Virtual "Make it Monday" forum - Creating a Safer Anchorage - Make It Your Business!

This presentation will give an overview of the Anchorage Alliance for Violence Prevention, including its interpersonal violence prevention plan for Anchorage, workgroup goals for implementation of prevention strategies and a short teaser of training that can be provided for local businesses about how to respond if clients or employees are dealing with unhealthy or abusive relationships in the workplace.
 

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Summer Chitwood is the Prevention & Education Coordinator at Abused Women's Aid in Crisis (AWAIC) and serves as the facilitator of the Anchorage Alliance for Violence Prevention. She has a background in education and has worked with survivors of domestic violence for the previous 8 years.



 

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Lisa Demer is the communications manager at Rasmuson Foundation, the biggest private funder in Alaska, and a former Anchorage Daily News reporter. An initiative to renovate and expand domestic violence shelters is among the Foundation’s most significant efforts of the last decade.




 

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Sara Fechtelkotter left her work at the Minnesota Department of Commerce, which ensures businesses are strong and consumers are protected by overseeing more than 20 regulated industries, to move to Alaska. As a judicial law clerk with the Alaska court system, she heard countless stories of domestic violence in criminal and civil cases. The level of domestic violence here in Alaska is unsettling and she decided to make this prominent problem the focus of her legal career. Sara is now an attorney at Alaska Legal Services Corporation where her work involves protecting victims' rights in criminal matters, representing victims in civil cases, and advocating for victims in administrative proceedings.

 

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Samantha McNelly is a Community Outreach Educator for Planned Parenthood where she teaches sex education and healthy relationships lessons at schools and throughout the Anchorage community. She has also been the facilitator for the Anchorage Teen Council, a group of local high school students committed to learning about sex and relationships, and teaching accurate and inclusive lessons to their peers. For the last three years, Samantha has also been a Women's Advocate in the AWAIC shelter.