Kodiak Strong Planning Day Team to Hold Housing Kickoff Meeting

Kayla Desroches/KMXT

At the Kodiak Strong Planning Day last week, community members pinpointed three goals that Kodiak wants to achieve in the next year. And participants aren’t wasting any time. The planning day’s organizing group, Healthy Tomorrows, has scheduled a day for its first kickoff meeting.

The group’s community wellness program coordinator, Merissa Koller-Williams, says that meeting will be for the goal of “Housing First – permanent housing for the homeless.”

“That will be facilitated by Julie, who was their small group facilitator during the event. She’s going to share just sort of general information that they discussed at the event so that they can define their direction. Right now, they’re kind of being pulled in different directions. So, she’s going to try to rally everybody and get a clear focus.”

Koller-Williams says participants will brainstorm and decide what direction they want to go in.
 
“There are lots of ideas that go along with that, and there’s a lot of housing issues here, so it’ll be interesting to see what the actual vision statement that comes out of that group is ‘cause you have to come up with a project that’s attainable in a year. You only have 365 days to utilize the $2,000 that you’ve been given.”

Last week’s meeting was the city’s first Kodiak Strong Planning Day and Koller-Williams says it’s all new for her.

“It’s been really interesting to sort of observe the natural process of people trying to create progress themselves and also trying to figure out where my technical assistance role comes in, because it’s really easy for me to just step and run everything. It’s more difficult to sit back and let people make their own mistakes and give them a little more rope.”

The Housing First meeting is open to the public and people are welcome to attend. It will be Tuesday at 6:30 p.m. at the Kodiak Public Library.