Health

Alaskans Christina Love and Josie Heyano served on the U.S. Advisory Council on Human Trafficking and helped shape the council’s 2024 report.

It outlines the forms of human trafficking, suggests policies to address the underlying causes and points out holes in the justice system that allow this type of violence to continue.

Love, who lives in Juneau, and Heyano, an Anchorage resident, spoke with KTOO’s Yvonne Krumrey to talk about what it means to be a survivor and to take the stories of other survivors — and those who didn’t survive — to the desks of federal lawmakers.

And a warning, these advocates discuss homelessness, sexual violence, drug use and suicide in this interview.

Listen:

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Josie Heyano: My name is Josie Heyano. I am a presidential appointee to the United States Advisory Council on Human Trafficking, which is an Advisory Council tasked with creating recommendations to the President’s interagency task force to combat trafficking.

Christina Love: Hi. My name is Christina love and I’m 2024’s presidential appointee to the Council on Trafficking. 

People entrusted us with their stories, and we have a responsibility to receive those words, to not let them hit the floor and to lift them up. We recognize that Josie and I are in seats of privilege, you know, that there’s a lot of other people that could be here who aren’t — like, literally — and people who aren’t with us, right? The recognition of people who died, you know, like, what it means to be a survivor, is the recognition that we survive something that a lot of people don’t. 

Josie Heyano: In last year’s report, and I think we put it in this year’s report also there’s a dedication space. That was a really important piece to me when I first came into the council. And to tack onto what Christina said, like, my position on the council, the reason I accepted it wasn’t because necessarily of my own lived experience, but because I was carrying so many stories, and still I’m carrying so many stories.

And that when we work in direct care, when we work in our community, it is our responsibility, or it feels like my responsibility, to do something with those stories, especially my years working with youth experiencing homelessness in Anchorage, so many of those stories were incredibly similar, and there were so many points of intervention that could have been so impactful in those stories. 

And so that’s what the council position meant to me, was taking those stories from not only the clients and the people that I’ve served in my community, but my colleagues at different agencies, law enforcement, NGOs, and being able to take that experience in those stories, and level it up to the federal government level, and say, these are our experiences in Alaska.

I struggle with the word survivor. A lot of the times I actually, I really don’t like it. It doesn’t resonate for me. And it maybe that’s even like a guilt thing, I’m not sure, but it always brings to mind to me that there’s a lot of people that I’ve worked with over the years who aren’t here anymore, and there’s a lot of people who won’t be here in the future. 

And so it was really important to me that the council was rooted in the recognition of that, that when we show up as survivor leaders, we’re also showing up honoring and respecting that there is a lethality to this, that there are people who aren’t here.

I found that my time on the council, there’s a lot of — maybe because it feels protective — there’s a lot of need to like, be really high level, be really federal, be really just top level, macro, everything. And that’s valuable, because that’s where we make our recommendations. But we have to root in people too, and we have to remember that humanity piece, that I’m not just going to write this recommendation because it’s my job on the council. I’m going to write this recommendation because I sat with the people who this recommendation impacts, and I care about them, and I took the time to learn about their experiences.

And I think just in general, in the anti trafficking space, there’s a need to want to just only talk about the crime of trafficking, and so I continue to find myself kind of head-butting up against that. Even, you know, I’ve done trainings here locally where submit the feedback I got on the trafficking training was, “Well, we didn’t talk about trafficking enough. ” I’m like, true, but what we did talk about was traumatic brain injuries. We did talk about our suicide rates. We did talk about the lack of shelter beds in the city. We did talk about all of the things that we really should be talking about, and if you’re listening, you can connect those pieces.

Christina Love: Working professionally, where people didn’t know I was a survivor, and then the moment they knew I was a survivor, treated me so differently, completely differently. And then late, years later, at having this experience, and someone told me, “They’re not going, they’re never going to listen to you, because you’re a survivor. They don’t see you as equal to them.” 

When we talk about the people that I’ve worked with who have experienced trafficking, or even my own experience that I never was the perfect victim and have never been the perfect survivor, you know? So we have people who are experiencing great harm, who are also committing crimes, and the majority of them do end up incarcerated. One of my favorite quotes in the council’s report, and there’s so many great quotes, so many, so many great quotes, is the recognition that that so many of them end up in jail, but the people who harm them never do.

