Broadband Ready

verywhere we look, we are talking about the great resignation. The question at hand is how do we get the right people for the right job, and how do we keep them?

With the rise of the digital age, remote working opportunities, and the mobile job market, the best talent are always job shopping, and if they aren’t shopping, they are being recruited right under your nose. This new digital job market demands employers meet the expectations employees set.

All stages of the employee lifecycle and talent management are critical, starting with proactive scouting and recruiting and extending to offboarding and succession planning, which leaves your employees and former employees feeling respected and paying dual respect back to your organization.

nterest rates rose in May for the second time this year. The Federal Reserve (Fed) bumped its benchmark federal funds rate 0.5 percent to a target range of 0.75 to 1 percent. The nation’s central bank applied a quarter-point-rate increase in March and has indicated that it intends to raise rates after each of its five remaining policy meetings in 2022. The Fed also announced plans to reduce its nearly $9 trillion asset portfolio of Treasury and mortgage securities, and it is allowing bonds to mature without reinvesting the proceeds into new securities. The recent moves are designed to curb record-high inflation, which surged to 8.5 percent in March—its highest level since December of 1981.

2018 Pew Research Center report states, “People living in rural areas have longer travel times to the nearest hospital.” It’s not an earth-shattering revelation, by any means, but the details are interesting. According to the report, rural Americans live an average of 10.5 miles from the nearest hospital, while those in the suburbs live 5.6 miles away and those in urban areas are 4.4 miles away, on average. This translates to average travel times of 17 minutes, 12 minutes, and 10 minutes, respectively. These are just averages, and the report recognizes that averages “mask considerable variation in access within community types.”

n early May, Nancy DeCherney gave her last presentation as Executive Director of the Juneau Arts and Humanities Council (JAHC) to the Juneau City and Borough Assembly. With retirement on the horizon, DeCherney is shoring up JAHC program funding for the upcoming fiscal year before handing over the keys to current Operations Manager Reggie Schapp, who will serve as interim director. After sixteen years as JAHC’s executive director and more than ten years in various arts administrative roles, DeCherney understands the cycle of arts funding and the adaptation by arts organizations. Most recently, funding and adaptation came to the forefront as the COVID-19 pandemic affected budgets within the industry and health and safety protocols forced arts agencies, arts organizations, and individual artists to feature and sell their work using streaming and virtual technologies.

ast year was a record sales year for Forests, Tides & Treasures, a general store in Seward. With strong sales continuing through the off-season, co-owners Cliff Krug and Linda Chichester project a double-digit increase in sales in 2022.

“We survived the pandemic despite the big cut in hours because we were able to maintain an elastic business model and adapt to the challenges before us,” Krug says. “We continuously adapted our merchandise selection to reflect what the visitors who came to Seward wanted.”

OVID-19 allowed (or enforced) a pause for reflection, a strategic regrouping that led many Alaskans to seriously consider starting a business. While the class of 2021 is barely past, or still approaching, the first anniversary of their launch, a few of its members have already made enough of a splash that they can be confident of being around for many years to come.

he data shows we haven’t done enough to make business ownership attainable for the many communities that call our state home. Women, Black, Indigenous, and People of Color are particularly underrepresented in business ownership across Alaska. At Anchorage Community Land Trust (ACLT), we know that to ensure that the next generation of Alaskan business owners reflects our great state, we must do one simple thing: We must believe in and invest in the talented local entrepreneurs that call our city and state home.

Our Alaska story is all about the potential of entrepreneurs and small business owners and what they bring to our communities. By supporting business creation, we build communities from within and empower the next generation of community leadership.

olf courses in every state and the District of Columbia have hosted a championship for the United States Golf Association (USGA) during its 128-year history. Every state, that is, except Alaska—until this summer.

The 2022 US Senior Women’s Amateur Championship tees off at Anchorage Golf Course on July 30, finally completing the USGA’s scorecard of states.

helsea Coartney, owner of Unleashed Alaska, decided to open her dog daycare, boarding, and indoor dog park in 2021 as the result of her own experiences as a dog owner.

“I have six dogs, and I wasn’t hugely impressed with the places in town that offer boarding or the places where families can go with their pets,” she explains. “It can be very slushy at dog parks—not to mention cold—and I thought it would be cool to have an indoor dog park where people could come hang out in a temperature-controlled environment and socialize with their friends and their pets at the same time.”

At Unleashed Alaska, members have access to the dog park on weekdays after the doggie daycare closes at 6 pm and on weekends. A key card allows members to enter anytime the need arises. “If your dog likes to do ‘zoomies’ at 2 am, you can bring them here to burn some energy and socialize in a safe place,” Coartney says.

alf of Southeast Alaska has no road access to its natural resources. During the 20th century, this fact was a consequence of slow development in a thinly populated territory. As the 21st century dawned, however, whether to allow or forbid roads in the wildest parts of the Panhandle became a political tennis match.

The outgoing Clinton administration served the first volley in 2001 with the Roadless Rule, which banned road building in areas of national forests without road access. This policy has the greatest impact in the nation’s largest forest, the Tongass in Southeast Alaska, where 9.4 million of its 17 million acres lack roads.

e’ve been chasing work-life balance for decades.

Individually, we have contrived all sorts of personal improvements, process improvements, and time efficiencies—and we’ve exhausted ourselves in our efforts to find it. Organizations have spent millions of dollars implementing wellness programs, hiring consultants, and establishing training and learning development centers in order to create it. And yet… balance remains elusive.

It’s because we are chasing the wrong thing.

etween helping her fiancé track wolves around Healy for three months last winter while working on his PhD in spatial ecology and their trip this summer, spending a week or two at Ruth Gorge in the Alaska Range, Sarah Glaser experienced a burst of creativity. In addition to designing the cover for this issue of Alaska Business, she spent six weeks in Nashville building a soccer stadium.

Art is her life, and welding is her trade. After growing up in Moose Pass, Glaser learned to weld at the state technical school down the road in Seward. For the last six or seven years, she’s mixed construction with illustration. Her website sarahkglaser.be offers her full-color drawings of wildlife, backcountry sports, and aerial landscapes as prints, stickers, and apparel. She says she takes enjoyment from surprising her audience with details hidden in an image. Among her next projects is a harvest handbook for St. Paul Island.