In its seventh season, the community-supported fishery Alaskans Own seeks to expand subscriptions – selling local fish to local families. (Photo courtesy of Joshua Roper/ASMI)

Sitka’s community supported fishery – called Alaskans Own – has received a $4,500 grant to expand operations. With this money, the CSF hopes to sell more Alaskan fish to more Alaskan customers.

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 The Alaska Longline Fishermen’s Association (ALFA) has received a $4,500 grant to expand Alaskans Own, a community-supported fishery program. The grant comes from Northwest Farm Credit Services, which awards grants to rural communities three times a year.

Linda Behnken, ALFA’s Executive Director, says that Alaskans Own qualified because it is steeped in keeping local fish local. This fall, ALFA assumed sole management of the operation, which include sales of salmon, lingcod, halibut, and rockfish.

From L to R: ALFA’s Linda Behnken, Anya Grenier and Northwest FCS Relationship Manager Mike Wittman holding the grant check. (Photo courtesy of ALFA)

Behnken said, “Part of what we want to do with Alaskans Own is reconnect people who live in this state with the people who go fishing and with how important and exciting that way of life can be.”

Operating at the height of the fishing season, from May through October, Alaskans Own sells the catch of local fisherman through a monthly subscription service. There are 125 fisherman and roughly 100 subscribers. Nearly all of them are Alaskan.

Behnken says Alaskans Own also makes an effort to process the fish locally, instead of marketing directly. The profits from Alaskans Own are funneled back into ALFA’s Fishery Conservation Network, which conducts research projects with fisherman.

The goal of all of this is to reverse what Behnken sees as an alarming trend – of Alaskans losing access to their own fisheries. She said, “There’s been a migration of access – whether it’s limited entry permits in state waters or federal quota share – out of state and also out of rural communities. And since many rural communities have little other alternative sources of income or employment, losing access to fish can really mean losing community.”

As we speak, Behnken is on her way to a two-day conference in Anchorage dedicated to fisheries access and says she’s excited the Alaskans Own will have a place in the conversation. 

Northwest FCS also awarded a Rural Communities Grant to Sitka Kitch, a project of the Sitka Conservation Society and Sitka Local Foods Network. The grant will fund a series of culinary basics classes, beginning in March, to teach entry-level culinary skills to people wanting to work in the restaurant industry.

Nic Mink, PhD, with a nice coho salmon.

WQAD newscast…

You know your business is on the map when you make the local television news in the Quad Cities. Nic Mink is a sustainable foods fellow at Butler University. He says he started Sitka Salmon Shares trying to answer a question many of us have asked:

“Why does this salmon taste so good here, and taste so bad down in the Midwest?”

Mink first came to Sitka in the summer of 2010 with his girlfriend, who had a full time job. He rented an office on the Sheldon Jackson campus to finish his dissertation. Then, he received an appointment in the Environmental Studies Department at Knox College, in Galesburg, Illinois.

Besides the college, Galesburg has a sustainable business incubator. And it could not be better situated.

“Galesburg is this perfectly, centrally located place. About three hours from everywhere in the midwest. When you start to think about developing markets in Chicago, Indianapolis, St. Louis, and Des Moines, and Iowa City, and Madison, and Milwaukee – Galesburg acts as the center of the salmon solar system that we plan to set up with our Sitka fish.”

For three months last summer, Mink and seven employees packed and delivered frozen salmon in 5-, 8-, and 12-pound boxes to 350 clients in the Midwest. The coho and king salmon was provided by two boats in Sitka; the sockeye came from three Juneau fishing businesses; and Seafood Producers Cooperative in Sitka supplied whatever inventory the others couldn’t.

Cindy Severt is a librarian at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. “The idea appealed to me, and the product appealed to me,” she said.

Severt saw an ad for Sitka Salmon Shares last summer in a small arts & culture magazine.

“My husband and I have a garden, and he’s a hunter. So we love good food. We priced it out and figured it was about the price we’d pay for really good salmon in town, and we figured, Might as well try it.”

Marsh Skeele, a second-generation troller from Port Alexander, supplies fish for Sitka Salmon Shares.

Now, even though she lives three-thousand miles from Sitka, she’s starting to sound like a local.

“And it’s been fun having a freezer full of salmon. Oh, we’ll have salmon tonight, and tomorrow, and the next day!”

One factor Severt did not roll into her decision was the sustainability of having fresh-frozen fish flown from Sitka to Chicago, trucked to Galesburg, and then hand-delivered to her door in Madison.

Nic Mink, however, thinks about this a lot. He knows using fossil fuels is not a perfect system.

“Part of our power at the sustainable business center comes from solar and is renewable, so that helps. We also pay to offset all of the carbon emissions for the salmon that come into Illinois, and we take that money and invest it into wind energy in the Midwest. So that’s one element of making the system, we believe, a little more sustainable.”

Sitka Salmon Shares also invests one-percent of its proceeds back into salmon habitat restoration, and salmon education. He thinks the money should be enough to support two summer internships for college students back in Sitka.

Although this is the only place where students fit into the business model, it’s not hard to look at Sitka Salmon Shares as an academic exercise that has taken on a life of its own. Professor Mink is walking the walk.

“If I’m going to teach it, and I want students to go out there and do it, well this offered me a cool chance to be able to try it myself, and to learn lessons that I could pass on to students.”

As a seasonal business, most of Mink’s 7 employees last summer were students. This summer, he’s hoping to hire 11 or 12 as Sitka Salmon Shares expands into a 5-month season, with the addition of longliners supplying halibut and black cod. Every box of fish contains recipes, and Mink has organized cooking classes with local chefs for up to 35 of his members at a time.

Sitka Salmon Shares was featured in this article in Forbes in December.

WQAD newscast…

Still, name recognition not quite where Mink would like it to be just yet.

“Funny thing is, a lot of people come up to me and say, Is Sitka your dog?”