Josie Heyano: There are a lot of Native people and Native women especially, who are doing this work, and they’re doing it grassroots. They’re doing it in their communities. Having Indigenous representation on the U.S. Advisory Council is great, and it is long overdue that should have been a really long time ago, because there’s a lot of people that are doing this work and have recognized this issue in Native communities that just haven’t had a voice in the federal spaces. 

Alaska is so important to me to be talked about because of my experience and because of holding the stories of so many people who their trafficking experience is rooted in drug trafficking in Alaska, it’s rooted in forced criminality. It’s rooted in substance use, and we still do not have the resources to support that. 

You know, if we have a young person who is — or a person at all — who is at the airport, who is being forced to transport substances into the community, there is no legal service or advocacy route for them to access safety whatsoever. It happens consistently, constantly in the state, and has for a really long time. And I’ve had so many conversations with law enforcement, with Department of Law, with service providers where they recognize this. Yet we have no methodology to help support people. So it just continues to happen.

And at the federal level, and you know, there’s so many toolkits that exist, there’s so many trainings that exist, and I still have yet to see this issue really being tackled head on, that forced criminality piece, the forced trafficking into our rural communities, it’s really heavily impacting all of our communities. I don’t know that there’s any community that’s excluded from that. I don’t have an answer for it, other than we need to be paying attention and we need to be doing better.

Christina Love: When we talk about what Alaska needs to be able to do this in a way that would translate to lives being saved, when we’re genuinely asking people what it is that they want — and we have other reports that show exactly that when we’re saying, “What is it that you need?” People are saying that they they want to be treated as a whole human being, that they want to have access to safe housing, that they want their own money to buy food, that they want help getting their children back, or clothes that fit or they want a washing machine, or they want their car to be fixed.

A big part of the report talks about substance use and mental health coercion, that substances are an incredible way to escape or to alleviate pain, and I will say this in every interview and in every presentation and anytime somebody will listen, that trauma and substance use are a very natural reaction to violence, and violence is the unnatural thing. And that people will end their pain in any way they can. For some people, that is suicide, which why we have such high rates. 

We have to make services as easy to access as alcohol and heroin. Whenever I’m working with someone who’s experienced a lot of harm, who’s trying to leave a domestic violence situation or trafficking situation, substances are not my first priority. And in taking those coping mechanisms away, that can drive them right back. 

And the same for people who are perpetrating harm. When we have removed substances, we see higher rates of lethality. So we deeply need to understand substances as a way of coping with pain as well as a tactic of violence.

People who traffic people, prey on people not having their basic needs. For a lot of people, it’s because they did not have transportation that they got a ride. It is because they did not have a place to stay that they were given what they thought was a safe place to stay, or maybe they knew it wasn’t safe, but they didn’t have another option. They had no other option. 

Or from my own experience, that they met a need that I had, and it was so basic — that’s something that we should all be entitled to.

If we are really working toward a solution, then we would be communities and places that when a trafficker comes in, they would have no ability to be successful, that our children would be so protected, that our children would know what healthy and safe feels like. So the moment they come into contact with someone who means to do them harm, they could feel it in their bodies, and all the red flags would go off, and they would have people that they could go to that would trust and that would listen to them, and we would have a response that would also include the meaningful rehabilitation of this person who is doing harm because they are also not well. 

Josie Heyano: I want to tag on to Christina’s message too. Like anybody that hears this or listens to this, doesn’t matter what you’ve experienced, what you’ve done — that shame can feel so crippling, and it doesn’t stay that way forever. If you keep going, it doesn’t stay that way. You find your people, you find the purpose for it. It could be really transformative. 

My experience was like being in a house that was on fire when no one had ever told me what fire was, and I didn’t have a plan. I didn’t know how to put it out, I didn’t know if there was someone you could call. I didn’t know if it was hot, I didn’t know what to do. And I think that that shame, combined with the naivety, like the “how did I not know this? How can I even begin to comprehend or understand it?” It’s such an isolating, lonely place to be. 

