Southcentral

Research shows that kids who age out of the foster care system are less likely to finish high school, find jobs, or go to college. But one organization in Anchorage is trying to change the outcome for former foster kids and other young adults who need to learn the skills to live independently.

Twenty-two-year-old Luke Guthrie shows off the sparsely furnished kitchen of the small two-bedroom apartment he shares with a roommate.

“This is my cabinet,” he says, pulling open the aged wooden door to reveal a stack of ramen noodles and other easy-to-prepare foods. “We both have one side, each of us. That’s my cabinet. That’s Jesse’s. This is our shared table.”

His fluffy, blazing orange ponytail flows behind him as he heads to the stove to put on a kettle for tea, eager to be polite and welcoming.

“Do you guys, like coordinate? Someone’s duty to dishes on one day…?” I ask, glancing around the tidy kitchen.

“Yeah, we have a rotation chart, actually, that the program provides.” Guthrie pulls out a sheet of paper the outlines each of the duties.

Guthrie is part of the Living Independent ForEver program at Shiloh Community Housing in Anchorage. The program provides low-rent housing for young adults while also teaching them life skills, like learning to live with other people.

Guthrie says it was hard at first because he never saw his roommate.

“But one night he just came out and said, ‘Hey man, wanna watch a movie?’ I was going ‘Alright.’ Apparently he had a movie I wanted to watch. I can’t remember what it was. It was about robots, fighting or something else.” He shrugs.

Guthrie grew up in Ketchikan but moved to Anchorage to attend job training. When he finished, he didn’t want to go back to the drama of his family life. But he was young and shy and didn’t really have the skills to live on his own.

Shiloh Community Housing Executive Director Verna Gibson says many kids end up in the same situation. They come from rough homes or age out of foster care and have nowhere to go. They often don’t know what is and isn’t acceptable as responsible tenants.

“Nobody wants to rent to them. They’re not good renters. They don’t know all of the rules. They turn their music up too high; they throw trash on the ground,” Gibson says.

She says many of her former foster kids had the same problem and they needed help transitioning into adulthood. So she worked with Shiloh Baptist Church to create the L.I.F.E. program back in 2008. They don’t provide anything for free. To live in the 8-plex apartment complex, the 14 young people have to start applying for jobs from day one.

“The Bible says if you don’t work, you don’t eat,” Gibson explains. His office is dotted with religious references though the program does not have any religious requirements. “They needed to understand that they needed to work to provide for themselves. But they needed the opportunity to be put in a position to increase their skills, get their GED or diploma, and do that in a safe, affordable environment.”

The residents also learn about financial literacy, hygiene, interviewing for jobs and showing up to work on time.

L.I.F.E. graduate Jessica Steve says the program gave her a safe environment to make mistakes and learn from them. She was fired from a job because she stopped showing up.

“I knew the policy. I knew what I was doing,” Steve says. “So I took responsibility for my actions. That’s another thing that Shiloh has taught me, to take responsibility for myself.”

Now, she’s starting a new job with a decent wage and knows she needs to be responsible.

Back at Luke Guthrie’s apartment, he comfortably settles into the old used couch in his living room with his cup of tea and smiles at Steve and another resident. The young adults interview each other to make sure they’re a good fit before joining the program.

“This program is like family. You gotta live like a family, help each other,” Guthrie says.

Each week the group meets to discuss their issues and successes. He says this new, supportive family has changed his outlook on life.

“I feel more confident, more inspired, more outgoing,” Guthrie says. “Before, I’m not going to lie, before, at work, as a janitor at the 5th Avenue Mall, if I saw a homeless guy I’d try to avoid him and stuff. But now, man, I just walk up and buy him a meal if he’s hungry. I just feel like a nicer person.”

He’ll take those strengths and the skills he learned as an electrical apprentice to his new job as well. After acing the application test and interview, he’ll begin as lead electrician for a cruise line railroad this summer.

 

Matanuska Susitana Borough officials got an early look at the Borough’s FY 2016 spending plan Thursday. Borough manager John Moosey opened the discussion, saying the budget would be “very conservative”, compared with previous years. The Borough’s mil rate has remained relatively flat since 2010, but indications are that changes are coming, Moosey said.

