The Alaska Energy Training Group wrapped up 2025 by delving into rural utility training and assistance strategies with examples from around the state.

Every day, small staffs of rural Alaska utilities pull off the Herculean and often unseen work of maintaining electricity, water, and bulk fuel services to their communities. Every aspect of community life relies on their meticulous completion of operator logs, oil changes, utility account reconciliation, fuel report filing, payroll processing, and the dozens of other tasks needed to keep a rural utility running. And in communities of a few hundred or even a few dozen people, all of that work often falls on the shoulders of just a couple people.

At its final meeting of 2025, the Alaska Energy Training Group brought together 28 participants from across the state’s training and technical assistance network to discuss best practices for supporting and empowering rural utility staff. REAP’s Community Programs Director, Steve Cleary, facilitated the meeting which began with presentations highlighting two different approaches: one statewide, cohort-based training coordination program; and one regional utility assistance partnership program.

Watch the Alaska Energy Training Group’s Dec. 9, 2025, meeting to hear about and brainstorm effective assistance and training strategies for rural utilities across the state with Jade Powell, REAP’s People in Power Training Manager, and Joni Yakunin, Kawerak’s Community Utility Assistance Program and Municipal Account Services Program Director.

access prior Alaska energy Training Group meeting notes
sign up for future meeting notices and trianing updates

The first presentation highlighted REAP’s People in Power (PIP) program. Through PIP, REAP’s Training Manager, Jade Powell, helps communities train and retain the utility staff needed to keep the power on across Alaska. While utility collaboratives can provide support and training opportunities for their employees working in dozens of communities across the state, there are several standalone electric utilities in rural Alaska that do not have the same kind of organizational support network. Powell works with employees at some of those standalone rural utilities, where teams can range from as few as 2 full-time positions to as many as 10 in a larger community. To date, PIP has coordinated the delivery of trainings on governance, management, clerical duties, and operations for two cohorts representing roughly 70 staff members at 15 independent electric utilities.

Powell’s presentation about PIP is available here.

People often notice electricity the most in its absence. REAP’s nearly two decades of education work have shown that students typically learn best when their lessons are individualized and immediately applied. With these realities in mind, PIP was designed to provide staff at Alaska’s small standalone utilities with the individualized on-the-job training training they need to operate their systems reliably and efficiently. PIP has coordinated 1:1, in-community instruction and regional group trainings on topics including solar installation and maintenance, Power Cost Equalization (PCE) reporting, and accounting. PIP also leverages REAP’s network of statewide and region-specific partners to facilitate in-person visits with experienced operators, accountants, independent power producer (IPP) experts and others to work through the specific questions and issues utility staff are facing. PIP has had a lot of success fostering inter-community support, where local trainers visit neighboring communities to share their firsthand knowledge and experiences with others working in similar roles, and REAP intends to build on that successful model in 2026 and beyond.

Jodi Yakunin, Program Director at Kawerak and former City Clerk for White Mountain, delivered the second presentation on the Community Utility Assistance Program and Municipal Account Services (CUAP-MAS). CUAP-MAS is a partnership between Kawerak, the Norton Sound Economic Development Corporation (NSEDC), and the Norton Sound Health Corporation (NSHC). Its goal is to strengthen governance, resilience, and financial sustainability for water and sewer utilities in the Bering Strait region.

One of CUAP-MAS’s main goals is to raise utilities’ Operations and Maintenance Best Practices scores above 60 by building local staff capacity, promoting sustainability and revenue growth, and supporting community services. These scores, which assess how well water utilities are following operational best practices and are tracked by the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation, are used to prioritize statewide community sanitation project funding. The highest possible score is 100. CUAP-MAS’s holistic approach also serves to strengthen regional collaboration. NSHC provides technical training and support for operators, and Kawerak provides financial and administrative support.

Yakunin stressed that the most important aspect of the MAS portion of the program is the in-person visits. There’s often a communication disconnect between Nome or Anchorage and the community where help is needed. Remote assistance is not enough. Relationships and connections amplify staff capacity and help to build awareness that every community is complex and has its own history. If CUAP-MAS staff can’t travel, they provide remote support through, for example, Microsoft Teams screensharing paired with remote logins and troubleshooting via their RightWorks accounting platform. This backup remote option can also help enable the delivery of stopgap bookkeeping services if a community is momentarily without a clerk – an unfortunately frequent occurrence in remote communities facing challenges such as high cost of living and low housing availability. Participation in the program, crucially, comes with direct financial benefits to communities. These include $15,000 in funding each year to cover the costs of maintaining, repairing, or replacing utility assets and $15,000 in annual water and sewer service subsidies per community.

Yakunin’s presentation about CUAP-MAS is available here.

CUAP-MAS has had a lot of success so far. They have seen a 20% increase in communities with Best Practices scores over 60. They have helped three communities prepare to introduce piped water service. And they have reconciled multiple years of financial backlog through staff shadowing and support. But Yakunin says their biggest success has been helping utility staff in the Bering Strait region recognize that they are not alone, aiding them in feeling confident in their work, and building pride in the importance of their role.

In the next year, CUAP-MAS is planning to deliver more bookkeeping services and aims to travel to each community at least once. Challenges remain, chief among them staff turnover, budget shortfalls, travel barriers, and aging infrastructure. But CUAP-MAS will continue to play a crucial role facilitating challenging conversations between utility staff and their communities, unveiling concerns and challenges, and charting a sustainable course forward.

After their presentations, both Powell and Yakunin were asked to share some strategies for retaining utility workers in rural communities. Powell observed that managers setting positive work boundaries and expectations both within the utility and between the utility and community can be helpful. They also recommended taking proactive steps, like shortening probationary periods for new hires. Yakunin shared that CUAP provides a level of outside support for overworked employees, helping them alleviate the burden of a high-pressure role in a small community.

Katherine Aubry, Alaska Energy Authority’s (AEA’s) PCE Program Manager, and her colleague Anna Larson, AEA’s PCE technician and the former utility clerk in Chefornak, also joined the conversation to share a bit about their work. Through their positions with AEA, they provide mostly remote support for meeting PCE reporting requirements. Examples include helping utility staff fulfill the Regulatory Commission of Alaska’s (RCA’s) requirements for depreciation schedules and walking folks through setting up QuickBooks correctly. They have historically hosted group trainings in hub communities, but they have experienced a barrier in getting clerks to share their struggles in group settings and make real progress away from their office, systems, and books. In response, AEA piloted individual support through travel to two communities in 2025. This effort showed similar progress to CUAP-MAS’s when it came to meeting staff where they are and solving more problems thanks to the additional information gleaned when support staff are in communities observing issues in real time.

The group conversation toward the end of the meeting inspired more ideas for collaboration between training programs in Alaska. These include helping utilities implement depreciation schedules, sharing more information on RightWorks remote access, and partnering with AEA’s PCE team to support further rural travel and in-office support for utilities in PIP’s training cohorts.

REAP facilitates these quarterly knowledge sharing meetings through its Alaska Network for Energy Education and Employment (ANEEE). Notes from each Alaska Energy Training Group meeting, along with helpful links and resources shared in each discussion, can be found here. If you want to participate in future conversations and receive updates about energy training in the state, sign up for the Alaska Energy Training Group here.

By Steve ClearyJanuary 30th, 2026

alaska energy training groupcommunity utility assistance programenergy workforce developmentpce trainingPeople in Powerpower cost equalization trainingrural utility assistancerural utility training