And so I think some of the work that’s impactful in the council and being in community with people like Christina is having the opportunity to if anybody that listens or hears this or reads this is in a space where they feel like it’s not overcomeable or believable or understandable, that it is. And I don’t know that you get past it, but life gets bigger.

The closures of child care centers and a worker shortage have left Juneau parents with few options for affordable and reliable care for their kids. 

But, a new report by a state child care task force proposes dozens of recommendations aimed at expanding child care options statewide. 

City and Borough of Juneau Deputy City Manager Robert Barr is a member of the task force. He sat down with KTOO on Friday to discuss the task force’s findings and what role the city can play in making them a reality. 

Listen:

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Clarise Larson: How would you describe the state of child care in Juneau and across Alaska right now?

Robert Barr: I would say that it’s relatively tenuous, to use a word to describe child care.

I think Juneau, we’re in a better place than most of the state because we’ve been subsidizing and participating in the child care sector, using local dollars in a real, meaningful way for a handful of years now.  That same trend hasn’t been happening across the state. 

Clarise Larson: What kind of impact does this have on Juneau’s economy? When people can’t find reliable care for their kids? 

Robert Barr: Yeah, I mean it’s huge, right? There’s a lot of studies out there, there’s a lot of research that shows that when a parent of a child doesn’t have a place — a safe, high quality, good place for their child to be when they’re at work — then they’re not going to work. 

Solving that problem is a priority of many, many political bodies and many, many business interests because it’s really become evident — and there’s a lot of consensus right now across the spectrum, whatever spectrum you care, right, the political spectrum, the business spectrum, — that this is a problem that is really worth solving. For a variety of reasons, economic being primary among them. 

Clarise Larson: What would you say are the biggest barriers for child care providers right now?

Robert Barr: There are many, but the single biggest barrier is money. We as a society, don’t fund in a public way, child care from zero to five, very well at all. When you look at statistics of how much money public dollars in the United States go to child care, and compare that to other developed nations, we’re generally at the bottom of those lists. And, the business model of child care just bluntly, doesn’t work without significant public subsidy. You know, we heavily subsidized K-12 education, but expect parents to bear the burden for all of zero to five care, and that just doesn’t work from a business plan perspective.

Clarise Larson: As part of this task force, you were trying to find solutions. Highlight some of the recommendations that you guys came up with and, from your perspective, which ones really stood out to you.

Robert Barr: There are many — there’s over 50, I think total — recommendations that we made. And all of them matter. All of them can make a difference. But the biggest one that I highlight is the necessity of creating sustainable, publicly funded wage subsidies for licensed child care, both in-home care and center-based care that support a living wage. 

People who work in child care, those are super important jobs, and our our child care workforce really isn’t going to get where it needs to be until our centers and our providers can afford to pay people enough money to live on.

Clarise Larson: What role does the City and Borough of Juneau and the Juneau Assembly play in helping to solve the child care shortage locally?

Robert Barr: We subsidize child care in a couple of different ways. We have a couple of stipend-based programs, and we provide a monthly stipend directly to child care providers to help address that living wage issue and the recruitment and retention issues that child care centers have.

Clarise Larson: All these recommendations have a lot of big ambitions, but walk me through what next steps need to happen to get these recommendations to become a reality. 

Robert Barr: A lot of the recommendations are things that the state can do right now and that the state already has started working on in a lot of instances. Really, the big one is the money piece, right? That’s really the key missing ingredient to really solving this problem, both at a local and statewide and, frankly, a national level. Until we can get enough funding in the system to enable good, decent pay, that’s really the big element that we need.

Clarise Larson: Do these recommendations give you hope for the future of Juneau and solving this problem hopefully in the coming years? 

Robert Barr: They totally do. There really is sort of a bipartisan consensus and a consensus in both the child care sector and the business community that this is a problem worth solving for a wide variety of reasons. And so I think now is a good time to be talking about solving this problem because we’re largely coming from the same perspective.

Clarise Larson: Perfect. Well, thank you so much for coming in today and chatting with me.

Robert Barr: Thanks for having me.

Last week, a 30-year-old Juneau resident was killed in a police shooting. Raye Johnston grew up in Juneau, and was unhoused from a young age.

