Arctic Encounter Symposium
Last Thursday and Friday I attended the Arctic Encounter symposium in Anchorage, an international event of world leaders, far too many to begin to list here. As Executive Director Rachel Kallander’s opening note says, it is an amazing collaboration of voices from politics, the environment, the local communities, arts and cultural components, educators and organizations representing health and well-being of the place and people. Most of the symposium was presented as panels, providing the opportunity for open communication though there were keynote speakers, as well. It was a lot to fit in to a two-day event and in order to share the best overview of everything it entailed, I was able to interview Rachel Kallander directly.
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“Great. Well, thanks for thanks for having me, Emilie. So, the Artic Encounter was founded in 2014. I was a law student a second year law student in Seattle, which is why the conference originated there, but basically just it was my best attempt as a law student to convene people including many Alaskans to talk about arctic policy issues that I felt were meeting more attention. I'd also started traveling to conferences around the world and realize that there really wasn't one in the United States.
“Sometimes there were Arctic meetings that were sponsored by the government or big organizations, but not one that was sort of multifaceted in terms of including every type of stakeholder. So we have political topics. I mean, I had a list going here regarding political infrastructure. We heard a lot about of housing and buildings for a lot of broadband discussion that's related to all of the federal money coming out of the big infrastructure packages, Alaska had like a groundbreaking. I forget how many billions of dollars amount awarded for broadband.”
I asked, What about in environmental and climate change kind of discussion topics?
Rachel’s response: “Yeah, so we have several panels that are dedicated solely to research and climate impacts. Basically a holistic approach to climate is kind of interwoven in every discussion here. I think it's it's hard to miss if you're in the room, you really can't talk about everything happening in the Arctic without acknowledging at least the challenges with climate and then as many speakers today have pointed out also, some opportunities.”
Can you remember some of the opportunities speakers have mentioned?
“Well, so we had a big announcement take place here yesterday by a new startup called Seven Glaciers. They made a big announcement that they'd calculated our carbon footprint, ours meaning the Arctic Encounter. So the number of flights taken from people coming from 15 countries Alaskans coming from around the state the rental of the venue how the energy is used in this building, etc. They did their best to basically assess our carbon footprint over these two days and then they made a commitment to offset it using dividends in a forest in Southeast, Alaska. So that's I guess one more Innovative approach that's been discussed here in regards to climate. That's should we say less, “doom and gloom,” in terms of the impacts and more opportunistic or looking forward for ways to I don't know if I want to classify as solve climate, right but respond in a positive way,” said Kallander.
I ask, is this the first time the event has been in held Alaska?
“Yeah, that's correct. So we've had smaller events in Anchorage and a few fundraisers. Were a nonprofit so, you know, that's to be expected from time to time. But those are really just hosted by friends and people close to the organization and supporters. But nothing to this scale. This is the first Flagship encounter to take place in Anchorage.
And what about the youth component? It seems like that's a pretty big piece of the communication effort to.
“Absolutely, that's a very big priority for us. Our team is made up of only Millennials and Gen Z. So, there is no one actually producing Arctic Encounter on this team. That is any older than that those two generation blocks. So, the youth component is important to us, I would say, on a personal level for that reason, but it should be important to everyone regardless of their age. We're talking about multigenerational decisions that are being handed down to people who are living in the Arctic or advocating or working in the Arctic that are generational, right? So, to exclude or not include deliberately voices of young people, I think would be irresponsible at this point in the discussion. So, we work really hard to do that in a number of ways. The most obvious ways is if you look at the agenda we had yesterday. We had an entire panel dedicated to young leaders and their voices but we also have what we call an artist scholarship. So, we put out a call for artists and designers to participate in the fashion show, which was hosted last night at the Museum and also to feature their artwork and design or other textiles in the main hall, which I know you've seen, Emilie, all of those exhibitors out there and all of that is free of charge to those who apply for it and they get to keep 100% of their proceeds.
“We also we didn't do it this year, but we have done it in the past. We deploy surveys as part of something that we call the Arctic youth initiative, which is to bring information from the farthest corners of the Arctic back to the Arctic Encounter and we present that information in a myriad of ways. 'm talking young people like Elementary School students who are willing in their classrooms, perhaps to fill out our surveys asking them for their feedback to present to the leaders who are here.
I ask, Do you want to talk about this one last question, and then that will probably be enough, maybe some of the underlying goals and principles and intentions of the event?
“So the Arctic Encounter mission or tagline, if you will, is raising awareness, which is what we do through our convening work in our opinion and sharing information year-round. It’s about engaging challenges which is what we're trying to do by putting together panels and audiences that are extremely diverse. And then, developing Solutions. We do not aim to or claim that we are the ones as our team, right or as one entity to develop Solutions, but we believe that more holistically doing this convening work and bringing people together, you know yesterday and today we have 670 attendees and total from 15 countries. So our aim is right to engage the challenges and raise awareness in such a way that the byproduct of this convening work might develop Solutions across many platforms governments and entities.
That was Rachel’s basic outline of the event, but my biggest take away was how much the community participation was included and how much public community outreach and media was supported by the organizers. In the future, I hope to coordinate with several of the non-profit organization I spoke with to hear, learn and share more about what is happening in these communities through public radio stories. One event that Rachel mentioned was the Arctic Fashion show and after seeing that, I was able to follow up an interview with Barrow designer Corrine Danner, who also happens to be a teacher and I hope I can share her story and “Atikluk” design in the near future.
https://www.arcticencounter.com/arctic-encounter-anchorage-2022
This is Emilie Springer.