Our People Are Our Greatest Resource

One changemaker to spotlight in our region is Joni Yakunin, City Clerk for White Mountain. The village of Natchirsvik – or White Mountain – is home to 185 people and is one of the few communities in the Bering Strait Region dotted with spruce trees, while other communities in this region don’t have trees at all due to the high latitude and permafrost. The village lies along the west bank of the Fish River, near the head of the Golovin Lagoon. Throughout the year, people in White Mountain are busy with subsistence activities that revolve around hunting, fishing, and gathering from the land and water. 

The community of White Mountain is unique, not only with its tree-covered landscape and plentiful activities, but also with its energy profile. The City of White Mountain owns and operates one of the few standalone electric utilities in the Bering Strait Region. Out of sixteen isolated microgrids in our region, eleven are part of the Alaska Village Electric Cooperative, and five microgrids are operated independently. White Mountain Utilities is owned by the City of White Mountain and has some exciting upcoming projects to highlight. 

In the past few years, the City Clerk Joni Yakunin, has been instrumental in tackling grant applications, new project implementation, and reporting tasks for the community. Joni was born in Nikolaevsk, Alaska, on the Kenai Peninsula of Alaska, but moved to White Mountain with her family in late 2020. Besides working for the city since 2021, Joni has also worked as a grant writer, consultant, accountant, and is a graduate student pursuing her Masters in Cultural Anthropology.

As the City Clerk, Joni has assisted the utility with power and fuel projects, accounting review, and PCE reporting – a huge part of utility management requirements in rural Alaska. “PCE” stands for “Power Cost Equalization,” and is a subsidy program that aids rural areas, where electricity rates can be three to five times higher than rates in the State’s urban areas. Also, on the list of energy projects for White Mountain are diesel generator upgrades for the power plant, cooling system upgrades, and a survey for a potential future solar array through the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium’s (ANTHC) technical assistance program. 

Joni is working with the local Tribe and Native Corporation in White Mountain on a U.S. Department of Energy Grid Resilience 40101d project which will support generator replacements and power control upgrades for the power plant. Navigating complicated federal funding opportunities like these can be challenging for many small communities. Finding the right people to get through the red tape and make the projects happen is key – even when projects are daunting. 

“We have this assumption about how things are supposed to function,” says Joni about working in rural Alaska. “It’s very complex. If anyone really wants to help, they need to come in [the community’s] terms – not the terms the outside world thinks or says.” This complexity is what makes communities unique, and what makes them function. According to Joni, it’s the people living in the community who know best how their systems operate. “Even if it’s hard, even if it’s expensive, everything seems to function very well,” she says. That hard work is paying off for the City of White Mountain, and many people in our region and across Alaska are excited to watch their progress in upcoming years.