“We can’t continue this for this budget. If you look back at 2009 and what we were charging to taxpayers and where we are now, what other organization, business, can say we are doing more things, we’re growing and we’re still charging you less, charging taxpayers less, seven years later. My message today is, ‘we need to make some changes, especially revenue changes because some of the revenue that we are counting on and some of the things we have created are really making at a pinch point.’”

No individual department heads presented figures to the Assembly at Thursday’s worksession. The Assembly prioritizes spending and will deliberate the plan after a series of public hearings starting on May 4.

Moosey said, along with the budget debate, there needs to be further discussion regarding deficits in the funds that pay for select Borough operations.. namely, Port MacKenzie, Borough solid waste services, and the unused ferry Sustina.

Those so-called enterprise funds are supposedly supported by fees charged for services, but there wide gaps between costs and charges, Moosey said. Borough Finance director Tammy Clayton reviewed the latest figures on the enterprise funds:

“With regards to the Port, the budgeted deficit for June 30, 2015 is estimated at 6.8 million ($), the budgeted deficit for June 30, 2016 is estimated at 6.35 million ($). The ferry, or what is approved to be transferred in for fiscal year 2016 is 460 thousand ($). “

Deficits in enterprise funds are covered by transfers from the Borough’s areawide fund.

The Borough’s Public Works director, Terry Dolan, told the panel that the solid waste enterprise fund is running a 1.6 million dollar deficit. He said increases in rates could close the gap.

State fiscal woes also are affecting the Borough’s budget for the next fiscal year. Moosey said a drop in revenue sharing, increases in school infrastructure needs and a drop in Borough revenue due to senior and disabled veteran tax exemptions are all contributing to the lean fiscal outlook.

West Anchorage High Senior Maeva Ordaz won the national Poetry Out Loud competition this week in Washington DC. It’s the first time an Alaskan has both reached the finals and won. Ordaz won $20,000 for recitation of “Zacuanpapalotls” by Brenda Cárdenas. She also recited “Ode on a Grecian Urn” by John Keats.

Ordaz says she chose Cardenas’ poem because she connected with it on a personal level as the daughter of immigrants. “The whole idea of rebirth is representative of how hard we worked to get where we are.”

After participating in Poetry Out Loud for the first time three years ago, Ordaz says she started reading poetry and connecting with it. Then, she started writing and publishing her own poems.

Poetry Out Loud was started ten years ago by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Poetry Foundation and is run statewide by the Alaska State Council on the Arts.

“Poetry helps us sense and think differently about the world around us,” said Council on the Arts Executive Director Shannon Daut. “It encourages more abstract and creative thought, which is really crucial for kids to develop to help them be competitive in the workforce that is increasingly relying on creative thought and problem solving.”

Next year Ordaz will be attending Columbia University on a full scholarship. Her education will be paid for through graduate school by the Gates Millennium Fellowship.

You can watch Ordaz’s other recitation on here. Videos and photo courtesy of the National Endowment for the Arts.

A theater production coming to Anchorage this week honors the accomplishments of a little known character in Alaska’s history.

Back around the turn of the twentieth century, one of the foremost dog drivers in Alaska was Jujiro Wada, a Japanese national who helped to blaze Alaska’s most famous trail.

If you mention the word Iditarod, images of racing huskies, dogsleds and the last of the Alaska mountain men come to mind. Swenson, Buser, Seavey, Mackey are names that carved Iditarod history. But Jujiro Wada? Who’s he? Well, he’s the man who built the Iditarod Trail.

University of Alaska professor and Seward native Edgar Blatchford says Wada faced incredible odds.

“It wasn’t like he had GPS or any food along the way. He carried a rifle, bullets and an empty sled, except for something to sleep in.”

Blatchford is helping the Asian American Cultural Center bring the musical “Samurai Musher” to Alaska. Back in 1909 Wada was renowned in what was to become the Alaska Territory, and his exploits were covered in newspapers of the time.

“The Seward Chamber of Commerce, it was called the Board of Trade at that time, hired him to find a way to connect Seward to the gold camps in the Interior and eventually Nome. Jujiro Wada was hired at a dollar a day, and he hired what we like to think of as an international crew. And they set forward to blaze the trial from Seward to Nome.”

