Dear Friends,

Happy Alaska Sobriety Awareness Month! To kick off this month, we are honoring three sober heroes across our state that exemplify living our sobriety out loud—reducing stigma around alcohol use, including zero alcohol use, and paving the path toward health and healing. Please join Recover Alaska in celebrating Stevi Angasan, Johon Atkinson, and Rob Seay. Stay tuned to our socials this month to hear their sober stories. If you have an event in celebration of Sobriety Awareness Month, please add it to the Recover Alaska calendar of events. 

We are in the midst of the Alaska Wellness and Prevention Symposium. Morning anchor sessions are being streamed daily on Recover Alaska’s Facebook page. We are excited to be able to welcome folks from across Alaska to this event, funded by the Division of Behavioral Health, as it’s one of the four proposals that were consented to during an August 2022 Alliance meeting. Major gratitude to everyone on the planning team who helped realize our vision, to regional co-chairs who stepped up to MC the event, and to all the presenters, participants, exhibitors, volunteers, and event planning staff that helped make the Symposium possible! 

Things to look forward to in March:

  • Evaluation and Learning Community Conversations: Peer interview sessions will be hosted by Stellar Group on Friday, March 10, from 9:30-11; Monday, March 13, from 2-3:30; and Tuesday, March 14, from 11:30-1. Please plan to attend one of these sessions in order to support The Alliance's annual evaluation activities. For more info, reach out to Hanna Menefee (formerly Marino) at [email protected]. 

  • Integration Session: Our bi-monthly integration session will take place on Thursday, March 16, from 1-3. Integration sessions are all-Alliance spaces. Zoom link and calendar invites for these sessions are available by emailing Marlene Adams at [email protected].

  • Transforming Conflict Political Education and Wellness Hour will take place on Friday, March 17, 1-2. The session will be facilitated by ACT’s Alaska Resilience Initiative and will be the “History and Hope” training.  
As always, please reach out to us with any questions. We hold monthly newsletter meetings at 11 AM on the Wednesday one week before month's end. Contact Jess Braunlich at [email protected] if you would like more information about this meeting/to be added to the calendar invite for the meeting.

Thank you, each of you, for your work to heal our families, communities, and systems. You are seen, and you are needed! Feel free to send us your news and updates for next month's newsletter via the submission link below.

Be well,
Jess 
Spirit of Youth: Spirit of Youth and Anchorage Youth Vote have launched a new website to address the issue of bullying in Alaska. EndBullyingAK.org was built with support from the Alaska Department of Health and seeks to empower the community to work together to build inclusive, bullying-free environments across the state.

Spirit of Youth has been working to address the problem for more than five years, and the website will prove to be an important tool in those efforts. Featuring resources that range from anti-bullying trainings, podcast recordings, and downloadable fact sheets, the website will be a valuable asset for educators, employers, parents, coaches, and youth themselves.
We will always do our best to publish upcoming events in a timely, regular manner for our newsletter subscribers. We also keep an event calendar through the Recover Alaska website that allows our partners a secondary means of sharing their event news with our community. We welcome your submissions!
Healing Together: Understanding the Root Causes of Violence and The Connection Between Trauma, Substance Use, and Mental Health

Series Description: This comprehensive educational opportunity delves into the underlying causes of violence and the link between trauma and substance use. Participants will learn about the science of addiction and the impact of substance use and mental health coercion in the context of abuse and control. Additionally, the series will cover organizational healing and transformation to support this crucial work. Join us on this empowering journey towards understanding and breaking the cycles of violence. Find the full hand out with details on each session here.

The Trainer: Christina Love is an Indigenous survivor and an intersectional Senior Specialist with a primary focus on substance use, mental health, disability access, neurodiversity, and issues connected to higher rates of violence for marginalized and targeted groups of people.

March 16 Session: We know that trauma is the underlying cause of many experiences of mental health and substance use concerns. These topics help us to better understand the prevalence of individual, historical, generational, and community trauma and the connection that trauma has with health disparities like mental health and substance use experiences. This training will examine the history of genocide, colonization, assimilation, and the anti-violence movement. Students will learn how gender-based and race-based oppression and violence intersect leading to higher rates of victimization and lethality. Students will also learn to make the connections between trauma and health disparities.

Date: Third Thursday of the month, March-July, 2023
Time: 10:00-11:30 AM

Meeting ID: 824 1286 6085
Passcode: 042828

Event made possible by ANDVSA and ANTHC.
Examining FASD Diagnosis | ECHO Series

Examining FASD Diagnosis ECHO is a six-part series that will explore the current issues, systems, and practices impacting Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders (FASD) diagnosis in Alaska and beyond.

This series runs on the 3rd Wednesday of each month from 8:00 - 9:00 a.m. AKST, January-June, 2023 and is intended for an interdisciplinary, multi-sector audience of clinical and non-clinical experts who provide supports and services to individuals impacted by prenatal alcohol exposure.

Objectives of the Examining FASD Diagnosis ECHO include:

  • Define barriers and benefits to FASD diagnosis
  • Discuss current strategies to diagnosis FASD and examine how these strategies might best serve Alaskans
  • Describe systems & tools that might support FASD diagnosis and interventions in Alaska and beyond
Alliance Community Stories

Join us for conversation and story sharing about your experience as a member of the Alliance, as part of the Alliance's annual evaluation. During this session, members will be paired up and have guided conversations using a list of questions developed by the Evaluation & Learning Workgroup. The interviews will be recorded and later analyzed by the evaluation team for the Alliance annual evaluation report. Participating members will received a $50 gift card as a thank you for their time and contribution.

There will be three sessions. Please select one time that best fits your schedule - you do not need to attend all three.

  • Fri (3/10): 9:30-11am
  • Mon (3/13): 2-3:30pm
  • Tues (3/14): 11:30-1pm

Calendar invites will be sent out shortly to all members so be on the lookout!
Pictured left to right: Blaze Bell, Jess Limbird,
Tiffany Hall, and Sara Platt.
About The Alliance

The Alliance is a collaborative effort of multiple and diverse partners across Alaska who recognize the impacts of alcohol misuse on individuals and communities. We are personally and professionally committed to working together to address this complex problem in our state.

Our primary goal is to connect and engage communities as partners — increasing protective factors, reducing risk factors, and changing social norms — to prevent underage alcohol use and eliminate adult misuse in Alaska.

Alliance Materials


Get Involved

Between starting new work and sustaining our progress, there are many opportunities to participate in The Alliance! All current workgroups are open to any member who would like to join. You can always read more about our workgroups and their purpose on the Get Involved page of our website. Our network practices an emergent strategy, and we update information based on our network's needs.

  • The Communications Workgroup will be supporting the social norms campaign and The Alliance's various other internal and external communications needs.
  • The Data and Learning Workgroup will be supporting data equity conversations and practices.
  • The Evaluation and Learning Workgroup is building out quarterly measures for the network to support grant reporting but also to increase real-time evaluation across the network so we can track and respond to improvement needs more frequently.
  • The Organizational Design and Strategy Workgroups will be merging for the first quarter of the fiscal year to determine if a combined group makes sense.
  • The Symposium Planning Workgroup will finalize an agenda and begin working with event planners.

You are welcome to reach out with questions about those workgroups or to ask to join any of them.