Gifts at work

With help from donors, CBSM was recently able to:

• Renovate the Student Investment Fund classroom, transforming it into a hub for finance students to collaborate and interact with the stock market.
• Provide student travel to academic/professional conferences.
• Bring accounting students in the Great Alaska Accounting People student organization down to Anchorage to meet with accounting firms and other potential employers.
• Host this year’s Arctic Innovation Competition, encouraging participants from all over Alaska to engage in innovative and creative problem solving.

With help from donors, this past year CEM was able to:

• Outfit student engagement and study space with modern furniture.
• Send our steel bridge team to not only the regional but also the national finals, where they placed second!
• Award nearly 60 scholarships.
• Purchase structural engineering stress-test equipment for the Engineering Learning and Innovation Facility high bay.

With help from donors, this past year CFOS was able to:

• Appoint Peter Westley as the inaugural Lowell A. Wakefield Endowed Chair in Fisheries and Ocean Sciences.
• Host the 25th annual Tsunami Ocean Sciences Bowl in Seward, where high school teams from across the state competed for the chance to represent Alaska in the National Ocean Sciences Bowl finals competition.
• Receive three new conductivity, temperature and depth sensors to conduct critical research in Southeast Alaska.
• Support over 160 students and graduate eight undergraduate, 12 master's and five doctoral students.

With support from donors, this year CLA was able to:

• Support the creation of a digital meeting space in the Gruening Building that is available to all of CLA for department meetings and other collaborations.
• Increase access to written works and increase exposure of local writers through electronic Short Story Cubes, which are little machines that let you print out a free short story. Writers can have their stories uploaded into the cloud, where everyone with a cube can read them.
• Host a Trauma-Responsive Virtual Writing Workshop with therapeutic support in March.
• Launch inside-out writing collections, which feature writers of all ages and backgrounds, some of whom are incarcerated.
• Support the summer salary for our choral director through the Steve and Cynthia Holmberg Choral Director Endowment.
• Support at least seven students' participation in the Fairbanks Summer Arts Festival.
• Host the UAF Summer Music Academy with 17 instructors who worked with over 70 students. Scholarships reduced many students' registration costs.
• Host two online visiting writers events.
• Support Master of Fine Arts graduate student attendance at the University Resident Theatre Association auditions. This year one student received a $1,000 fellowship for URTA support.

This past year, the UAF College of Natural Science and Mathematics has seen significant demand for our programs. The research of our faculty, staff and students challenges boundaries and improves lives—in Alaska and in the global community.

With help from donors, CNSM was recently able to:

• Graduate 145 students, including 19 doctorates.
• Provide scholarships to approximately 10 undergraduate geoscience majors to offset the costs of summer field courses.
• Help excavate a well-preserved wooden house, with ties to the Inupiaq culture, at Cape Espenberg archaeological site.
• Send students from Interior Alaska communities, including Beaver, Fort Yukon, Galena, Huslia and Nulato, to attend GeoFORCE Alaska, a four-year summer-based geoscience academy.
• Provide seven scholarships to veterinary medicine students.
• Purchase a critically needed rock saw for analyzing geologic samples.
• Award 80 scholarships to students to help them achieve their academic goals.

CRCD hosts the Rural Alaska Honors Institute in Fairbanks each summer. Here are highlights from 2021's session:

• 2021 marked RAHI's 39th year. The theme was "Rise Up," which aimed to capture the spirit of returning to an in-person program and, for some students, a return to the classroom after over a year of disrupted education. Students were eager to experience an in-person program and trusted us to ensure their safety during the COVID-19 pandemic. Mitigation protocols were new to the program but successful. No students contracted the virus while at RAHI.
• RAHI received 100 complete applications and was able to accept 57 students for 2021. We saw an increase in both the number of applications received and the number of students we were able to host. In 2019, our last in-person session, we received 84 applications and were able to accept 52 students.
• Fifty-one students completed the six-week program — taking classes, participating in recreational activities and volunteering in the Fairbanks community. The class graduated on July 15, 2021. This year's cohort earned 460 credits (9.02 average) with an average GPA of 3.6. Thirty-six students (71%) earned academic honors (3.5 GPA or higher).
• Of our 51 alumni, 30 completed their senior year of high school and at least 17 were enrolled at a university during 2021-2022. Most are in Alaska, but one ventured off to Fort Lewis and another is at the University of Jamestown in North Dakota on a wrestling scholarship.
• The class of 2021 graduates came from 33 communities across the state, including Akiak, Allakaket, Ambler, Bethel, Chevak, Cooper Landing, Copper Center, Delta Junction, Dillingham, Eek, Fairbanks, Galena, Glennallen, Golovin, Huslia, Juneau, Kake, Ketchikan, Kotzebue, Mountain Village, Napaskiak, Nenana, Nome, Noorvik, Nunam Iqua, Quinhagak, Ruby, Russian Mission, Sitka, St. Marys, Unalakleet, Unalaska and White Mountain.

This past year, the UAF Community and Technical College has seen huge growth in demand for our programs due to the labor market. Our student body has increased drastically, and we are now educating over 3,000 students a year, preparing them for the workforce and supplying much-needed labor for Alaska. With donor help, in the last year we’ve been able to:

• Purchase new student iPads for the Bunnell House.
• Work with community partners to launch the Alaska Interior Business Accelerator microcredential.
• Graduate 180 first-generation students in spring 2022.
• Launch a new mining mill operations program that yields an occupation endorsement.

The School of Education is committed to preparing and retaining the best possible K-12 educators for this far northern and geographically, culturally and linguistically diverse state. UAF’s School of Education offers undergraduate- and graduate-level programs to students across the state through distance-delivered instruction and the opportunity for educational internships in Alaska’s diverse school districts. Donors support our students by helping us provide a stipend to those in need while they're in internships that lead to their initial teaching licenses. The internships do not allow students to have other jobs, so this stipend helps them pay for expenses such as books or supplies.

In August 2021, the Geophysical Institute celebrated 75 years of pursuing science for the benefit of not only Alaskans but also the planet. Under the Geophysical Institute, the Alaska Earthquake Center; Alaska Volcano Observatory; Alaska Satellite Facility; Poker Flat Research Range; Alaska Center for Unmanned Aircraft Systems Integration; and Snow, Ice and Permafrost group have had an exciting year. Some of the highlights are:

• Adding the Athena computing cluster, which helps process terrain imagery faster and produces maps in greater detail than the current system.
• Aiding the Hurricane Ida response by providing technology to speed up remote sensing.
• Discovering a new volcano-monitoring method to enhance early warning.
• Launching two rockets from Poker Flat to study aurora activity.
• Making Alaska’s first large drone flight from an international airport.

In the last year, IARC has strengthened its role as a leader in Arctic collaboration, working toward understanding the Arctic to make a difference.

Some highlights from the past year include:

• Deploying a carbon dioxide-sensing underwater glider for tracking ocean acidification.
• Leading another Inspiring Girls Expedition for young women to increase the participation and diversity of women in field sciences, art and outdoor recreation.
• Launching the new massive open online course Climate Change in Arctic Environments.
• Starting the Research Networking Activities for Coordinated Observations project to improve international coordination among Arctic observing networks.
• Turning science into music by working with a composer using data and math to produce a song that captures the “sound” of climate change.

The Institute of Agriculture, Natural Resources and Extension has had a busy year educating and training Alaskans, as well as researching, in areas that include agriculture, health, Alaska ecosystems and much more. Some highlights include:

• Sarah Lewis, with the home, health and family development program, taught 10 food preservation workshops; three food entrepreneurship/cottage foods classes; two 4-H/youth local food-focused classes; six food preservation demonstrations at the Southeast Alaska State Fair in Haines; and tested more than 50 pressure-canner dial gauges for accuracy.
• Alaska 4-H received a Rasmuson Foundation grant in 2021 to deliver camp programming. Sitka Spruce Tips 4-H club partnered with the Sitka Conservation Society to spearhead an invasive European slug collection and awareness campaign in the community. The workshop and friendly competition resulted in over 600 invasive slugs collected and disposed of over two days.
• The Mining and Petroleum Training Service continues to average 60 graduates a year, and 85% of them have jobs within one year. Graduates have earned $21 million in salaries since 2015, contributing to Alaska’s economy. Fifty-four percent of the mine training students are Alaska Native.
• Nine different farms and the Matanuska Experiment Farm’s vegetable variety trials program contributed to the Alaska Tilth Program this year, and 39 vegetable varieties were donated, totaling 10,632 pounds of produce, a 5,067-pound increase from 2019. This year, the Alaska Tilth Program handed out over 1,900 recipe bags, and the produce was used in 100,000 Kids Kupboard meals.
• A collaborative project with the Georgeson Botanical Garden and Nanook Grown helped teach and empower 15 students to grow their own food and food for others. This collaboration, in addition to produce raised from the vegetable variety trials, resulted in the donation of over 5,500 pounds of produce to the Fairbanks Food Bank, UAF Food Pantry and Stone Soup Cafe.

Although many COVID-19 mitigations remained in place in 2021, Toolik Field Station hosted a more typical amount of projects and visitors compared to 2020. In total, TFS supported 32 projects with over 4,000 user days to researchers in 2021.

The Spatial and Environmental Data Center continued to fulfill remote access requests, which allowed researchers to obtain samples without traveling to the North Slope. SEDC manager Amanda Young reported she and SEDC technicians completed over 2,970 hours of requests for 34 projects in 2021. Toolik GIS also supported 12 projects with field sampling, site selection and spatial data analysis.

In the last year TFS got an updated medical clinic complete with heat and running water, new bikes by donation for their commnuity bike fleet, and almost $3,000 on Giving Day for its TUNDRA award for early career researchers.

LARS has welcomed not only its usual adorable additions of reindeer and muskox babies this year but also 40 11-month-old wood bison! In June 2021, biologists and staff from the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, Alaska Wildlife Conservation Center and LARS worked together to prepare yearling bison at the LARS facility in Fairbanks for their anticipated release to an area along the lower Innoko and Yukon rivers.

All the wood bison were rounded up and one by one ran through the handling facility and into a “squeeze chute” that safely holds the animals while biologists work on them. Bison were handled to collect samples, conduct health screenings and affix radio collars.

After going through the chutes, bison were separated into medium and large body-size groups as ADF&G continued to prepare them for transport. The animals will travel in shipping containers specifically made for the transport of large animals.

Alaska Sea Grant has been working on its priority focus areas of healthy coastal ecosystems, sustainable fisheries and aquaculture, resilient communities and economies, and environmental literacy and workforce development. Some headlines from the last year include:

• Work has begun on five research projects competitively selected for Alaska Sea Grant funding over the next two years. More than $500,000 will support research involving ocean environmental changes, Pacific salmon in the Arctic, fish responses to environmental change, seaweed cultivation and sea otter-oyster farm interactions.
• Alaska Sea Grant’s Gay Sheffield has been closely monitoring for a possible avian flu outbreak in the Bering Strait region as part of her work as the Marine Advisory Program agent based in Nome.
• Alaska Sea Grant hosted a three-day hands-on training workshop covering the fundamentals of commercial seaweed processing and handling. The workshop took place at the Kodiak Seafood and Marine Science Center. The workshop trained new and established workers and entrepreneurs in the seafood processing, mariculture and food production industries.
• Alaska Sea Grant and the Alaska Region of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association's National Marine Fisheries Service developed online resources to guide applicants through the permitting process for establishing aquatic farms, including information on choosing a farm site.
• Research investigates toxins in Arctic food webs and marine mammals and where and when harmful algal blooms may occur.
• Kachemak Bay monitoring efforts contribute important data about ocean acidification in nearshore ecosystems.
• Regional partnership sparks collaboration to advance Indigenous aquaculture practices.
• Pacific Shellfish Institute works with Alaska shellfish growers to address emergency rainfall closures.

