Two weeks ago, Aaron Sechler with Citizen Salmon Alaska, posted a FaceBook note to express that his organization is willing to donate seafood to aid organizations. His post reads “If you are a colleague of mine and want to drop wild protein with us, we will air cargo to Minnesota at our expense using my account. I have people in Minnesota that will pickup from cargo and help distribute…”
Sechler started his business eight years ago with the intention to help people who want to know where their foods come from. “What that means for me is I connect with farmers in the lower 48 that have community supported agriculture programs, and they tie in with their members,” he said.
“We get them fish. It's been great. I really love it. I've got a great passion for it. I connect with our local fleet for salmon and halibut consistently, the same fishermen for probably the last six years. At first it was a little bounce and go, because I was so small. I'm still very small. That's really the forefront of what we do,” Sechler said.
Sechler runs a Homer Farmer’s Market booth that he took over when Pat and Dawn Schneider wanted to retire and provides community seafood sales there in the summer. He noted that sales at the booth often go to just as many local customers as tourists, which was not expected originally. He also provides seafood to several Homer restaurants and a few national restaurants. He doesn’t fish commercially but owns a state and federal permit export license. Sechler processes his fish through Kenai Red Fish, a plant in Ninilchik that he leases directly.
When asked how he created the idea to send fish to Minneapolis Sechler responded that this is not the first time he has provided fish to the region. The first time he donated through a group called the Hope Foundation. The HOPE Program was founded in 2014 and is a nonprofit organization that serves people with mental health issues in the Minneapolis and Saint Paul metro area.
Sechler noted other personal history related to events in Minneappolis: he said the George Floyd event in 2020 occurred just six blocks where he lived for seven years, one of the recent shootings happened very close to the same house:
“So, I have ties to that community. I may not know everybody in that side of town, but I would go to the stores and participate in the events. So there's a little bit of passion. And I've always had compassion for others and generosity is easy for me. So it seemed like a natural thing to see if I could aid people. Finding an aid organization was important for me, because I didn't want just going to people. I wanted somebody to kind of organize that there on their end, take ownership of that, so to speak. So we found a church that was willing to do that. They fed. They've got meals to 43 families, which was pretty neat. You know, in a community of 3 million, it maybe isn't, doesn't seem like a lot, but to that particular part of that community, it made a big impact. So they got salmon, halibut and smoked salmon,” he explained.
He concluded his conversation with comments on his perspective of the general role of community: ”Community has always been really big for me. I feel a little emotional about this, but I think that regardless of where you stand in the aisle, what's going on right now that I'm a part of, as far as trying to help is a basic human rights thing. It has nothing. It shouldn't affect a person because of their political alignment, because, as we know, any administration can change. And what if you were on the opposite side of that with the next administration, or the one after that, or that 100 years from now, humanity needs more compassion. They need to listen more than they speak, in my opinion. So for our community, for our community, I mean, we have lots of resources that we could help with. We have a voice that we can help with.”
For other people who may be interested in donating Alaska seafood from their own freezer’s, it does not need to be commercially processed. Sechler compared it to donating food to Homer’s own local food pantry. The donation needs to be reasonably packaged and can be coordinated with Sechler by contacting him through his webpage citzensalmonalaska.com or by finding the post he made on Facebook. At this point, Sechler has already donated about 50 pounds of salmon, 50 pounds of halibut burger and 50 pounds of smoked salmon.
Reporting from Homer, this is Emilie Springer