Johnston was identified as a woman in early reports of the shooting, but family and friends say they were genderfluid and used multiple pronouns. 

A few days after Johnston’s death, their brother, Nathaniel Hensley-Williams, sat on the edge of a garden bed outside of the Glory Hall — an organization that provides shelter space for unhoused people in Juneau. He said he started getting condolence messages after the shooting, even before police confirmed Johnston’s identity.

“Everybody knew her,” Hensley-Williams said. “I mean, she’s been roaming the streets since she was 12, so it’s 18 years. So everybody knew her.”

His family is Lingít, from the Raven Moiety, and he pointed to the large black birds gathered across the street. 

“The ravens have been upset, too,” he said. 

But for him, the grief has been coming in waves.

“It hasn’t fully hit. Realization hasn’t fully set in,” he said. 

Hensley-Williams said Johnston cared for the unhoused community in Juneau and would defend and support those who were having a hard time. 

“She’s like me,” he said. “She never knew when to take off the cape and mask.”

Johnston’s mother, Angel Nierstheimer, agrees. She said Johnston was funny and good at making people smile.

“She was one that could uplift a lot of people, even sometimes in their darkest hour,” Nierstheimer said. “She was one for noticing that people might need a quick little chuckle.” 

Hensley-Williams suggested Johnston might have known what the consequences could be when they advanced on armed police officers with a weapon on Christmas morning. Nierstheimer said Johnston had told friends they dreamed about being shot by police in the weeks leading up to the event. 

According to Juneau police, officers responded to a call that Johnston was threatening people while holding a hatchet near the Mendenhall Valley Breeze In convenience store. They told Johnston to put down the weapon. When Johnston moved towards officers, police say they used a taser, but Johnston continued to advance. That’s when police say Officer Jonah Hennings-Booth opened fire and killed Johnston. 

Juneau mental health advocate Christina Love met Johnston while she was doing crisis intervention work, and came to know them over the years. She saw them in moments of both hope and struggle. Love said she thought they wanted to get better. 

“They were deeply interested in recovery and mental health and healing,” Love said. 

Love is a specialist in advocacy for people who have experienced domestic violence, are involved with the justice system, or struggle with addiction. She also has personal experience with generational trauma among Indigenous people.

“People said, you know, this is a person that had caused a lot of harm, and there is no denying that, but I also know that it came from a place of so much need, like unmet needs, untreated medical, untreated mental health,” she said. 

Johnston’s death was the second fatal police shooting in Juneau in 2024. In July, 35-year-old Steven Kissack was also shot and killed by police during an altercation downtown. Kissack had lived on the streets of Juneau for several years. After an investigation by the Alaska Bureau of Investigation, the state ruled that the use of force against Kissack was justified. 

But members of the Juneau community, like Love, say these incidents raise questions about how people who live outside and struggle with mental health issues are treated in crises. She says more needs to be done to prevent mental health emergencies among Alaska Native people and the unhoused from ending this way.

“If we want changes, I think we have to ask different questions and have to demand evidence of that,” Love said. “So that means that we are asking for cultural responsiveness. We’re asking for them to be well-versed in trauma, well-versed in mental health and substance use.”

There is a script for what police do if a person threatens them with a weapon. But Love said that script considers the dangers of one moment and not the whole life of that person — or the lifetimes before.

“Because if they don’t know about the village that was burned here or why Native people — the majority of us — don’t own land, and why so many of us are struggling with substance use and mental health issues, then they’re going to think it’s an us problem, rather than it being like a systemic problem,” she said. “That bias and all of that is present when they’re holding a gun and there’s a Native woman-presenting mental health crisis in front of them.”

The Alaska Bureau of Investigation will investigate and the Office of Special Prosecutions will determine whether the shooting was legally justified. In accordance with JPD policy, the officers involved were placed on administrative leave following the shooting. On Thursday, JPD said the officers would all be back on duty by Friday. 

Back at the Glory Hall garden, Hensley-Williams says he thinks Johnston is still looking out for their community. 

“She’s still there, she’s still watching, she’s still there if needed, and will be until her mission is done,” he said. 

