As the Trump administration continues to cut federal spending in all kinds of areas, Sitka's 4-H program has received notice that the Department of Agriculture has terminated the grant that funds about half of the local 4-H budget.
In Sitka the 4-H Alaska Way of Life program is run by the nonprofit Sitka Conservation Society in collaboration with the University of Alaska Fairbanks, offering people ages 5 to 18 a chance to learn relevant outdoor skills such as boating and water safety, bicycling, deer and fish butchering and berry gathering.
“It's all about teaching skills for youth in Sitka to be the Alaskans of the future and build the state into it the next chapter," SCS executive director Andrew Thoms told the Sentinel, "But also taking on some of these challenges that you face in different settings than school, and getting youth outside of their comfort zones and developing skills that put them on life and career pathways.”
4-H is a century-old American institution for youth development, funded by USDA Cooperative Extension Service grants as well as state, local, corporate and volunteer contributions. In Alaska, 4-H operates under the umbrella of the University of Alaska Fairbanks Cooperative Extension Service.
Thoms said USDA notified the Conservation Society by email on April 18 that their $250,000 USDA funding for 4-H was terminated, effective immediately. The notice was signed by Louis Aspey, USDA associate chief of natural resources conservation science. It alleged discrimination as a cause for ending the grant, and said the department is working to ensure grants are free of alleged “fraud, abuse, and duplication.”
“It is a priority of the Department of Agriculture to eliminate discrimination in all forms… That priority includes ensuring that the Department’s awards do not support programs or organizations that promote or take part in diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives,” the letter continues.
Thoms said he had been hoping for a renewal of the grant from USDA’s Natural Resource Conservation Service, and was unsure how the agency determined there was discrimination in Sitka's 4-H programs.
“In this grant, we do talk about integrating traditional cultural values for living with the land and building community that are based on traditional Tlingit values, and bringing those together with values related to land management, forestry and civic values of being American and taking part in your community,” Thoms said. “And I don't know if it was because of the cultural values that we got flagged.”
Though 4-H in Sitka looks different than it does in the lower states, Thoms said the courses offered locally teach essential Alaskan skill sets that prime kids to be members of the community.
“These programs down south are heavily funded by the state contributions and others for getting kids into career pathways like dairy farming and crops and farming,” he said. “In Southeast Alaska, the skills our kids need are how to hunt and fish, how to be safe on the water, and how to go into the career pathways that we might need for forestry, commercial fishing, local food production, business management. All of those are skills 4-H teaches, which is why we're invested in part of that program.”
The USDA grant made up half of the annual budget for 4-H, with the remainder from local matching funds.
Those local funds will keep 4-H summer camps open to Sitka kids this year.
“We've been able to raise some money to keep summer camps going and find some other sources of funding that you know will get us a little bit further, like local funding,” he said. “This program had a one-to-one match, so we put in for every dollar that we got, we put in one dollar and that was from funding sources, from local businesses, sponsors, individual donations and other private sources.”
Since the grant requires those matching funds, there is still $250,000 of local money left in the coffers with the federal money withdrawn, Thoms said.
The Sitka program is run by an SCS employee, Allie Prokosch, and a Jesuit Volunteer, Kolby Sirowich, and coordinates with groups such as Sitka Trail Works and the Sitka Native Education Program, as well as Pacific High School and local businesses. On UAF's side, Jasmine Shaw works with the program from the Cooperative Extension Service's Sitka office. Shaw confirmed today that UAF funding for 4-H programs around the state has not been impacted by last week's grant cancellation.
The cutback in federal funding will likely push 4-H to rely more heavily on volunteerism, Prokosch said.
“The whole program... is just connecting youth to the outdoors and supporting programs so more youth have access to activities that connect them to their culture and the land,” Prokosch said. “So historically, that's meant we've done lots of processing of wild foods like salmon and deer and berries, and we're hoping to continue that and rely maybe on volunteers more to step in to fill some of those gaps with lack of potential staff funding.”
4-H began in Sitka under UAF in the 1990s, but has run with SCS collaboration since 2011, and now serves about 100 local kids annually, she said.
Some of Sitka's 4-H programs revolve around maritime safety, while others, such as the annual deer series in the fall, teaching kids about the meat processing aspect of hunting.
Accessibility has been a high priority for 4-H, and scholarships are offered, she said.
“A lot of the work that we've done recently has been just making programming accessible to all youth, which is a bummer because now scholarships are harder to get,” she said, though SCS can likely still offer scholarships through the summer.
Some 4-H programs, such as the Splash Mountain Camp, a water safety course, are free.
"The kids got to meet with Coast Guard helicopter pilots who told them all about their job and what they do in water safety,” Thoms said. “They got out and paddled kayaks. They got in the water, they flipped their kayaks. They all were given life jackets at the end of their completion of the camp. They did stuff that was the skills we need.”
Regardless of the 50 percent budget cut and the uncertain future of federal support, Thoms said SCS plans to run its summer 4-H programming as scheduled.
“We’ve got our summer camps that we're going to hold together for this summer and and then I don't know," Thoms said. "We don't want the 4-H program to go away, and there's a lot of Sitkans that are involved in that,”
“It reaches a lot of people, and we have a lot of partnerships, so we really want to keep it going… I think this kind of fundamentally asked us, what do we want for the future of our youth and our communities, and how are we making the investments to create that future?”
