Lister scholarship fund grows and gives

By Sam Bishop

When Hope Roberts attended community college in Fairbanks in fall 2008, her 5- and 10-year-old children sometimes came along and sat in the hallway outside the classroom.

“They sat right there and waited and read,” she said.

She had no other choice. At the time, Roberts was a single mom studying business management at what is today the UAF Community and Technical College.

She declines to offer many more details even today, almost 15 years later and four years into ownership of Surreel Saltwaters, a successful fishing charter operation based in Valdez.

“There was so much chaos going on,” she said. “There was no child support. There was no job.”

But there was a scholarship, $1,600 from a fund established in memory of Ruth Lister, the woman who led the community college for much of the 1990s.

The Lister scholarship kept Roberts in her classes. 

“I would have had to drop out. I would have failed the classes,” Roberts said. She had five that semester. Had she dropped them, she said, “I wouldn’t have done them again.”

Doesn’t take much

Friends of Lister created the scholarship in 2003, shortly after she died following a long battle with breast cancer.

“We started out with a promise to Ruth in 2002,” said Susan McInnis, who, with her spouse Joy Morrison, serves on a seven-member committee that raises money for the scholarship fund. “Joy asked her when she was in her last months what we could do in her memory.”

“Ruth said she’d always worked with people who had a hard time climbing out of hardship,” McInnis said. She thought helping single mothers attend community college would be a worthy effort.

The group of friends went to work creating the fund at the UA Foundation and raising money for it. Nearly 20 years later, more than 300 people have donated. Through mostly small individual contributions and an annual fundraiser, the fund contains about $370,000. It earns about $12,000 annually, enough to provide several scholarships of a few thousand dollars.

“It’s the ‘Little Engine That Could,’ just chugging along,” McInnis said. “It just requires us to keep going.”

Over the years, the scholarships have supported 39 single parents attending the Community and Technical College, McInnis said. 

“They juggle kids, work and school,” McInnis said. “They all have dreams.”

Lister worked hard to remake CTC into a school that trains such people for the jobs they’re likely to find in Fairbanks and Alaska, McInnis said. 

Gaining the confidence

Years passed before Roberts completed her associate degree in business management in 2017 and another in tribal management in 2018, but she credits that 2008 scholarship in part for her success today. 

The scholarship told her that people had noticed how hard she worked. That gave her the inspiration to keep studying. All the while, she worked as a heavy equipment operator in Fairbanks, Hawaii, Anchorage and finally Valdez in 2016.

At that point, she knew she wanted to work for herself. Earning the degree gave her the confidence to do it. She started the charter business in 2018.

“I did the work. I did the study. You buy the boat. You buy the permit. It’s a six-figure startup,” she said.

The first several weeks, they had few customers. But she deciphered the problem, and “a month later we were getting so many bookings we needed another boat,” she said. Today, she and her husband of seven years, Charles Upicksoun, operate a 26-foot Weldcraft with twin 200-horsepower Yamahas. They take four to six people out 75 miles from Valdez, seeking halibut, rockfish and salmon.

Roberts, who participates with several boards involved in fish and wildlife management, also has a new passion — teaching fellow Alaska Native people how to hunt marine mammals. She doesn’t like hearing talk of taking away such rights, talk that she said is fueled by the fact that fewer Native people are hunting today.

That doesn’t justify ending the rights, she said. “No, you don’t. You need to reconnect people to the art,” she said.

So, in April 2022, she showed five people “who were disconnected from their hunting culture” how to harvest seals, she said. “We’re going to get an elder to help teach us to hunt sea lions this year.”

Successful endeavors

McInnis, after 49 years in Alaska, moved to Portland, Oregon, with Morrison in 2019. She returned to Fairbanks this July for the annual Ruth Lister Scholarship Garden Party.

The event raises about $10,000 to $15,000 annually for the Lister scholarship fund.

This year’s party, held July 16 at the home of retired UA executive Patty Kastelic, drew almost 40 people, McInnis estimated. 

“I spend most of the time grilling chicken and talking to people as they come and go, so I don’t know that I have a good count,” she said. “We get to visit with each other. We get to incorporate new givers, although it’s a pretty stable group. It’s a successful event.”

A few hundred miles south in Valdez, scholarship recipient Hope Roberts was busy with the summer fishing rush and her other enterprises that weekend.

“I feel so good about being successful in my little endeavors,” she said. And she feels thankful for all the people who have contributed to the scholarship fund.

“I hope I have done what they hoped I would with it,” she said.