A friend came outside and gave him a hug, and they watched the sunlight on the mountains together. 

Update: NAMI Juneau shared grief and trauma resources available to the community. 

Child care shortages could be addressed by a combination of actions to help families with subsidies and help providers work through what is currently a daunting bureaucratic process, according to a new task force report released by the Alaska Department of Health.

Recommendations to expand child care options came in the second and final report of a task force established last year by Gov. Mike Dunleavy. The Governor’s Task Force on Child Care report, released on Dec. 27, follows an earlier report released last year.

Altogether, they contain 56 recommendations for action.

“The recommendations put forward are not only responses to immediate challenges but also a roadmap for a resilient infrastructure that serves both working parents that need reliable, safe care, and the licensed facilities that provide that care,” Heidi Hedberg, commissioner of the state Department of Health, said in a statement. “Removing barriers, especially in rural areas, and supporting the child care workforce, are other areas we expect to see long-lasting improvements, as a result of this important work.”

Child care shortages and costs have been cited by businesses as a major workforce challenge. The problems became more severe after the Covid-19 pandemic, when Alaska lost 10% of its licensed child care providers, according to state officials.

Dunleavy created the task force as he declined last year to support more funding in the state budget for child care.

A study conducted by McKinley Research Group that helped guide the task force revealed varying gaps between the actual costs borne by families and the subsidies they receive, ranging from under $100 to several hundred dollars a month, depending on the type of child care received.

It also revealed cost differences based on geography. For example, monthly preschool costs per child in Anchorage averaged $1,186, while in northern Alaska the average was $1,749, according to the study.

To help address the problem of affordability, one recommendation is for geographical cost-of-living adjustments to be applied to parents’ income, said Leah Van Kirk, a department health care policy adviser. Living costs are higher in rural Alaska than in urban Alaska, and the McKinley Research Group report showed that child care costs in rural areas are particularly high.

Currently, a geographic cost adjustment is applied to subsidies paid for child care costs, but that does not extend to the income levels that are used to determine subsidy eligibility.

“Your income would have been considered the same whether you lived in Bethel or whether you lived in Anchorage,” Van Kirk said. The new report “recommends that we acknowledge the cost of living that’s different in some of the more rural areas of the state where we know cost of living is higher.”

Another recommendation focuses on making child care jobs more attractive. “It would be so when a parent works in a child care facility that they would qualify for a subsidy for their own children to attend child care,” Van Kirk said.

Some of the important information revealed in the study concerned the cost differences between home-based child care and that provided in child care centers, Van Kirk said.

“One of the things that was confirmed for us is that for child care providers, having a home-based licensed child care is a stronger business model, or more affordable,” Van Kirk said. “The cost of delivering care is less.” Because of that, home-based child care could be encouraged, especially in rural areas, she said.

Still, there are some potential cost-saving solutions that involve centers, according to the task force report. One of the recommendations is to explore the possibility of providing child care in schools or school district buildings. Sites like vacant classrooms could be assessed for use by providers who might want to open up new child care centers, potentially lowering costs and making the service more feasible, Van Kirk said.

“We know that, above staffing, the cost of a facility definitely is one of the highest costs for child care providers,” she said.

The Anchorage School District, which has struggled both with employee recruitment and with declining enrollment, is already considering setting up such a system. Care for school employees could be provided in school buildings, according to the district.

The task force also recommended that the state consider establishing what is known as a Tri-Share system, with government, employers and parents sharing costs. That system was pioneered in Michigan and has since been adopted in other states.

Other recommendations focus on streamlining the process for licensing child care providers and hiring child care workers. Some of the solutions involve modern technology. For example, safety screening of potential workers required the creation of physical fingerprint images that were mailed to law-enforcement agencies to use for background checks. To speed that now time-consuming process that can delay the hiring of staff members, the state just acquired digital fingerprinting equipment, using American Rescue Plan Act funds to do so, Van Kirk said.

The Department of Health has already taken action on several recommendations in the two reports. The acquisition of digital fingerprinting equipment is one example, Van Kirk said. The department is also developing an online Child Care Information System to help streamline licensing, employment, notices to families and other bureaucratic processes.

Some action has come in the form of new regulations.