Why Wada? Because he was considered the foremost musher in Alaska at the time.

“Wada was credited from mushing forty to fifty thousand miles across Alaska,” says University of Alaska professor Tony Nakazawa.

Nakazawa says Wada came from Hinodemachi in Ehime Prefecture. He was born in 1875 into a samurai family down on its luck, and left home early to seek his fortune in the U.S. He first arrived in San Francisco.

“One of the stories that is more prominent is that he was shanghaid by this Captain Norwood on the ship Ballena, and they were up in the Arctic waters, and their ship became icebound. And so Captain Norwood had Wada and a small group go on to shore and there he befriended the Brower family who mobilized the village and they came out and saved the people on the ship.”

Wada first worked at the Cape Smyth Trading post with the legendary Charles Brower. It is was there that he learned his dog mushing skills. Later, he traveled with E.T. Barnette, the man who founded Fairbanks, and did his share of gold prospecting.

He was a man of many talents — sailor, prospector, dog driver, and quite the adventurer. He was driven by the desire to make his fortune and send money back to his widowed mother in Japan.

A 1995 book published in Japan, “The Samurai Dog Musher Under the Northern Lights,” is credited with spurring interest in Wada in that country.

The book was later translated into English by a Canadian who was documenting Wada’s travels for the Canadian Park Service.

Now the Mikan Ichiza Playgroup, from Wada’s hometown in Ehime Prefecture, has produced a musical based on Wada’s story

Nakazawa says the story captures public imagination in part because of its theme of mother and son devotion.

“And there is a following among historians here in Alaska on Wada, but in terms of the communities, I don’t think it’s very well known. But one of the things that’s interesting about the Wada story is it was actually that he had written to his mother, sent money back to his mother from a distance.”

Wada’s fortunes did not always run smoothly. Nakazawa says Wada was once almost lynched because of a misunderstanding.

“So one of the [newspaper] articles that we looked at had said that Wada was sent to much to Circle and Dawson City to build up Felix Pedro’s gold strike, and up to one thousand prospectors came to the Goldstream Valley area, and unfortunately, they didn’t find gold, as promised. And Wada almost met his demise, but fortunately, Mr. Barnett prevailed and Wada was spared.”

And, as World War I loomed, Wada was faced with discrimination because of mistrust of the Japanese in the US.

The stage production covers the triumphs and disappointments of Wada’s life from childhood in Japan to his adventures in Alaska, and through his declining years.

Edgar Blatchford says Wada’s story is exactly the kind of thing that fascinates tourists who are looking for something beyond the usual attractions.

“This is a major production. They are excited about it. They’ve put a lot of time into it. They are serious performers, and they recognize the connection between Japan and Alaska which gives Alaska great avenue for more and more people from Japan coming to visit Alaska and getting off the beaten path.”

Wada eventually left Alaska. His later life is obscure, but we know he died in San Diego without ever having struck it rich. But the growing interest in his life is sure to enrich his memory in Japan and Alaska.

The Alaska Public Offices Commission is looking into a complaint against an Anchorage mayoral candidate over an improper corporate donation.

The complaint was filed against Ethan Berkowitz by David Nees, who has run unsuccessful campaigns for seats in the House and on the Anchorage School Board.

In the documents submitted to APOC Nees says that Berkowitz used images from a KTUU newscast in a campaign ad, but failed to disclose a corporate donation from the private company.

Nora Morse is a spokeperson for the campaign, and says the use media in ads is commonplace.

“Political campaigns use news clips all the time,” said campaign Berkowitz campaign spokesperson Nora Morse. “This complaint is just another distraction to the Anchorage voters, it’s an unfounded claim that will hopefully be resolved by this afternoon.”

APOC is holding an expedited hearing on the issue today at 5:15pm.

People who have heard Erik Falskow play the saxophone compare him to a 60-year-old black man on a Chicago street corner. But what shocks listeners is the fact that Erik is only 16 years old. And even more, he’s only been playing for five years. In this episode of Indie Alaska, we meet Anchorage’s own saxophone sensation and the local musical legends who have helped guide him through Alaska’s music scene.