New Chamber director looks to bridge the gap

The new director of the Evangeline Chamber of Commerce is Tobin Deville, a Ville Platte native who plans to shake up Evangeline Parish for the better by bridging the gap between generations.
Most may remember Deville’s Store, which was owned by Tobin’s parents, Ollie and Nora Deville. A 1987 Sacred Heart graduate, Tobin was active in theatre and band, playing alto saxophone. He still owns the very same sax he started playing in high school. Deville then attended USL and had a marching band scholarship, marching for four years, and was even the stadium announcer for a year. He recalled being in the press box at College Station where he announced, “‘The Ragin’ Band from Cajun Land, the pride of Acadiana!’ It just rang across the country. It was the largest live audience I had every been in. I was nervous,” he said.
While gifted in music, Deville found his passion one weekend when he walked into KVPI to visit Chris Fontenot, who was his theatre director at Sacred Heart. “I fell in love with the radio equipment, and that’s what did it for me. I just needed to see the turntables turning.” That was when he decided to go into mass communications which became his major at USL. He even became the president of his undergraduate advisor’s communications honor society. His advisor found an opportunity for him to get a graduate assistantship. All he had to do was move to Boise, Idaho to be a radio DJ. Deville took the opportunity and stayed there 15 years, earning a master’s in education technology, before moving back to Louisiana to help his parents retire.
In 2010, a federal grant was awarded to the Louisiana State Library, and Deville was hired by a training company to deliver computer skills classes in state libraries. From there, he built a network of clients and eventually incorporated a few years later, building a teaching network and becoming a professional development instructor with his own company, Deville Training Connection. He trains professionals in stress management, Excel, etc. “With all the teaching that I’ve done, everything is all leaning toward one direction for me. It’s simply engaging people in something.” He said he has learned much about people and relationships, about how people think and take in information, how to get things done. “Generations keep coming up over, and over, over again, everywhere we go. I think that’s the big, big missing piece to the puzzle in Evangeline Parish.”
Because of COVID-19, Deville’s instructor industry was turned upside down. He had to go from teaching in person to conducting webinars. He soon found himself with a lot of free time, so he went back to KVPI where he had worked years before. Now he is a DJ and does programming.
When asked what made him want to take on the role as Chamber Director, Deville said, “Opportunity. My whole life, my whole career, has evolved around opportunity. When something presents itself, I have to weigh the pluses and minuses. All the skills I have gained over the years have put me on this path, and that’s why I tell everybody to take the opportunity. You never know where it’s going to take you. Fake it until you make it!”
When asked how he plans to attract younger people to the parish, Deville said he plans to build relationships, especially by bridging the gap between generations. “I’m finding there is a big disconnect among the generations, not just in this country or the world, but more so I’m finding in Evangeline Parish. A lot of businesses that we’ve had here are very old businesses run by families. With that, we’re having a lot of struggle to update, to talk to the younger people. That’s one of the reasons why people look elsewhere. A lot of people don’t like change. I love change. I’m big on change.” He went on to say it is important to let all age groups know they can work with each other.
Deville went on to explain how the younger generation can show the older generation new opportunities and how to market to different age groups. “A boomer and a millennial, you get them in a room together it’s a cat fight. Not to mention the traditionalists which are still working in many businesses. The Alphas and the Gen Zs that are coming up to help lower the boundaries will allow people to learn new ways of doing things, create a new environment that will promote more business, and that’s one of the things I’m finding is coming up in all my conversations with all of our members in the chamber. We need to start merging the generations together, give them perspective, and allow a new environment to build in which new companies would want to be a part.”
When asked how he plans to bring everyone together in the wake of COVID-19, Deville said that is the biggest challenge. “Pointing people towards social media because that’s what we’re using right now. Looking at the generation barriers we have in place, social media is one of the main resources of younger generations as we know. The older generations don’t understand it because they have not been raised with it. As we age we typically stick with what we learn as kids, teens, and twenties. That’s a fact of life. Focusing people and teaching them how to have an online presence, if nothing else with Facebook, is one of the first things we can do because it’s already in place. The second thing is to encourage ways they can network themselves. It’s going to be an online presence for the most part that we know of.”
Dr. Gwen Fontenot, Chamber President, said Instagram is another useful tool used primarily by Gen Zs and Alphas. “To show our businesses and business owners and employees to use Instagram is one way of bridging that gap,” she said. “Use the media they are accustomed to. My great niece taught me if you take a picture and put it on Facebook and you put the same picture on Instagram they can tell.”
Deville said when he was teaching the boomer generation in library classes, they complained about the younger generations, saying they do not have a work ethic, cannot read and write, and will never be able to run the country. Deville told them, “They will run the country. We don’t know how they’re going to do it, but they’re going to run the country. We have to have faith in the way they do business, which is really hard for a boomer or even a Gen Xer to accept a different way of doing things. Follow the millennials! Follow the Gen Zs! Watch the Alphas because they’re getting into high school now. What they’re going to end up doing we’re going to have to follow. We can’t change them. They’re going to change the world. We have to adjust to them or we will lose our contact. We will lose touch with our market, our demographic, and our money-making opportunities.”
In addition to bridging generations, Deville and Dr. Fontenot plan to bring more diversity to the chamber, by bringing in qualified people of color and various age groups and backgrounds to give a greater perspective in approaching the needs of local businesses. “A big message we would like to send to the community is that we are moving and consciously making an effort to diversify the chamber,” said Dr. Fontenot.
When it comes to attracting new businesses to the parish, Dr. Gwen said the first thing is to give the parish a face lift. “We want to try to restore pride in the community.” Deville added, “And build and reestablish a business-friendly environment. A lot of businesses, by nature, are competitive, and don’t want to give anything to their competition, which unfortunately, is a closed-minded way of doing business. A lot of people hold their cards close to their chest when they should actually have friendly competition and embrace that and make it a more customer-friendly environment. A lot of people are simply closed to those ideas. No one has given them permission to do it because they were taught a long time ago, ‘They’re competition.’ One of the things the chamber can do is give businesses permission to have friendly competition.”