One new set of regulations that went into effect on Oct. 9 allows for designated caregivers to be in charge when administrators of child care facilities are off-site.

Another new set of regulations, aimed at lowering hurdles to hiring child care workers by broadening qualifications, was published on Oct. 9. Public comments were mixed, with some that were supportive and some expressing concerns about unqualified workers.

Additionally, the Legislature earlier this year passed Senate Bill 189, that expanded families’ eligibility for subsidies and offers tax incentives for employers investing in child care. Those provisions were originally in House Bill 89, which passed that body, but they wound up merged into the wider-ranging Senate bill.

Pace Chikigak would have been a senior at Mt. Edgecumbe High School this year, the third generation in his family to attend the state-run boarding school in Sitka. His mom Jolene, who graduated in 2003, says he was a straight-A student with a huge heart.

“If you needed a friend, he was there. He never turned anybody away,” she said. “He was an amazing kid. I was so proud to be his mom.”

When Pace died in April at home, Chikigak says she called the school to let them know, and asked if a staff member could pack up her son’s belongings from his dorm room and mail them to her. The person she spoke with on the phone said they would.

“Every day I was wondering if I would come home from work to see a box of his stuff, but it never came. And so, you know, I would email and be like, ‘Hey, I still haven’t received his items. You know, were they mailed?’ And they were like, ‘Oh, we do have a tracking number. It was mailed.’”

But when a package finally showed up, it was a memorial plaque and letters from students from Pace’s service at the school, not the items from his room.

“I always made him come back [home] because I wanted him here for his birthday. So he only brought home the clothes he was clothed [in], sweaters and other items he wasn’t going to be bringing back,”Chikigak said. “I know left his towels, bedding, probably extra clothes that he didn’t bring. I think maybe shoes, toiletries and whatnot he did leave behind that we did not receive.”

It was important for Chikigak to get these items for Pace’s traditional funeral rites in her home village of Alakanuk.

“In our culture, we were supposed to burn his items 40 days after his death and hold a feast, she said. “But the items I never received, we never got to burn, and it’s just our culture.”

After 40 days, they held the feast without all of Pace’s belongings. But she continued to reach out to staff at Mt. Edgecumbe, holding out hope that the items were still on their way. Via email, staff said they would look for them, but then she says they didn’t follow up about whether the items were lost or found.

“You never know if the item, the thing, might not be valuable, but they might be sentimental and have huge meaning for the student,” Chikigak said. “That’s what really upsets me. I just feel like I’m being gaslighted.”

Eventually one of Chikigak’s co-workers connected her with KCAW, and we reached out to see if we could learn what had happened to Pace’s missing belongings. In a statement, Superintendent Suzzuk Huntington wrote, “Mount Edgecumbe High School remains deeply saddened by the loss of one of our students. Our administrators, staff, students, and community have come together to pay our respects and show our support for the family -and continue to keep them in our thoughts. Out of respect, courtesy, and privacy to the student’s family, we will not be giving further comment.”

KCAW also reached out to the Chair of the Alaska Board of Education and Early Development, which oversees Mt. Edgecumbe High School.  We were referred to a public affairs staff member, but have received no statement.

A week after KCAW reached out to the high school, Chikigak received an email from staff. They’d finally found something – a notebook. She was informed that it was the only remaining item of Pace’s at the school.

Chikigak’s grief is compounded by the fact that Pace died by suicide. Getting his belongings back won’t necessarily ease her pain, but it could offer her some closure. She says she wishes the school would take accountability for losing the dorm room items. She says she’s connected with two other parents who have had trouble recovering their children’s property from the school.  She hopes the school will review their practices around recovering and returning student’s items to families, so no parent has to go through this again.

Mostly, she just wants folks to remember Pace, who loved hiking and biking, his two dogs, going for a random car ride, and so much more.

“I would like to keep his memory alive. I want him to be remembered for the lovable, amazing person he was, [rather] than how he had passed away,” she said. “I just want him to be remembered for the amazing, straight-A kid he was.”

If you are a loved one is struggling with thoughts of suicide, call the National Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at 988 or Alaska Careline at 877-266-HELP. 

This story has been updated to correct that Pace’s funeral rights took place in Alakanuk. 