The UAF General Support Fund is one of the most important funds we have, as it gives us the flexibility to support projects, events, and students that truly need it. We are able to fill in funding gaps for a variety of projects that come just short of reaching their budget goals. These are some examples of what the fund has supported this past year:

• 2022 Commencement, back to in-person
• UAF athletic scholarships
• UAF College of Natural Science and Mathematics teaching assistants
• UAF Summer Music Academy
• Three Minute Thesis competition
• Women’s faculty luncheon

The UA Museum of the North continues to expand the ways we provide access to research, education and collections at the local and global level.

With support from donors over the past year, the UA Museum of the North was able to:

• Offer behind-the-scenes tours (both virtual and in person) to share collections and our role as a research museum.
• Grow the free virtual museum and share over 200 unique activities online.
• Modify family and school programs in response to pandemic restrictions and welcome over 2,500 K-12 students for in-person field trips.
• Provide hands-on learning opportunities for 1,341 visitors during monthly themed family days.
• Conduct field work on Alaska's North Slope to expand the Earth Sciences Collection of dinosaurs, which has helped UAMN establish the largest polar dinosaur collection anywhere.
• Increase access to collections through expansion of the online database, Arctos.
• Develop the “Crossroads of Beringia” exhibit featuring the UAMN Herbarium and other objects from the Ethnology, Fine Art, Entomology and Earth Sciences collections for late 2022 installation.
• Design and install updated casework, mounts, labels and hands-on interactive interpretation in preparation for a complete Gallery of Alaska renovation.

During the past year, Rasmuson Library employees have been working tirelessly to make sixth-floor space available for a long-planned student success center, a major UAF project that will bring student support services together with library collections and services, to help students with academics. All our usual work continues, including providing reference information services and maintaining online and print collections, special collections and archives.

With help from donors this past year we have:

• Purchased nine rare maps dating from 1650 to 1844, 16 books for the rare collection and one piece of sheet music, “Klondike waltzes”.
• Conducted conservation work on 23 gold rush-era maps and brochures.
• Upgraded photo lab digitization equipment.
• Digitized and made accessible 140 videos from the Lower Kuskokwim School District Collection, many in Yupik language.
• Purchased archives supplies.
• Purchased many books for our Alaska and science subject collections.
• Provided a fellowship stipend for a Master’s in Library and Information Science student intern in the archives.
• Provided support for a UAF student research project in the archives.
• Provided professional development opportunities for two staff.

This year the University of Alaska Board of Regents unanimously voted for formal project approval for the Troth Yeddha’ Indigenous Studies Center and Park. The regents’ approval of the $40 million project means UAF can proceed with fundraising and schematic design, thanks to the $2.7 million collected from donors.

When complete, the center will serve as the administrative hub for UAF’s College of Rural and Community Development, which includes the Alaska Native Language Center, the Department of Alaska Native Studies and Rural Development, and the Center for Cross-Cultural Studies, among other programs. The center will also house programs that support Indigenous student success.

Donations to OLLI have been essential in the last year. The COVID-19 pandemic upended UAF-OLLI's operations, and we still haven't bounced back to pre-pandemic levels of membership and class participation, which means that our revenue from membership and tuition fees is reduced. Even though we have fewer courses offered and fewer students, demand on staff is higher because we've incorporated distance-delivery via Zoom. Payroll for our small staff is our program's major expense and the donor support has ensured that we’ve been able to pay our bills without raising our student fees.

Our fundraising goal for the 2022 fiscal year was $30,000 in spendable donations. We exceeded that goal by $2,500. We also received a new $25,000 endowed fund in memory of a beloved OLLI instructor, Joe Dart, who passed away in fall 2021.

In the last year, over 50 donors have given $8,769 to support UAF trail maintenance, grooming and downed-tree removal. Thank you to all the donors who help us keep UAF trails accessible and available for community enjoyment.