Dear Friends,

We’re fully into winter and the holidays are approaching. This can bring up lots of different thoughts, feelings, and experiences. If you have the mental and emotional space, I encourage you to reach out to the folks in your life who you lost touch with during the season. There is no price that can be put on meeting your needs and taking care of yourself. Self and community care are interdependent.

We hope to see many of you in retreat with us on December 7th and 8th. The Alliance network meeting and retreat will be a hybrid offering. Registration is open and swag boxes are being sent in advance of our time together. For folks attending in person, we’ll be at the Loussac Library in the Event Center (formerly where the Alaska Collection was housed.) More information about location and mask policy is included in the participant agenda. You can view the participant agenda here. This is our network, and your support in helping us to vision our collective next steps is needed! Please invite others whose voice will add to our already vibrant chorus. Many thanks to the planning team for coordinating this event, to the member leaders who have stepped into leadership, and to Annette Alfonsi, whose support has made this event possible!

Other network activities coming in December:

  • The Shared Risk and Protective Factors Community of Practice will host a quarterly meeting on Thursday, 12/15, 1-2:30. For more information and to join, please reach out to Daniella Delozier, daniella.delozier@alaska.gov, or Tanya Iden, tanya@agnewbeck.com. 
  • Transforming Conflict workgroup will be presenting the second Political Education and Wellness hour in the series. The first session was powerful and production. You can view the slide deck here. Join us Friday, 12/16, 1-2 for Conflict, Culture, and Power. 
As always, please reach out to us with any questions. We hold monthly newsletter meetings at 11 AM on the Wednesday one week before month's end. Contact Jess Braunlich at jbraunlich@spiritofyouth.org if you would like more information about this meeting/to be added to the calendar invite for the meeting.

Thank you, each of you, for your work to heal our families, communities, and systems. You are seen and you are needed! Feel free to send us your news and updates for next month's newsletter via the submission link below.

Be well,
Jess 
The Alliance Grounding Statement
Nominations Open for Spirit of Youth Awards

Know a teen or youth group doing something positive for their community? Nominate them for Spirit of Youth recognition and let them know their contributions matter!

Spirit of Youth is dedicated to empowering Alaska's teens through positive media recognition and the annual awards program. All nominees in each of the eight categories are publicly recognized in their communities, and award winners have the opportunity to receive a scholarship of up to $2,000 from Alaska 529.

Research demonstrates that youth who are recognized for their accomplishments by the people around them are better able to build confidence for their future endeavors. You have the power to make such a difference in the life of an Alaska teen!

Spirit of Youth relies upon community members like you to let young people know they are making positive contributions to Alaska as our state's future stewards. Nominations are quick, easy, and may be done directly through the Spirit of Youth website.

Nominations are open through December 31, 2022. Youth and/or youth group award winners will be selected by members of the Spirit of Youth Teen Advisory Council early in 2023.
Job Openings!

Anchorage Youth Development Coalition: Program Manager
Center for Safe Alaskans (Safe Alaskans) promotes wellbeing, the prevention of injuries and improved safety of Alaskans. The core values guiding our work are to be innovative, collaborative, inclusive and respectful, data-driven, and strengths-based. The public health model is the foundation of our work.

The Anchorage Youth Development Coalition (AYDC) is housed at Safe Alaskans and supports youth-serving organizations through advocacy, resources, networking, and training, so all Anchorage youth thrive. We are a broad and inclusive coalition of over 60 youth-serving organizations, businesses, and individuals working to create shared community practices around professional youth work. The Program Manager will support planning, implementation, and evaluation of program activities for AYDC. More information about Safe Alaskans, AYDC, and how to apply is available on our website.
About Queenie's Crew

Queenie’s Crew engages children in learning about building communities of care without prisons or policing. Every month, members receive an email with an activity that kids can complete to learn more about abolition. We’ll share activities like coloring pages, word searches, word scrambles, mazes, and reflection exercises. Using readings and art projects, we support children in imaging a collective future where we are all free. To learn more, access resources, or sign up for the monthly newsletter, visit https://queeniescrew.com.
Updates from the Alliance Workgroups

Strategy Design Workgroup: The strategy design workgroup had their first meeting of the year in November, focusing on the question, "What do we mean when we say the network is the strategy?" This meeting's agenda focused on prioritizing our work and supporting both the retreat and transition planning by helping to identify next steps for designing the network, which IS the strategy of The Alliance.

