UAF launches a fellowship to grow Alaska Native leaders in food and agriculture

The University of Alaska Fairbanks is launching a new program to grow Alaska Native leaders in food, agriculture and natural resources — fields where Alaska Native people are, by the program's own description, "critically underrepresented." Sixteen Native and rural undergraduates will move through it over the next few years, backed by a roughly $500,000 federal grant that took effect Sept. 1.

The Alaska Native FANH Fellows Program — the acronym covers food, agriculture, natural resources and human sciences — will run two groups of eight students recruited from related degree programs. Titled "Growing Our Own," it puts fellows through a cross-disciplinary seminar, mentorship and an apprenticeship in research or community outreach, then asks each to design their own leadership project around a local food, health or environmental priority. A final piece of the work is a toolkit other Native-serving and rural colleges could copy.

The program leans on a stark case. Alaska Native communities face some of the country's highest rates of food insecurity, diet-related chronic disease and environmental disruption, according to the grant, which reflects UAF's own application and carries no outside assessment of those claims.

It's not UAF's first federal food-and-nutrition money, and not close to its largest. A 2024 grant of about $1.6 million continues Drumbeats Alaska, a food-and-energy-sovereignty effort spanning the College of Indigenous Studies and five rural campuses that together serve more than 160 Alaska Native communities — work that dates back to at least 2008.