Outer Coast, a nonprofit, post-secondary education institution based on the former campus of Sheldon Jackson College, is inviting the public to its first-ever community town hall Thursday night.
The event will be held in Fraser Hall starting at 6:30 p.m. with a presentation about the school, which currently has 15 students enrolled in a two-year college program that’s accredited by the University of Alaska Southeast.
After the opening, breakout groups of townspeople will have conversations facilitated by Outer Coast staff, faculty and students, who will record the ideas and feedback that arise.
The college is hosting the town hall with support from the Alaska Humanities Forum. Participants will share a meal during the two-hour event.
In an interview Tuesday, Outer Coast executive director Bryden Sweeney-Taylor said he’s hoping people who attend the town hall "won’t necessarily all be on the same page,” and will bring their ideas of “what Outer Coast can and should be.”
Sweeney-Taylor explained that the college, which is built on the “three pillars” of academics – service and labor, and self-governance – got its start about a decade ago as a vision of bringing higher education back to the SJ campus.
“We’ve been running programs since 2018 but this year marks the launch of our two-year undergraduate program for students to begin their college careers at Outer Coast,” Sweeney-Taylor said.
Fifteen students comprise the first-ever class of the two-year program, and 20 more young people will join the student body this fall.
“Ultimately, our vision is to have 40 students across two years here in Sitka studying, working in the broader community and helping to build this new institution of higher education,” Sweeney-Taylor said.
Staff and faculty also are preparing to host the college’s eighth summer seminar this year for 24 high school students from “across the state, and around the country and the world to get a taste of college-level academics while immersing themselves in Sitka,” Sweeney-Taylor said.
He said Outer Coast leaders are working to build an institution that addresses the complicated history of the campus which began in the late 1800s as a Presbyterian missionary boarding school for Alaska Native children.
The Sheldon Jackson College closed in 2007 and since then the greater part of the campus has been owned by Alaska Arts Southeast, a nonprofit organization that uses the buildings and grounds for the summertime Sitka Fine Arts Camp and rents space to Outer Coast throughout the year.
The new college on the campus is meant to be “accessible to everybody,” Sweeney-Taylor said.
Thursday's town hall comes as students and "staffulty" now have “enough of this first year of the undergraduate program under our belts” to consider ways to possibly reshape the program.
“This feels like a really good moment to sort of take stock of that and hear from the broader community about the ways that it feels like Outer Coast could be of service to all of Sitka,” Sweeney-Taylor said.
Nicholas Bonnin, a first-year Outer Coast student from Houston, Texas, said today that feedback from community members is “vitally important” to community buy-in for the college, and to shape its “curriculum of volunteering.”
Students’ regular service and labor activities include working with longtime cemetery caretaker Bob Sam, cooking meals for the community, supporting classes like the Tlingit violin program at Blatchley Middle School, and volunteering with organizations such as the Sitka Sound Science Center and SFAC.
Bonnin volunteers weekly with the Sitka Homeless Coalition, and called leaders Andrew Hinton and Denise Shaffer “wonderful, kind, caring people” who he can “build deep ties with” as part of his education.
Bonnin said that anyone who “works for or runs some sort of community organization or nonprofit” should attend the town hall to consider working with Outer Coast students.
The students’ curriculum includes academic courses in writing, ecology, Indigenous studies and other disciplines, as well as practice in Tlingit song and dance, arts, traditional harvesting and other aspects of local cultures.
Last week, students helped host the college's fourth annual Learners Teaching Learners: Tlingit Language Conference with elders from across the region who participated in workshops and discussions about Tlingit language.
Bonnin explained that the school “works across the western and Indigenous paradigm,” guiding students to “understand both and combine the two for a more complete and holistic worldview.”
“I would impress upon people that the language work and culture work is so important, but it’s also not all we do as a college,” Bonnin said.
Bonnin said he hopes Sitkans will recognize Outer Coast students in the community “like, ‘oh, this is a college student, and someone who is committed to living and learning and contributing to Sitka for two years.’”
He expects the school's presence will be noted next fall, when the student body doubles in size.
“We want being an Outer Coast student to mean something in the greater Sitka community,” Bonnin said.
He encouraged people who only know Outer Coast “in passing,” or have “no knowledge” of the college, to attend the town hall.
“That’s something that we really want to change,” Bonnin said.