Alaska Wellness and Prevention Symposium Planning Committee: The Symposium planning team continues meet. We developed an agenda, are inviting speakers and presenters, and will soon begin working with event planners to roll out registration for this offering.

Youth Social Norms Campaign: The youth social norms campaign is progressing steadily! After selecting a range of participants from various locations and backgrounds, we began fielding a mobile ethnography project in November. Participants were asked to complete eight tasks to share their thoughts, feelings, and experiences, including how they talk about alcohol and how alcohol impacts their lives. These tasks were developed with input from Social Norms Workgroup members.

We have a few participants finishing their tasks this week, and Walsh|Sheppard has begun reviewing responses for trends and themes. The responses collected thus far are remarkable. Young Alaskans showed up in a big way—each sharing their lives with candor, kindness, insight, humor, and creativity. Many have expressed interest in continuing to be involved in this work, and we’ve invited those 18 and older to The Alliance’s retreat next week. 
We will always do our best to publish upcoming events in a timely, regular manner for our newsletter subscribers. We also keep an event calendar through the Recover Alaska website that allows our partners a secondary means of sharing their event news with our community. We welcome your submissions!
Alliance Community Stories

Have a story to share about how you/your organization has drawn on the Alliance to support local-level work and coalitions? You can now share them here! One of the new quarterly measures for the Alliance is about how the network is supporting local work and connecting back to community-based coalition priorities. Stories can be anonymous if preferred. If you have any questions about story submissions or the new quarterly measures contact Hanna Marino (hanna@stellargp.com).
Data and Learning Workgroup - December Meeting
December 13, 12:30-2pm
About: The Data and Learning Workgroup is preparing to host a Data Equity session during the Prevention Symposium. To do so, we are hosting virtual meetings with representatives from different regions in order to gain important insight that will help us facilitate the most successful Data Equity session possible.
Distance Learning Course: Leveraging Systems Change in Substance Misuse Prevention

Northwest PTTC is offering an Enhanced Prevention Learning Series beginning in January: “Leveraging Systems Change in Substance Misuse Prevention.”

This six-week distance learning series offers an interactive experience for participants to explore the role of systems change in substance misuse prevention. Participants will examine capacities shown to enable evidence-based interventions to achieve and sustain expected results and learn how to incorporate these into their work. Trainers will share examples from their own systems change experiences and will highlight how leveraging leadership, communications, funding, and data can help participants to achieve their prevention goals. The distance learning series will include skill-based learning opportunities, individual and group activities, reading assignments, and group discussion. Space is limited to 25 participants.
Pictured left to right: Blaze Bell, Jess Limbird,
Tiffany Hall, and Sara Platt.
About The Alliance

The Alliance is a collaborative effort of multiple and diverse partners across Alaska who recognize the impacts of alcohol misuse on individuals and communities. We are personally and professionally committed to working together to address this complex problem in our state.

Our primary goal is to connect and engage communities as partners — increasing protective factors, reducing risk factors, and changing social norms — to prevent underage alcohol use and eliminate adult misuse in Alaska.

Alliance Materials


Get Involved

Between starting new work and sustaining our progress, there are many opportunities to participate in The Alliance! All current workgroups are open to any member who would like to join. You can always read more about our workgroups and their purpose on the Get Involved page of our website. Our network practices an emergent strategy, and we update information based on our network's needs.

  • The Communications Workgroup will be supporting the social norms campaign and The Alliance's various other internal and external communications needs.
  • The Data and Learning Workgroup will be supporting data equity conversations and practices.
  • The Evaluation and Learning Workgroup is building out quarterly measures for the network to support grant reporting but also to increase real-time evaluation across the network so we can track and respond to improvement needs more frequently.
  • The Organizational Design and Strategy Workgroups will be merging for the first quarter of the fiscal year to determine if a combined group makes sense.
  • The Symposium Planning Workgroup will finalize an agenda and begin working with event planners.

You are welcome to reach out with questions about those workgroups or to ask to join any of them.