Last year, food banks across the country saw record high demand for their services, and in many communities, including Alaska, officials say the need is even higher this year. The Food Bank of Alaska works with roughly 150 partners in a state where about 1 in 8 people experience food insecurity.

Data is incomplete for 2024, but Food Bank of Alaska CEO Cara Durr says her organization has seen a rise in requests for food aid, and ran out of food during several community events this year. She says a major driver for the increased demand is the lack of federal resources that were available during the pandemic.

Below is the transcript of an interview with Durr on Alaska News Nightly. It has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Cara Durr: Coming off of COVID, there were lots of resources available for people. So the need was certainly high in COVID, and everybody knew about it. But there were great programs available like enhanced SNAP benefits, free school meals for kids, child tax credits, things like that. So food insecurity rates actually declined during COVID, which was pretty incredible.

Wesley Early: So where are we at now?

Cara Durr: The need is still really, really high. Our partners continue to see more people than ever coming to their pantries, coming to their meal programs. We know that. You know that the high cost of living, inflation, things like that, have taken a toll on people, and they continue to demand our services.

Wesley Early: So on that topic, last year, some big drivers for the surge included a backlog on state food stamps and a decrease in federal programs. What have been the drivers this year?

Cara Durr: Well, we’ve certainly seen a lot of improvement with the SNAP backlog, of course. Not totally taken care of, people are still having some lags there, but by and large, much, much improved from before. I think it’s really just the continued high costs of inflation and other other things like housing. You know, for low income people, they’re spending a higher proportion of their income on those basic needs, like groceries, fuel, things like that, and so, we see a little bit of increase here and there, it’s felt more deeply by them.

Wesley Early: Last year, you were also reporting a declining trend in donations. Has that also persisted this year?

Cara Durr: It has. You know, this is our big giving season during the holiday. I think we are lagging a little bit behind in general on donations, both food and monetary donations, but we’re really hoping to make that up in the new year. We’ve got plans to enhance our food sourcing. Look at different ways of pulling food in and different options for grocery rescue. And of course, the public is incredibly generous with us, and the community has definitely shown up, and we hope they will continue to do so.

Wesley Early: So how about the amount of volunteers, has that amount gone up or down? Or is it pretty steady?

Cara Durr: Volunteers remain a pretty steady source of support for us. Sometimes we have more volunteers than we even have opportunities for, so that’s not a real area of need. But we definitely could not do what we do without the incredible support of our volunteers.

Wesley Early: So it’s the holiday season, a time where groups often come together. Large meals are pretty commonplace. Can you talk about how the food bank has been faring this season?

Cara Durr: Well, we just wrapped up our Thanksgiving Blessing meal distribution in Anchorage in the valley, and this was actually our 20th anniversary of that partnership with the faith-based community to serve fixings for a holiday meal. And this year, we saw more need than we’ve ever seen. You know, at the end of the day, we had sites shutting down because they ran out of food and had to either turn people away or redirect them to other services available, which, you know, fortunately there were some other options, but that never feels great. So we’re just doing the best we can to keep up with the demand.

Wesley Early: So it strikes me that last year there was a record high demand. This year it’s even higher, I guess, to people who are constantly hearing ‘the demand is up, the demand is up,’ what can be done about it?

Cara Durr: I think if we just look to COVID, we can see that we actually made gains in addressing food insecurity because we put resources and investment into that area. So programs like free school meals for all kids, enhanced SNAP benefits, child tax credits, these are some really key ways that we drove down food insecurity rates. So I think we need broader investments to the problem. Food banks and food pantries certainly play a critical role in addressing food insecurity, but we are not the whole solution we need. You know, it’s a public-private partnership, and so we need the state and the federal government to invest in the programs that they have and make sure that they’re strong and accessible to everyone.

Wesley Early: For members of the community listening who want to help, what would you suggest?

Cara Durr: Just get involved in some way. You know, certainly we have opportunities for volunteers, donations, things like that. But we have a network of great partners around the state, you know, partner food banks and other communities. And so just encourage you to reach out and either, you know, donate, volunteer, be an advocate, just get involved in some way. It really makes a big difference.