I AM UAA: Sharon Lind

M.B.A. '08
Assistant Professor, College of Business and Public Policy
Hometown: Kenai, AK
Fun Fact: Her 70-year-old mother is taking Alaska Native Perspectives this semester

Twenty-two-years old. Fresh out of Warner Pacific College with a bachelor's degree in business administration. A young Sharon Lind lands her first job with her regional Alaska Native corporation, Aleut Corp.

After five years of running the shareholder's department, she becomes frustrated with the management she sees around her.

"Someone out of the blue said to me one day: stop complaining and do something about it!" says the Kenai, Alaska, native. "So I did. I ran for the board of directors."

One problem. Aleut had a policy that a board member couldn't be in a management position while serving on the board, so Sharon had to make the tough decision to step down from her first "real" job and only get paid for board and business meetings. She did just that and ended up staying on the board for the next 17 years.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves. Sharon's story is a lesson in making the most of opportunities and always looking for ways to grow. She didn't just sit on the board and call it good. She found ways to continually develop herself as a professional.

Married the same year she started on the Aleut board, Sharon moved with her husband to Hawaii. Balancing a new job with Big Brothers and Big Sisters of Honolulu and traveling back to Alaska periodically for board duties, Sharon made the most of it.

"It was a great experience!" she says. "It was good for me. It was really fun going all over Honolulu to sign up Bigs. They actually hired me as an office manager and then promoted me to management rather quickly. When I left I was running their PR department."

After three years in Hawaii, Sharon received a call from a contractor of one of Aleut's subsidiaries. He needed help hiring shareholders in Adak for a specific project. Ready to move back to Alaska, Sharon and her husband headed home.

"That was a crazy job," she says, describing flying from Anchorage to Adak all the time. "I was told later that they used to make bets when I would come to the island on who would have to pack their bags because I was coming to give them a pink slip," she laughs.

Still on the Aleut board of directors and two years with the subsidiary under her belt, she started looking for ways to get even more involved.

"Aleut had a scholarship program that wasn't very organized," she says. "So I talked to the CEO of the subsidiary and told him I wanted to go run that scholarship program, to turn it into something more meaningful."

The subsidiary was doing well enough to make a large contribution to the scholarship foundation, still a separate entity from the Aleut Corporation. And Sharon was posted as foundation president.

"I went in and developed policy, guidelines, gaming permits for fundraising, lots of things they didn't have in place to help grow the foundation," she says. "Most of all I loved working with the young people who received the scholarships. I just loved helping them decide what to do with their lives. And I always encouraged them to go to UAA because it's an affordable option for in-state students, and especially Native students."

By now it was 2004 and Sharon was in her mid-30s. Although she was loving the scholarship foundation job, she suddenly didn't feel like she was growing as a manager so she started to think about graduate school.

"John Ross, president and CEO of the Alaska Native Heritage Center, approached me around that time and offered me a position as vice president of operations," she says. "I agreed as long as I could still be on the board of the Aleut Corporation and get my master's. I knew my development as a manager required more education. And I knew I had to practice what I preached to my scholarship students, and that UAA was my school of choice."

So, Sharon started her M.B.A. program at UAA at the same time she joined the Heritage Center. Then, in 2006, after 12 years serving on the Aleut board, she stepped into the position of chair. With a full load in all three roles, she knew she had to transition jobs once again to help her focus more on finishing her degree. A public information officer and government coordination program manager position with the Denali Commission fit the bill, and Sharon graduated with her M.B.A. in 2008.

The next three years were fairly quiet as Sharon stayed on at the Denali Commission and continued in her role as chair of the Aleut board, but last summer there was more and more talk about her returning to UAA to teach. And, more specifically, to help develop curriculum for a budding program in Alaska Native Business Management.

"When Dean Baker and Professor George Geistauts really started talking to me about teaching as a possibility, I knew I'd want to focus solely on this," she says. "So I made a choice for me, and I stepped down as chair of the Aleut board in October 2011. It felt like the right thing to do."

Sharon settled in at UAA for the fall 2011 semester and, with the mentorship and support of both Dean Baker and Professor Geistauts, got right to work with the new curriculum.

"In 2009, the 12 Alaska Native regional corporations made over $7 billion in revenue," she says. "Every single company in Alaska is affected by Native corporations, so teaching our students-Natives and non-Natives alike-more about these corporations is essential I think. And I'm actually in the process right now of meeting with all 12 regionals to let them know what we're doing and why."

She is also in the process of developing a Ph.D. proposal with one of her brothers, Bob Snigaroff, as a cohort project. Bob has been worked with Lower 48 Native American tribes, and the two of them would like to look closer at how far the Alaska Native corporations have come over the last 40 years since the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act. With that will include developing curriculum for teaching a management class at UAA.

"I would love to see UAA have a Center of Excellence for Indigenous Peoples someday," she says. "Going beyond Alaska Natives and singling out a methodology that was created for our aboriginal people then showing how we developed a result that allowed Native people reclamation of what was theirs, and allow others to learn from that."

Over two decades since her first "real" job and degree, and Sharon is still striving for more. That's the Seawolf spirit.