Winter in Unalaska by Sam Zmolek
Your voice in the Aleutians.
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations
The KUCB Newsroom provides newscasts Monday through Thursday at noon and 5 PM on KUCB Radio. You can find many of our local news stories here.

New Aleutian program distributes $24K in grants for small businesses

Berett Wilber
/
KUCB
Grant recipients range from an ice cream shop in King Cove to a notary in Unalaska to commercial fishermen in Sand Point.

Eight Aleutian businesses were awarded $3,000 each in late April as part of a new microgrant program from the Aleutian Marketplace.

Grant recipients range from an ice cream shop in King Cove to a notary in Unalaska to commercial fishermen in Sand Point. A total of $24,000 worth of grant money was distributed throughout the region.

It’s the first of two rounds of grants through the partnership between the Aleutian Pribilof Island Community Development Association, TelAlaska, Wells Fargo and the Aleut Corporation. The organizations work with community members, small business owners and creative entrepreneurs throughout the region in an attempt to help fuel local economies.

“We were pleased to add micro grants to the Aleutian Marketplace program this year after community members shared that one of the best ways to support entrepreneurial efforts was to provide a flexible funding source,” said APICDA Chief Program Officer Laura Delgado ina press release. “This program continues to evolve to better serve the small businesses and foster grassroots economic growth in the region.”

The second round of grants opened May 1 and closes June 15. Both new and established businesses in the Aleutian-Pribilof region are eligible to apply.

For more information, visit APICDA’s website.

Hailing from Southwest Washington, Maggie moved to Unalaska in 2019. She's dabbled in independent print journalism in Oregon and completed her Master of Arts in English Studies at Western Washington University — where she also taught Rhetoric and Composition courses.
Related Content
  • Sand Point upgraded its travel lift at the Robert E. Galovin Small Boat Harbor. Also known as a boat gantry crane, the travel lift hoists boats out of the water for repairs or storage. Jordan Keeler is the city administrator for the Eastern Aleutians community. He said the former travel lift was about 40 years old and needed to be replaced.
  • Alaska businesses hurt by the COVID-19 pandemic have until April 30 to apply for tens of millions of dollars from a second round of federal pandemic relief funding. But that’s only if they didn’t get money during the first series of grants issued through the state’s American Rescue Plan Act. Even if business owners applied and were turned down during that first round of the Alaska ARPA Business Relief Program, they can still give this second round a shot, said Shirley Marquardt, executive director for the Southwest Alaska Municipal Conference. “If you applied, but you did not get any funding, for whatever reason … you can go back and you can apply again here on round two,” Marquardt said. “And I would really strongly urge people to do that.”
  • New data from drone surveys flown over Unalaska’s three road-system lakes last summer show low sockeye salmon counts. The counts total less than half of what they were in summer of 2020, according to data released in April by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. But Fish and Game biologist Tyler Lawson said the one-year drop isn’t too concerning. Escapement numbers often fluctuate and there’s more room for error in aerial surveys, he said. “We call them a ‘high error survey,’ which kind of sounds bad, but it's just because in comparison to the weir — which is a very precise tool — there's variability whenever you're up in the air, looking down and trying to count salmon,” he said. While the technology is still relatively new when it comes to counting salmon in Unalaska, Lawson said he’s hopeful that drones will play a key role in helping assess broader trends among salmon stocks in the region.