The teenage girls behind a $25 minimum wage fight in rural Alaska

In one of the most remote towns in America, a group of teenagers is fighting to put an initiative on the November ballot that would raise the minimum wage for the largely Native population of Nome, Alaska. 

The idea took hold earlier this year when the six young women were invited to a conference in California as part of a Native youth leadership group they’d joined at their high school. There, they listened to Saru Jayaraman, who heads a national effort to raise the minimum wage, speak about the work being done city by city to secure higher pay. They kept looking at each other as she spoke. We should do this in Nome, they thought.

“We were just talking amongst ourselves, and we were like, ‘There’s people in Alaska who work for their whole lives, and their minimum wage doesn’t change at all to support their children and their elders, and their whole family,’” said Alora Stasenko, one of the women leading the effort who graduated this spring. Another student leader, Renee Brown, was working part-time at the local preschool and saw how many of her coworkers lived out of renovated shipping containers and walked to work in harsh conditions. The low in Nome reached -26 degrees Fahrenheit last year.

“We decided that money was a problem, and that we wanted to help get, not just a few people, but everybody, what they need,” Stasenko said. 

Nome, a town of about 3,700 on Alaska’s Seward Peninsula, just 150 miles off the coast of Russia, is perhaps best known for its history as a gold rush town and as the ending point of the Iditarod Sled Dog Race. The next nearest town is 70 miles away, and supplies need to be shipped or flown in. That makes living expensive. The minimum wage is $14 an hour, but the cost of living is about 69 percent higher than the national average. Gas often tops $6 a gallon. Milk is $10 a gallon. Grocery stores are rarely full and so expensive that many people hunt for their food. 

“It takes a while to go out on boats or snow machines or trucks or four-wheelers, and you have to buy your ammo and your guns and all your equipment to go out. Everything gets expensive,” Stasenko said. “I grew up living a very subsistence lifestyle.”

In her freezer: caribou, fish and walrus that she helped hunt herself.

Stasenko and the other students were gripped by the idea that raising the minimum wage in Nome could help give people there a better quality of life. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology Living Wage Calculator sets the living wage there — how much one person working full-time needs to support themselves — at nearly $24 an hour. A family of four would need two working adults earning about $28 an hour each to stay afloat.

Jayaraman was impressed when the students followed up with her after the conference. It was the first time in her decades of activism that she had been approached by high schoolers to start a campaign. 

With her guidance, the students formed the Nome Living Wage For All Alliance and convened a call with some of the town’s largest employers to discuss interest in a ballot initiative. They settled on a goal of raising the minimum wage to $25 an hour. They’re proposing a phase-in period, giving large corporations until 2029 to raise wages and small businesses until 2032. Already, the town’s top employer, Norton Sound Health Corporation, sets its minimum wage at $25 an hour, so raising the floor would only apply to about 15 percent of workers in the city. 

They submitted a ballot petition to the city in May, which was approved, and now need to collect 108 signatures — representing a quarter of ballots cast in the 2025 local election — to get their proposal on the ballot in November. They have until the end of the month to collect enough signatures.

“They’ve initiated this conversation in Nome,” said Jayaraman, who added that the story of the group’s work has also inspired other organizers around the country. “Whether they make it on the ballot this November or not, they’ve already had such profound impact on the national movement, on young people all over the country, on workers in other states.”

Because Nome is also a larger regional hub, part of the hope is that improving wages there could also help raise them in neighboring towns where conditions are even harsher — where stores often lack meat or fresh produce and there is no running water.

Over the summer, Brown, one of the student organizers, spoke at a national mobilization event in Washington, D.C. about the hope she had that Nome’s movement “will not only improve the lives of our community members, but will inspire our fellow classmates and peers across Alaska to believe in the power of effort, advocacy and determination.” 

“Our efforts will help Nome pioneer a new kind of American dream — one where dignity is the baseline and every resident can afford to stay on our golden beaches,” Brown said.

Most of the organizers spent much of the end of their senior year at Nome-Beltz Middle High School strategizing. Kaya Kent, another organizer, said she remembers talking excitedly about it with Stasenko during classes. 

“I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I was checking my email constantly, and I was waking up thinking about the campaign,” Kent said. 

A $500 million-plus project to turn Nome’s dock into the nation’s first deepwater Arctic port just kicked off, and though it will likely bring in money for all the businesses that traverse through there, the organizers want to make sure the people of Nome can benefit, too.

Even those already earning more than $25 an hour — like Kent’s mother, who works in an administrative position at the local hospital — are still struggling to live comfortably in Nome, Kent said. 

“If it’s like that for my mom, who’s able to make $40 an hour, I can’t imagine what it’s like for the people that are making way, way less than that,” she said. 

It’s an effort that is about fundamental survival, and it mirrors a lot of what’s driving Gen Z students to get engaged politically, Jayaraman said. Some tell her that they support raising the minimum wage because it’s fundamental to them being able to take on any other causes. 

“They tell me, ‘This is the thing that’s giving me hope because I can’t envision a future unless I can have one job and earn enough to maybe one day have my own place, maybe think about having a family. I can’t imagine working on any of these other issues I care about, whether it’s climate or immigration or anything else, unless I can survive and my family can survive.’”

Still, getting a tight-knit town that has subsisted on its own to embrace a lofty idea made popular in cities like New York, Los Angeles and Chicago has not been easy. There’s concern over how businesses will be able to absorb the increased personnel costs. There’s dismissiveness because the effort is being led by young women — people say they’re just high schoolers who need to take an economics class, Kent said.  

Plus, she added, “with a lot of Nome, change is scary for them.” 

But the arguments against a minimum wage hike in Nome are similar to those heard across the country, Jayaraman said. Primarily, it’s the worry that it will lead to rising costs. Minimum wage increases have led to some modest employment loss and some added costs to businesses — but these are often offset by rising revenues. Extensive research that’s been done on minimum wage initiatives over the years has also found significant positive benefits for workers, and particularly low-wage ones. 

“What the girls are saying is, ‘We need money to survive costs going up,’” Jayaraman said. For many people in America now, “that argument that it’s going to make costs go up and therefore we can’t do it, they’re like: ‘Costs have already gone up. What are you talking about? The only thing that hasn’t gone up is my paycheck.’”

Kent starts every conversation when she goes out to collect signatures with the same question: “How much money do you make?” 

She and the other students are rushing to collect signatures before their deadline is up. Admittedly, it’s been tough to do with most of them out of town or preparing for college this summer. Stasenko already moved to Washington state to attend Shoreline Community College, where she’s studying accounting and playing college volleyball. 

Kent will soon move to Colorado to attend Fort Lewis College. As she’s made her final push for signatures, she’s been thinking about how this effort might ensure that if she ever comes back home to make a life, she can. 

Before all of this started, she and the other students had never done any activism like this. For Kent, taking it on has helped solidify what she wants to do with her life. When she gets to Colorado this fall, she’ll major in political science.