Over the course of the summer, SSP catalysts have visited Yakutat, Pelican, Hoonah, Kake and the communities on Prince of Wales Island. During these visits, catalysts have conducted one-on-one interviews with community members, business leaders and organizational leaders to discuss their vision for their community’s economic future. They conducted infrastructure surveys and hosted a community meeting to share information on the current state of the community economy, infrastructure and what was heard during one-on-one meetings.

All the catalysts who have been leading the RISE work in the communities, as well as our partner contractors at SALT and Raincoast data, met in Haines at the end of October to share the results of community economic data analysis, business climate surveys and community capacity assessments. We identified several common themes on the greatest economic development opportunities that folks see in each community (i.e. cultural tourism, fisheries, mariculture and forest products), as well as the greatest barriers to growth in these sectors (i.e. housing availability, child-care availability, the costs of energy, transportation and shipping, and workforce capacity). We are now in the process of action planning that to connect each community to the infrastructure, workforce and marketing support they need to thrive.

This web page provides access to the community “By the Numbers” reports, community capacity summaries, industry opportunity summaries and community action plans that have been generated through this project. If you do not see these items below, it means we are still working on them. Everything should be available by January of 2023.

These reports were prepared by our contractor partners at SALT and Raincoast data. These reports provide data on economic trends in each of our RISE communities, as well as information from the 2022 business climate survey, which gives us a good sense for how business leaders are feeling about economic development opportunities, what they see as the strengths of each community and the barriers to growth in each community.