COMMUNITY PROGRAMS
Listening, Recalibrating and Adapting Working Together To Meet The Community Challenges Of The Pandemic Every year, our program staff works diligently to understand the unique needs of our community members and deliver programming that benefits all our residents. Historically, this has included programs designed to assist residents at every stage of life, from youth looking for their first jobs, to adults purchasing their first homes or ATVs, to elders who benefit from heating oil and high-quality meat to help them through these long Alaska winters. During the pandemic, our program staff’s ability to understand those community needs and adapt programs to fulfill them became all the more important. In February of 2020, program staff began to suspect that the whispers of the coming virus might disrupt programming if they were not prepared. Given Alaska’s remote location, they anticipated a buffer of a few extra weeks before the virus spread to Anchorage, then the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta. This offered staff a window of opportunity to get ahead of the planning cycle and begin to recalibrate programming with public health and safety in mind. As the pandemic grew and public health guidance evolved, our staff stayed abreast of all changes, managing and reimagining our programs in real-time to keep our residents safe. Special thanks are due to BRENDA ERIK, who manages our Youth-to-Work (YTW) programs. She spearheaded efforts to develop a plan that incorporated all applicable public health guidelines — from the federal, state and local levels. This plan included social distancing, mask guidance, handwashing and regular sanitization processes in communal spaces, as well as no-contact deliveries of materials whenever needed. After multiple iterations and adjustments to shifting CDC guidelines, the plan went into effect with the summer YTW cohort. It went on to become the model with which all the other in-person community programs operated. None of this would have been possible without input from our residents and community partners across the region. Our team worked together with local leaders on our plans. We consulted with experts from the Yukon-Kuskokwim Health Corporation on best practices. We enabled our staff to work from home when needed by engaging our network provider, GCI, to bring connections to their homes and rush antennas to our communities despite supply chain shortages. Our other vendors diligently implemented social distancing guidelines and no contact procedures in order to keep their staff and our communities safe. We are grateful for all the hard work our staff and partners did in 2020, and we look forward to many more years of collaboration and dedication.
8 | COASTAL VILLAGES REGION FUND | ANNUAL REPORT 2020
JOHN P & PAULINE ANDREW
