JALSA in The Newton Beacon on Annual Meeting Award Recipient Greg Reibman

Full article in The Newton Beacon at this link.

Greg Reibman honored with Jewish social action leadership award

If you heard about the New Kids on the Block’s lip syncing scandal in 1992, you have Greg Reibman, the president and CEO of the Charles River Regional Chamber, to thank.

“I broke that story nationally when I was working for the Boston Herald as an entertainment writer,” Reibman said.

He’s been the head of the the fourth-largest chamber of commerce in Massachusetts since 2012, a pretty far cry from breaking boy band news. He’s still a communicator, though, sending business news and advocacy via the Chamber’s newsletter to an audience of 8,500 twice a week.

For Reibman, that work flexes the same muscles as his days reporting for former employers the Herald, WGBH, or Dallas Morning News.

“I never expected to be back in a writing phase, like I am now, where I’m writing almost daily,” Reibman said.

The journalist-turned local business leader has been a storyteller throughout his career, and his recent advocacy in housing and immigration earned him the Jewish Alliance for Law and Social Action’s (JALSA) Community Leadership Award last week.

“They do really important work in this community, and they’ve been doing it for a long time, and I respect it, and it’s a real honor that they’re recognizing me,” Reibman said.

JALSA is focusing its advocacy on the issues of immigration and housing this year because it sees the two issues as intertwined—businesses need workers, and those workers need places to live.

“In order to have thriving communities and a thriving economy we need to make sure that our immigrants are protected and that they can continue to be part of our workforce,” JALSA President & CEO Cindy Rowe said. “In order for people to live here to bring their families up here, they need access to housing.”

Reibman said he’s focused on the same issues within the business community from Needham to Brookline.

“The Massachusetts economy cannot survive without our immigrant workforce,” Reibman said. “They are neighbors, they are employees, they are bosses, they’re business owners, and it’s really such an important fabric of our communities and who we are, and what makes Massachusetts special.”

Amid heightened ICE presence in the state, Reibman said he’s heard from business owners around Metrowest about the ways in which fear of detention and deportation is hurting businesses like restaurants. He makes it his prerogative to share those stories with his readers.

“Many business owners have employees who have been afraid to go to work or afraid to come out of the kitchen, because the kitchen can be a safe spot for them—immigration agents can’t enter the kitchen without permission.”

The Charles River Regional Chamber has also been at the forefront of advocacy for more housing production, something Reibman sees as necessary to staff the businesses that keep the Metrowest economy running.

“It was really important for the business community to have a voice there and to say that housing is really important for the economic competitiveness of our communities,” Reibman said. “If you cared about whether or not your coffee shop had long enough hours to wait on you, it was because of their employees.”

So Reibman and the chamber set up a training program alongside a few partners, including Citizens’ Housing & Planning Association and Eastern Bank, that would teach business leaders around Metrowest how to make effective public comments at government meetings.

“If you’re a business owner, you’re not really used to necessarily going to a city council meeting or a town meeting and speaking up, and we felt it’s really important that businesses be heard, so we started training,” Reibman said.

That training was especially important as towns and cities across Massachusetts began to ratify the MBTA Communities Act, a 2021 state law that required municipalities around the state to allow more multifamily housing near transit.

“We really tried to pick people in professions that the elected officials in that community, and the members of the community itself, could realize all of these really are businesses that matter a lot,” Reibman said. “It was a pretty persuasive argument.”

It was around 2021, during the pandemic, when Reibman began the Charles River Regional Chamber’s newsletter as a way to keep information flowing in a time of fear and uncertainty. “There wasn’t a lot of information then about what you do with your business,” Reibman said. “Could you even go into your store yourself and work on your stock, or do mail order, or whatever? So we started putting out newsletters whenever there was any information we could find.”

The newsletters became so popular Reibman kept them going even when the virus subsided. Glenn Rosengard, vice president of Eastern Bank, said Reibman’s newsletter is a fixture of his morning routine.

“When the email arrives every morning, that’s the first email that I read every day,” Rosengard said. “Although it gives a lot of news and important local and national news, he also infuses humor into the reading, and that’s what makes it worth reading every single day.” COVID is what prompted Reibman to begin his wide-reaching newsletter, and now it’s a tool for him to steer the Metrowest business community through the newest slate of challenges, a federal immigration crackdown and a housing shortage.

“We went through COVID, and that was very difficult, now we’re going through a lot of other challenges,” Reibman said. “The immigration issue is one that certainly is not going away.”