Community Corner: Sharing our mission with students

Lisa Matlock
Lisa Matlock

By Lisa Matlock
Outreach Coordinator

Universities, both from Alaska and out-of-state, offer field courses that can connect students to places and topics firsthand, adding a dose of reality to their academic learning and creating lifelong memories for participating students. Every year the council receives requests for presentations and educational activities to help students understand our mission, our work, and its global significance.

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Listening to downstream concerns

By Lisa Matlock
Outreach Coordinator

Vern Hall, Mark Swanson, Lisa Matlock, Al Burch, Bill Burch at ComFish 2015. Photo by Lynda Giguere.
Vern Hall, Mark Swanson, Lisa Matlock, Al Burch, Bill Burch at ComFish 2015. Photo by Lynda Giguere.

Over the past two months, Executive Director Mark Swanson and I have been traveling as part of the council’s community outreach program to a good number of our downstream communities. The term “downstream” was coined after the Exxon Valdez oil spill, when oil spread across more than a thousand miles of coastline in southcentral Alaska, including the southern Kenai Peninsula and Kodiak Island. Because of this, when industry works on contingency planning for safe oil transportation through Prince William Sound, the council regularly speaks up for downstream communities and resources that could be affected by an accident. So it is important for us to visit these communities to hear from these citizens about how our mission connects to their priorities and community needs.

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Developing internships for the council’s future

By LISA MATLOCK
Council Outreach Coordinator

Lisa Matlock makes a new friend at the 2014 Copper River Wild! festival in Cordova.
Lisa Matlock makes a new friend at the 2014 Copper River Wild! festival in Cordova.

In February 2015, the council will be 25 years old. We are an organization in transition, created by one generation and moving to the next. In the past year alone, several board members and long-time staff have retired, or, sadly, passed away. At every meeting, the board discusses the importance of finding and recruiting passionate younger citizens who will eventually be called upon to represent the council’s member entities and work on behalf of our mission. To help answer this need, the council has been developing an internship project to engage the next generation.

Pilot internships

The project began in 2014 with two interns working on very different pilot projects. Cordova High School student Sarah Hoepfner spent a few hours each month of the past year using traps and plates to monitor for European green crab and invasive tunicate species in the Cordova area. She also worked with several classrooms in Cordova this spring and at the Copper River Wild! Festival this summer to educate youth about invasive species. Sarah has been mentored by Information and Education Committee volunteer, Kate Morse, and Science Advisory Committee project manager, Joe Banta. Sarah’s final report on this summer’s aquatic nuisance species monitoring will be completed this fall.

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The power of shared history – Chenega Bay

Community Corner:

Lisa Matlock
Lisa Matlock

By LISA MATLOCK
Council Outreach Coordinator

On June 6, nearly a hundred people gathered to commemorate the residents of the former Native Village of Chenega lost to the Good Friday earthquake fifty years ago. 26 residents, more than a third of the community’s population, died in the earthquake and its devastating tsunami. Survivors, family members of those who died, descendants representing multiple generations, and village friends gathered together at the site of the old village to share memories of March 27, 1964, to grieve for those who were lost, and to reflect on changes wrought by this event.

A beautiful bell, blessed for the occasion by Chenega Bay’s itinerant Russian Orthodox priest Father Christopher Stanton, tolled for the village’s losses before the gathered group shared a festive lunch. Father Christopher held a memorial service for the people of Chenega who lost their lives to the earthquake and tsunami and to “honor Chenega survivors whose faith, fortitude, and perseverance has kept the spirit of the Chenega Family alive.” It was an event of the heart, moving and sad, but uplifting as well.

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