Inside Alaska business.

• Author: Anderson, Tasha

May 2017

FIRM 49

Brooke Sandoval-Banker, previously the director of Marketing for Jack White Real Estate, has launched FIRM 49, a digital marketing company created to assist Alaska businesses looking to make the shift from traditional marketing to digital through the implementation of digital platforms, firm49.com

MUNICIPALITY OF ANCHORAGE

The Anchorage Parks and Recreation Department announced a process to update the master plan for Town Square Park. The new master plan provides a twenty year vision for Town Square Park, seeking to address community issues and concerns and identify strategies to ensure the park is a safe and thriving public space for all. Advisory groups and public workshops will address issues such as park safety, evaluating and understanding design and usage, analyzing the role of programming in civic space, and revisiting how Town Square Park fits into the long-term fabric of downtown Anchorage. Members of the public can apply online to participate as part of the Citizens Advisory Group or the Technical Advisory Group, muni.org

ALASKA REGIONAL

Alaska Regional and The Jason Foundation, Inc. partnered to designate a JFI Affiliate Office dedicated to increasing awareness and prevention of youth suicide. The office at the hospital in Anchorage offers free educational materials and training programs to parents, teachers, students, churches, and other community organizations. The "Promise for Tomorrow" curriculum is intended for students in 7th through 12th grades as a part of school health or wellness classes.

An especially useful resource for this particular age group is a smart-phone app called "A Friend Asks." The free app provides information, tools, and resources designed to help users offer support to friends or family who are showing signs of struggling with thoughts of suicide. JFI also offers programs for parents and other adults to address youth suicide by providing strategies for awareness and prevention.

alaskaregional.com

FUGRO

Fugro announced a partnership with the Shell Ocean Discovery XPRIZE to support firstround testing of the global, three-year competition, which incentivizes development of rapid, unmanned, high resolution ocean mapping technologies. Fugro's role is to provide high resolution deepwater baseline bathymetry data over a 500 km2 competition area. The company collects more than 1 million km2 of high resolution bathymetry data per year globally, predominantly in water depths greater than 750 meters.

Capitalizing on its deepwater survey expertise, Fugro will acquire seafloor data using stateof-the-art techniques and equipment, including a deepwater autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) equipped with sonar-based survey systems. This information will be used to groundtruth the work of twenty-one semi-finalist teams advancing to Round 1 of the competition.

ALUTIIO MUSEUM

More than half a century after they were taken from Chirikof Island, human remains representing at least 109 Alutiiq people have been returned to the Kodiak region. The US Fish & Wildlife Service transferred the remains to the Alutiiq Museum, Kodiak's tribal repository, as a step in their repatriation to the Alutiiq community. The remains were collected in 1962 by physical anthropologists and were largely from the Russian Orthodox cemetery in the historic village of Ukamak, about one hundred miles south of Kodiak Island.

Since their collection, the human remains have been held by two universities, the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee and Indian University at Bloomington. During this time they were subject to research without the knowledge or consent of the Alutiiq community. The return to the Kodiak region represents the...