A collaborative community project aimed at providing parents and caregivers the resources and information to help support Homer area youth kicked off on Thursday, Feb. 6 with a public meeting at Kachemak Bay Campus in Homer.

Around 60 community members gathered to listen to presentations from the Southern Kenai Peninsula Resilience Coalition, Kenai Peninsula Borough School District and Homer Police Department. Child care and food were provided for attendees free of charge, in an attempt to remove potential barriers to attendance.

Planet Youth Homer was inspired by the success of the Icelandic Prevention Model. Originally created in Iceland to address substance abuse issues in teens, the program has been replicated across the world and tailored to specific community needs. Seward implemented a similar program in 2021, called Youth 360.

“This is an approach that is molding to what we have going on in this community. Even though this was invented in Iceland, we’re not doing Iceland’s thing, we’re doing Homer’s thing and using their guiding steps,” Rudy Multz, program manager for South Peninsula Behavioral Health’s child and family team, said during Thursday’s presentation. Multz — along with SKP Resilience Coalition youth project manager Anna Meredith and coalition coordinator Hannah Gustafson — were able to attend an international conference put on by Planet Youth in March 2024. Meredith said about 25 countries were present at the conference, which is held annually in Reykjavík.

The goal is for students grades nine through 11 within the Homer school system to be given a district-approved questionnaire this fall to gauge what areas of life they may be struggling with within the community and where their strengths are. Thereafter, the coalition hopes to reassess and re-release the questionnaire every two years to continue the process, update the data, and make any necessary changes. The team is still working on what questions they want to include in the questionnaire and the language they want to use when asking those questions. Even slight differences in language can have an immense impact on how teens respond.

“It’s not 100% done yet, but we’re working closely with the district,” Meredith said in an interview Monday.

The resulting data from the Planet Youth Homer questionnaire will be specific to youth in the community of Homer, and locally owned, allowing findings to be freely shared among organizations, helping them to shape their programs in ways that are inclusive of problems youth are facing in the community and better able to provide proper support systems to help them succeed, despite the hurdles they face. Additionally, Meredith said the turnaround time for feedback and data analysis of the questionnaire response generally takes six to eight weeks, allowing for quick responses to the findings.

Presenters at the Feb. 6 event — many of whom have spent at least the last 10 years dedicating their lives to supporting Homer youth in one form or another — brought up examples of challenges faced by youth in the community in recent years, such as drugs, suicidality and depression.

Multz spoke about “upstream prevention” during Thursday’s event, posing a hypothetical to help community members visualize the idea of evidence-based prevention models.

“Say you’re going for a picnic with a friend. Maybe you’re out by the Anchor River. You throw out your blanket and you’re about to bite into your sandwich when suddenly you see this kid floating down the middle of the river, screaming for help. And you throw down your sandwich and you run over there, you dive in, and you grab this kid and swim them back to shore and you’re exhausted … and just as you’re ready to get out, you see another kid floating down the river, and then another and another.”

Multz said that figuring out why and how these kids are ending up in metaphorically deep water is key to keeping them out in the first place. By going upstream of the problem — and addressing root causes — the community can be proactive about saving kids’ lives before they need to be saved.

Youth connectors at the event shared a resource they created called “Where Can I Homer?”, a website that makes finding youth-friendly events in Homer easy for youth and parents. According to the website, there are currently five teens and young adults working on this project, including Ashe Dias and Sofia Loboy, Poppy Smith, Ahni Cook, and Ella Gustafson. Jody Mastey of Fiddlehead Creative designed the website. Funded through both the Kenai Peninsula Youth Court and the SKP Resilience Coalition, the goal of the Youth Connectors program is to provide the community with an outlet for actively engaged teens.

“Rather than just saying, ‘Oh, here’s all these great youth activities’, the youth are the people communicating with the agencies and building those relationships with positive adults as they promote and advertise the events for the rest of the community. I feel like that’s kind of a fun and important piece of it. We’re not just talking about connecting youth with adults, we’re trying to institutionalize it into the operations of the coalition,” Gustafson said in an interview Monday.

Last Thursday’s event was supported by Kenai Peninsula College, South Peninsula Hospital, Homer Foundation, and the Southern Kenai Peninsula Resilience Coalition, part of the MAPP Health Coalition. South Peninsula Behavioral Health staff helped out with watching kids and Derotha Ferraro, public information officer of South Peninsula Hospital, served food to attendees throughout the event, sending people home with bowls of still-hot chili, bags of fresh bread and cookies, and other treats provided by South Peninsula Hospital cafeteria staff and funded by the Homer Foundation.

For more information or if you work with, parent, or care for young people and would like to get involved, you can reach youth project manager, Anna Meredith, at anna@elementalconsulting.solutions.

Chloe Pleznac is a general assignment reporter for the Homer News. You can reach her at chloe.pleznac@homernews.com or by calling 907-615-3193.

Youth connectors present a video explaining to parents and youth the new “Where Can I Homer?” website on Thursday, Feb. 6 at Kachemak Bay Campus in Homer, Alaska. The new site aims to make it easy to find local, youth-friendly events in the area.(Chloe Pleznac/Homer News)

Southern Kenai Peninsula Resilience Coalition youth project manager Anna Meredith explains the history of the Icelandic prevention model at the Planet Youth Homer event hosted Thursday, Jan. 6, 2025, at Kachemak Bay Campus in Homer, Alaska. The collaborative community project is aimed at providing parents and caregivers the resources and information to help support Homer area youth. (Chloe Pleznac/Homer News)