ecently we sent out a readership survey to help us better understand what you love to read in Alaska Business. We’re learning so much about your interests and the areas you’d like to see us cover more (small businesses and entrepreneurship, for example). We are heartened to learn that the great majority of you read the magazine from cover to cover every month. Thank you for your continuing support and your valuable input—we take every idea you give us seriously and are thrilled to have the opportunity to even better tailor each article to the topics that are relevant to you and the regions you’d like to see show up in the magazine more often (we hear you Southcentral). If you haven’t taken the survey yet, please do! Just visit akbizmag.com and follow the link.

One subject you’ve told us you love reading about is Alaska Native business activities, which is particularly exciting since this is the month in which we celebrate all things Alaska Native. This year we asked each of the twelve Alaska Native regional corporations a few questions about their respective business activities including their favorite programs of 2019, what initiatives their shareholders are telling them they’re excited about, and how each of their regions is unique in how it allows them to search out economic opportunities. We’re thankful to those executives who provided us with thoughtful answers for this extensive article.

This year we made a very exciting change to our Alaska Native directories by surveying not only the twelve regional corporations, but all the village corporations for which we have contact information. This change not only allows us to present you with a bigger, better, more comprehensive directory, but also gives us the opportunity to touch base with some of the smaller operations we don’t get to hear from as often.