.
How it is funded: Courthouse Revitalization Act funds, charitable contributions, grants, sponsorships, and program revenue. Main Street Livingston is a separate 501(c)(3) organization.
Main Street Livingston is an independent nonprofit corporation with its own board of directors and its own 501(c)(3) charitable status. It is housed in the Chamber building with a Director.
What Main Street does that the Chamber does not is concentrate on a defined geographic district and on the physical fabric of that district. The Chamber serves a manufacturer in the industrial park and a small service provider exactly as it serves a shop on the square. Main Street's entire concern is the square and the blocks around it, including the buildings themselves, who owns them, whether they are occupied, what they look like, and whether people want to spend time there.
Main Street Livingston operates under the Main Street Approach, the nationally recognized downtown revitalization framework developed by the National Main Street Center and administered in this state through Tennessee Main Street. That framework organizes the work around four points:
Economic Vitality. Filling vacant storefronts, recruiting and supporting downtown businesses, connecting property owners and entrepreneurs to financing and incentives, and building the market case for private investment downtown.
Design. The physical condition and appearance of the district, including historic preservation, facade improvement, streetscape and public space, signage, and the standards that protect the character of a commercial district that has been standing for the better part of two centuries.
Promotion. Positioning downtown as the center of community life through events, marketing, and a coherent identity for the district.
Organization. Building the partnerships, volunteer base, board capacity, and funding that keep the effort going year after year, because downtown revitalization is measured in decades rather than in fiscal years.
Because Main Street Livingston is a 501(c)(3), contributions to it are tax deductible as charitable gifts, which is a meaningful difference from Chamber membership dues and one reason the two organizations are structured separately.
Advocacy
Advocacy runs through everything above, and it deserves its own explanation because it is the function most often misunderstood.
The Chamber is the collective voice of the Overton County business community before every level of government. Our 501(c)(6) structure exists in part to make that possible, because unlike a charitable organization, a business league is permitted to advocate directly and without limitation on matters affecting the common interests of its members. That is not incidental to what a chamber of commerce is. It is one of the original reasons chambers were formed.
We are nonpartisan. The Chamber does not endorse candidates, does not contribute to campaigns, and does not align itself with a political party. We take positions on policy, not on people. A business owner in Overton County should be able to belong to this Chamber, and to be represented well by it, regardless of how that owner votes.
We advocate at every level.
Local
At the local level, we engage with Livingston City Council, the Overton County Commission, and the boards and commissions whose decisions shape zoning, permitting, utilities, infrastructure, and the local tax structure that businesses operate under every day.
State
At the state level, we work with our General Assembly delegation and with the executive branch departments whose programs and regulations reach into every business in the county, and we participate in coordinated efforts alongside the Tennessee Chamber of Commerce and Industry and other Tennessee chambers on issues affecting business statewide.
Federal
At the federal level, we work with our congressional delegation and with federal agencies on the funding, regulation, and policy that affect rural employers, rural infrastructure, and rural communities.
What advocacy looks like in practice.
It includes tracking legislation and regulation that would affect local employers and alerting members when something is coming. It includes making the case for the state and federal investment this community needs, whether that is a road project, a broadband expansion, a grant program, or a designation. It includes writing letters of support, providing testimony and data, and putting local business owners directly in front of the officials making decisions. It includes hosting candidate forums and policy discussions so that our members are informed participants rather than spectators. And it includes simply being the phone call an elected official makes when they want to know how a proposal will land in Overton County.
We exist for our members and our community, and the measure of our work is whether the businesses and people of Overton County are better off for it.
Very little of consequence in a county our size gets done by any one organization alone, so we work shoulder to shoulder with the City of Livingston, Overton County government, our schools, Â TCAT, VolState, our industries, our hospital, our nonprofits, and our regional and state partners.
We are accountable for the member dues, sponsorship dollars, tourism revenue, and public funds entrusted to us, and we hold ourselves to a standard of transparency and sound governance in how we spend and report every one of them.
We represent business, not a party, and we intend to remain an organization that every employer in this county can belong to in good conscience.
We are proud of where we come from, and we believe the history, the landscape, and the character of the Upper Cumberland are among the strongest economic assets we have.
Our Community
Overton County sits in the heart of the Upper Cumberland, roughly twenty miles north of Cookeville and almost exactly halfway between Nashville and Knoxville, which gives our employers ready access to two major metropolitan markets while our residents keep the cost of living, the pace, and the neighborliness of a rural county. The county was established in 1806 and named for Judge John Overton, and Livingston has served as the county seat since 1835.
Two industries built the early economy here, lumber and coal, and both left their mark on a county that has always known how to work. What sustains it now is a more diversified base of manufacturing, healthcare, agriculture, education, retail, and tourism, anchored by a regional hospital, a strong K-12 system, a TCAT campus, a community college center, and manufacturers who have been building things in this county for generations.
Overton County at a Glance
(2025 estimate)
(2020 Census)
Membership
Chamber membership is open to any business, organization, or individual with an interest in the economic wellbeing of Overton County. Dues are structured so that a sole proprietor and a major manufacturer can both participate meaningfully, and because the Chamber is a 501(c)(6) business league rather than a charity, membership dues are generally treated as an ordinary and necessary business expense rather than as a charitable contribution. Members should consult their own tax advisor regarding deductibility.
We would like you to consider joining, and not only for what you will get out of it. Every project described on this page, every job recruited, every grant secured, every visitor drawn here, and every position taken on behalf of business at the courthouse or the capitol is underwritten in part by employers in this county who decided that Overton County was worth investing in beyond their own four walls.