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As Heard on Morning Line: the Alaska Women Veterans Listening Session

Koahnic Broadcast Corporation
Katie St. John, Vanessa Meade

Todays guests on Morning Line featured Katie St. John, the Director of Programs and Grants at the Alaska Community Foundation and Vanessa Meade, a Clinical Asistant Professor at the University of Alaska, Anchorage School of Social Work. They spoke with Morning Line host Frank Chythlook about the Alaska Women Veterans Listening Session.

The Alaska Women Veterans Listening Session poses as an opporunity to not only to better understand the opporuniuties and challenges facing womens veterans in the state of Alaska, but to give them a stronger voice in how the community could join in on honoring and serving these women.  Alaska's women veterans makes up more than twice the national average in the population, with 1.2% compared to one-half percent nationally. Even though this group of women is large, theres a lack of communication that fully understands their unique experiences. "There's still real sterotypes about women and about what women do and how women serve in the military that are absolutely not true," said St. John.

Meade says sometimes women will open up and explain different service related injuries and illnesses, but ends with a common response such as "there are people with worse conditions that need help more than I do." Meade states it does not work that way. In fact, it's not taking away services from other veterans, the more services that are needed, the more opporunities are recognized for further  veteran assistance.

The listening session will be taking place Friday, June 8, from 4:30 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. at the Wilda Marston Theatre in the Loussac Library. For more information, contact Katie St. John or visit https://alaskacf.org/

 

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