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Fish for Families
Last week, local fishermen, tribal organizations, and community leaders worked together to deliver Bristol Bay sockeye salmon to families in Chignik facing a fourth consecutive year of low salmon returns.
Bristol Bay’s salmon fishery is projected to have a record-breaking season of more than 75 million sockeye salmon while communities in Chignik and the Yukon and Kuskokwim River watersheds face another summer of low salmon returns, leaving Alaska Native families without one of their most vital subsistence foods.
The salmon donation project, Fish for Families, is an expansion of the Alaska Sustainable Fisheries Trust and Alaska Longline Fishermen’s Association’s Seafood Donation Program, which was launched in March 2020 in response to COVID-19 and its impacts on Alaska’s seafood industry and local families struggling with food insecurity.
Since 2020, the Seafood Donation Program has deployed $2.5 million to purchase and deliver more than 640,000 donated Alaska seafood meals to individuals and families in Alaska and the Pacific Northwest.
The Chignik region was one of the Seafood Donation Program’s early partners; in 2020, over 33,000 pounds of Bristol Bay sockeye was delivered to Chignik families unable to harvest salmon due to Chignik’s record-low sockeye salmon returns.
In response to growing demand for donated salmon throughout Alaska, the Longline Fishermen’s Association recently launched a GoFundMe campaign for the Fish for Families project. All donations made this summer will go towards purchasing, processing, and shipping salmon to Alaska Native communities where local fisheries have been shut down due to low salmon returns.
This summer’s Fish to Families project will focus on sourcing salmon from Bristol Bay, where more than 30 million salmon have already returned, and deliver that salmon to other regions where there is not enough local salmon to meet local needs, including communities throughout the Yukon and Kuskokwim River watersheds.
With the support of the Bristol Bay Regional Seafood Development Association, Bristol Bay Native Corporation, and Catch Together, ALFA has raised $60,000 for this summer’s Fish for Families deliveries and seeks to raise another $40,000 through its GoFundMe campaign.
(As posted on KINY webpage Thursday, July 7th)
For more information on the Alaska Sustainable Fisheries Trust please visit their webpage https://thealaskatrust.org/
Free Antigen COVID-19 Tests Available for Summer Programs
The Alaska School Testing Point of Contact for the CDC program is giving away 5 million antigen tests to school districts. These tests are now available to summer programs serving the K-12 population. This includes day camps, residential camps, school-related summer programs, and church camps.
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There is no charge for the test kits or for shipping, and there is no limit to the number of tests which can be ordered. These test kits are over-the-counter tests to be used at home, and come from the manufacturers. They have 9-month to 12-month expiration dates from the time the order is placed.
A new order can be placed every Monday through June 20. Please email Judy.Holland@alaska.gov with the following information:
- Organization’s name
- Individual’s name (this could be the person ordering, or the person receiving the tests)
- Email address
- Phone number
- Street address (Post Office boxes not allowed for deliveries), City, State and Zip Code
- Note whether you do or do not serve “under-served populations” (CDC doesn’t provide a definition for this)
- How many test kits you want to order (2 tests in each at-home kit)
If the number of test kits is higher than 720, Judy will contact you to get additional information for special delivery requirements since this amount will be delivered as a pallet. The delivery information must accompany the larger orders or CDC will reject the order. If you plan to order a large number of test kits, you can consider placing three separate orders on subsequent Mondays if that helps your logistics in receiving and storing the tests.
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