USDA awards UAF $499,976 to train 16 Alaska Native and rural fellows in food and agriculture fields

Sixteen Alaska Native and rural undergraduates will train for careers in food, agriculture, natural resources and human sciences at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, funded by a $499,976 federal grant that took effect Sept. 1. USDA groups those fields under the acronym FANH.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture's National Institute of Food and Agriculture made the award. It runs through Aug. 31, 2029. Applications closed June 16, and the grant was signed Aug. 31, the day before it began. It requires no matching money from the university.

The money establishes the Alaska Native FANH Fellows Program, a cohort-based undergraduate fellowship. UAF will recruit two cohorts of eight fellows each from FANH and related degree programs. The project is titled "Growing Our Own: Cultivating Alaska Native Leaders in FANH Sciences and Food Sovereignty." Fellows will complete a cross-disciplinary seminar, mentorship and an apprenticeship in research or in Cooperative Extension, the university's community outreach service, then design their own community-engaged leadership projects addressing food, health, environmental and food sovereignty priorities identified locally.

The award record states that Alaska Native communities face some of the nation's highest rates of food insecurity, diet-related chronic disease and environmental disruption, and that Alaska Native people remain "critically underrepresented" across FANH professions. The record also cites structural and cultural barriers to degree completion. The grant description reflects the university's own application and contains no outside assessment of those claims. The record names no project director, and UAF has not published an announcement of the program.

The award came from a national competition NIFA expected to spend $9.6 million on this year, in grants of $150,000 to $1.5 million to Alaska Native-serving and Native Hawaiian-serving colleges. UAF's share is about 5 percent.

UAF has drawn repeated federal food-and-nutrition funding. A Rural Nutrition project promoting traditional wild-gathered foods ran on $7,671 through May 2025. A larger award, $1,586,402 signed in September 2024, continues Drumbeats Alaska: Place-Based Solutions for Alaska Native Food and Energy Sovereignty, which spans the College of Indigenous Studies and five rural campuses that the record says serve more than 160 Alaska Native communities. Drumbeats awards date to at least 2008.

The grant's fourth objective is a replication toolkit for other Alaska Native-serving and rural institutions nationwide.