Mar 22, 2016  |  Cristina Geissler comes full-circle
Former Henderson baby now Concession St. BIA Director

Photo by Mark Newman
Cristina Geissler took over as Executive Director of the Concession Street BIA on March 1.

Hamilton Mountain News
By Mark Newman

For Cristina Geissler, it’s all about effective communication.
The 45-year-old Ancaster resident took over as the new executive director of the Concession Street Business Improvement Area earlier this month.
“It feels like coming home,” said Geissler who was born down the street at the then Henderson General Hospital.
She’s been spending the last several days getting to know the business owners on the street.
One of 22 applicants for 24-hour a week position, Geissler said the new job is a natural fit for her strong communications and people skills.

She spent 15 years with RBC as a national service manager with the bank’s information technology division and five years ago she left the bank to as an entrepreneur to start a jewelry for children e-commerce business.
“It seemed like it was a good complement to the (skills) I was already using managing my own business,” she said. “It gives me the opportunity to work with other businesses, help them grow their business, leverage what I’ve learned along the way and learn from them and help give back to my community.”
BIA chair Leo Santos said the management board was impressed with Geissler’s business, communications and people skills and she will be guiding the organization’s marketing initiatives in the coming months.
Before joining the bank, Geissler majored in Spanish and French at the University of Western Ontario.
She’s married to an RBC Hamilton area branch manager.
The couple, who has three children, moved to Ancaster last summer from Oakville.
While she was born on the Mountain, Geissler noted she and her family spent much of her childhood moving around with her pediatrician father, including spending some time in her parent’s home country of Argentina.


Mark Newman is a Reporter for Mountain News. He can be reached at [email protected]

http://www.hamiltonnews.com/news-story/6401459-cristina-geissler-comes-full-circle/

​Hamilton and the surrounding area is in for a boom of manufacturing jobs and soaring house prices over the next two years, according to a pair of new economic outlook reports.

A joint study by the Ontario Chamber of Commerce and Credit Unions of Ontario, supported by the Hamilton and Burlington chambers, predicts the Hamilton-Burlington-Grimsby area will "experience above-trend employment growth" in the next two years as the troubled manufacturing sector ends its lengthy restructuring.

"We expect some impressive economic performance from the bay area," said Helmut Pastrick, chief economist at Central 1 Credit Union. "The Hamilton area will experience ongoing growth and better growth than we experienced in 2015."

Specifically, the forecast study says the bay area's 5.6 per cent unemployment rate will fall below five per cent in 2017. That drop will be fuelled by the twin forces of more jobs and a lower labour force participation rate. A portion of the area's working age population has opted out of the workforce and this remains a problem in several parts of the country.

Full Hamilton Spectator Story...