Rallying Businesses to Develop the Metro East
Date Posted: November 23, 2015
Posted In: News, People,
From stlToday: The Metro East has more than 500,000 people, heavy industry, a river port, rail and highway connections that make it a hub for making and shipping things.
The Air Force command in charge of moving the military around the world sits at Scott Air Force Base.
But the Metro East also has large pockets of poverty along with worries over a questionable levee system that protects 55,000 jobs and 150,000 residents. Illinois state government is in partial paralysis.
Ronda Sauget sees her new job as rallying influential people to fix problems and move the region toward the better.
Sauget, a longtime business consultant, is the new executive director of the Leadership Council Southwestern Illinois. That’s a group of business, nonprofit and labor leaders who study the region, its business and educational structure, and push for improvements.
Sauget spent much of her career doing just that sort of thing. She spent 10 years as volunteer director of the Archview Economic Development Corp., formed by Touchette Regional Hospital to try to bring more jobs to the area around Alorton, Cahokia, Centreville, Dupo and the town of Sauget.
Ronda Sauget, 52, married into one of the oldest families in Metro East. The tiny town of Sauget was named after a relative of her husband’s. She and her husband own the Sauget Farm in Cahokia, which has been in the family since 1844. “It’s a grain farm. It grounds you in the community and agriculture and it grounds you in what happens from the time you grow it, to the time it’s processed,” she says.
She started her own business consulting firm, Validus Business Strategies in 2006, after stints in business and market “intelligence” at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis and FleishmanHillard. FleishmanHillard is a public relations firm, but Sauget says her job was more in business consulting, studying markets and recommending how business clients should respond.