Welcome to our latest edition of the Trust's quarterly newsletter! The first quarter of the fiscal year includes many important milestones for the Trust, including the board's approval of our budget for our next year of work on behalf of Trust beneficiaries.

Our annual budget is developed each year following robust stakeholder engagement, Trust program analysis, and a consideration of our current priorities. The budget outlines designated spending on strategies associated with the Trust's focus and priority areas. Materials developed to inform trustees, stakeholders, and Trust staff in the budget development process, as well as the final Trustee-approved FY26 budget are available on our Trust budget development webpage. A big thank you to all who participated in our budget process this year!

While the Trust continues to invest in grantmaking and systems change-focused advocacy and planning, we want to highlight a specific area of emphasis: our ongoing initiative to transform behavioral health crisis response. Trustees have approved funding resources to continue advancing this statewide initiative in partnership with the State and numerous community partners.

To help illustrate the positive impacts of this crisis response work, we recently released a video illustrating the way many communities are implementing and benefiting from new crisis services. The video does a great job educating audiences about the breadth of the crisis initiative in Alaska, and demonstrating the significant momentum for our collective initiative to transform BH crisis response. Watch the video here.

The Board of Trustees recently approved a $250,000 grant to Set Free Alaska, a community provider that offers treatment and services to beneficiaries impacted by addiction and mental illness. Trust grant funding is supporting Set Free's therapeutic campus expansion project in the Mat-Su. Once completed, this new community-use facility will increase capacity for three existing Set Free programs. This expansion will double the capacity of their Children’s and Families Program by adding 70 new clients, as well as grow their Adult Outpatient Program serving individuals impacted by addiction and mental health by adding 75 new clients and 14 new beds to their crisis residential and recovery housing facility.

We are proud to support this project that will reduce the waitlist for needed behavioral health services, bolster the community’s continuum of care, and improve access to critically needed addiction treatment and recovery housing in South Central Alaska. We appreciate Set Free Alaska's work to improve health outcomes for Trust beneficiaries.

The Trust is looking for qualified applicants to join its Board of Trustees. Trustees oversee the Trust's work in the advocacy, planning, implementing and catalytic funding of services to improve Alaska’s mental health system and the lives of its beneficiaries, as well as Trust financial and land assets.

Membership on this dynamic board is based on ability in financial management and investment, in land management, or in services for the beneficiaries of the Trust. Additionally, applicants cannot have worked for an organization or served on a board of an organization that received a grant or contract from the Trust within the last two years. To learn more about the position and the application process, visit our website.

Last month the Trust Land Office hosted a signing ceremony to finalize a negotiated sale of Trust land to the United States Army Corp of Engineers to support the Permafrost Tunnel Research Facility near Fox, Alaska. This land transaction supports the mission of both organizations; the newly purchased land will augment the research and development mission at the Corps' permafrost tunnel, and generates close to half a million dollars in revenue for the Trust. All revenues from Trust lands support our work on behalf of Trust beneficiaries. 

The permafrost tunnel research complex is operated by the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center's Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory. The research areas includes a 650-meter-long tunnel dug into a large block of continuous permafrost, which over the years has allowed researchers from around the world to study permafrost and better understand subjects ranging from climate change to microbiology.