CRRC’s mission is to provide natural resource management and economic development services for our member Tribes. Promoting health and wellbeing in our communities underlies all the work we do. The COVID-19 pandemic is already causing significant disruptions in our communities and shifting the focus of our organization to assist communities dealing with the immediate impacts of COVID-19 matches our long-term goals for building Tribal health and resilience. It is imperative that CRRC have the capacity to provide risk communications guidance and information sharing to tribal members during this time. Through continued correspondence with Tribes and Tribal members and through a Needs Assessment for Tribes and communities in the region, CRRC will be able to increase the capacity of each member Tribe, through technical assistance, to respond to health impacts in their communities which can include: applying for funding opportunities and developing community-specific outreach material.
The current global outbreak of COVID-19 has disrupted food systems in the Chugach region. Tribal member’s food environments are rapidly changing in both their external dimensions – food availability, prices, vendors- as well as personal dimensions – geographical access, affordability, convenience, and desirability. These rapid food environment changes are influencing the consumers’ dietary practices and can lead to a deterioration in both individual, and country-level, nutritional and health status. Traditional food has implications beyond physical health; it also plays an important role in the formation of identity, in the development of community, economic and social institutions, and in the everyday lives of Alaska Native people and communities. People, and their health and nutrition status, are what counts. Not only are certain foods central to the ceremonial and epistemological belief systems of many Tribes, but communities also face unique issues as they try to feed their people in a world of increasing prices and less access to healthy food. As the CDC’s own Traditional Food Project (2016) noted, a number of factors contribute to significant health disparities in Indian Country, and traditional diets have proven crucial to battling a number of health-related risks such as heart disease and diabetes, which also contribute to increased morbidity in COVID-19 patients. Issues of hunger, food insecurity, access to traditional food sources, and geographic isolation make accessing fresh and healthy foods a challenge for many Alaska Native communities, families, and children. The seven Tribes suffer from the lack of economic opportunity that the rest of Alaska prospers from due to the remoteness of the towns and the high cost of travel. The primary food sources have changed dramatically over the past 100 years. Lifestyle changes, including moves from rural areas to cities and new economic pressures, make time-consuming harvests of wild food impractical, if not impossible.
It is important for CRRC to continue work in the region to ensure food security throughout the Chugach. Without access to healthy foods, Tribal members, particularly those at risk of, or suffering from food insecurity and those with pre-existing non-communicable diseases who are at a heightened risk of becoming severely ill with the virus. Funding that provides the programmatic flexibility to support our member Tribes during this turbulent and unpredictable time will allow us to offset staff costs related to COVID-19 business interruptions, shifting our services to provide information, capacity building, and other support to our Tribes around their COVID-19 responses, with both short- and long-term community health goals in mind. CRRC has been bringing traditional food recipes to life with funding from the CDC and we are happy to share those below.
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