Alaska Experience Project

Project Date: 2007
Project Manager: Ellen Campfield Nelson
Client: Alaska Experience Project, Beth Landon
Locations: Statewide

The Alaska Center for Rural Health has a bi-annual Alaska Rural Health Conference.  In May 2007, the conference was held in conjunction with the annual National Rural Health Association in Anchorage. Over 1,000 people were expected to attend this conference, including health care administrators, policy-makers, researchers and other influential rural health care professionals.

As a part of this conference, the Alaska Experience Project, a nonprofit organization formed to give conference participants a first-hand experience of rural Alaska and its health care network, planned a series of trips to 30 rural Alaskan communities. On these trips, a subset of conference attendees were able to see our rural health care systems and gain a greater awareness and sensitivity to Alaska’s rural healthcare structure.

Agnew::Beck produced a publication focusing on the Alaska Experience Project and Alaska’s Rural Health Care System.  This publication is intended to serve multiple functions, including orienting trip participants, thanking AEP funders and most importantly, sharing with a national audience the Alaskan heath care system and the communities it serves. 

Products

• AEP - Healthcare in the Nation's Last Frontier (3,017 KB)

Project Outcomes

Randall Burns, Director of the Alaska Small Hospital Performance Improvement Network, wrote to us about the success of the Alaska Experience Project: 

“[T]he AEP was a tremendous success – please share that news with everyone involved there! 

It was amazing – we had no major problems, all trips came off, and most were fabulously successful.  “Trip of a lifetime” was the most common phrase.  The individual stories were also astounding: some of the people on the Kodiak/Akhiok were emotionally knocked back by the reality of village life and were still processing the impact at the end of the week; the Hooper Bay folks were reeling from the beauty of the environment and the devastation caused by the fire; and the Huslia folks were in tears as they told the story of getting off the plane to discover there was a high school graduation about to occur with 2 of the 12 students graduating, and because of their titles and where they were from, the visitors were invited to be speakers at the graduation ceremony, and so they were! At the beginning of the conference and at the end, the experiences were highlighted and discussed with great emotion and appreciation for the experience.  And, Beth Landon, [one of the project's organizers] got the National Rural Health Association (NRHA) Volunteer of the Year Award for her leadership on the AEP and her work with the NRHA staff in coordinating the Anchorage conference!

The guide was also a huge success.  We have had multiple requests for the book and gave out quite a few above the one provided to each conferee.  ANTHC was pleased, and our funders were very pleased with the book as well as the reception that the AEP received.  If ever a project had a stated purpose from the outset and, at the end got the exact outcome it had planned for, this was it!  We made our point, and big time! 

Rural in Alaska is not like rural anywhere else!  Period! 

It was very exciting to see that our concept came so successfully to fruition, and in the context of fabulous opportunities to experience the beauty and geography of Alaska and the rurality/poverty and isolation of many of our communities, as well as much of the cultural influences on us here in the State. 

It was wonderful!  Thanks so much for all your help, and Ellen’s help, and the beautiful design for the guide.”