Our volunteers have been keeping busy this winter.
It’s par for the course for our volunteer program, but our 2013-2014 volunteers – Dayneé, Anna Rose, Tara, Zach, and Emily – have all been putting in extra effort to reach out to the communities we serve.
In January, all five volunteers were scheduled to take outreach and/or news-gathering trips to some of the villages within KNOM’s listening range. (Thanks to an ongoing sponsorship with a regional airline, this rural travel is free of charge.) Because of the strangely warm weather, some of their travel had to be canceled; some of our communities’ runways were simply too icy to permit landing.
Thankfully, Emily, Anna Rose, and Zach did make it to their destinations. Emily ventured to Savoonga (suh-VOON-guh), Alaska, where she presented at a career fair for high school and middle school students. She then joined Anna Rose in the village of Koyuk for a similar career presentation (top picture). The two traveled with a group of other presenters from Nome, also pictured below.
Zach spent time in Stebbins, Alaska (pictured at bottom), doing research for a follow-up news story on recovery efforts from this past November’s severe fall storms in Western Alaska. Zach’s trip came on the heels of a recent federal declaration designating parts of rural Alaska as natural disaster sites, thus opening up funds (from FEMA) for relief efforts. In Stebbins, the rebuilding work is ongoing and arduous. As Zach recently wrote on our blog, the reconstruction efforts in Stebbins “are not just important, they are vital.”
Thank you for helping our volunteers to engage with our region and to share their stories. (And thank you to Chisana White for the Koyuk photos!)
