By Jennifer Leahy

When Lisa Pekich, director, ConocoPhillips Alaska Village Outreach, left Anchorage to attend California Polytechnic State University, there was no doubt in her mind that the move was temporary. After earning a degree in civil engineering, she couldn’t wait to move back home to Alaska, “the last frontier.”

The daughter of a Standard Oil and Alyeska Pipeline employee, Lisa was familiar with the opportunities the oil industry offers Alaskans and eager to start her career at ARCO, a ConocoPhillips heritage company. Her first professional role as an environmental coordinator permitting projects on Alaska’s North Slope set the stage for her career. 

“I found myself spending more and more time in communities, talking to people about our operations.”

Her unofficial education had begun.  

“Life on the Slope is very different from life in Anchorage. The Indigenous way of life in rural Alaska is nothing like my experience growing up,” she said.

She immersed herself in the culture, taking the time to meet people living near company operations and understand their perspectives and concerns. As her knowledge increased, her career progressed. She joined the Alaska business unit Strategy & Planning group in 2004, where she learned the complex commercial arrangements that cover how oil flows down the pipeline.

 Her people skills were quickly called into duty on the Denali natural gas project.

“They needed someone who could represent ConocoPhillips in the field, who could let folks in nearby communities know what we were doing and help incorporate their input into the project design,” she said.

Lisa, who became ConocoPhillips Alaska Village Outreach director in 2011, oversees a team of four liaisons, two based in Anchorage and two on the North Slope.

Lance Hathaway and Curtis Ahvakana are both Iñupiat and work from an Alpine Field office on the Western North Slope, connected via road to their home village of Nuiqsut. Both started as high school students in the ConocoPhillips Career Quest program and progressed to interns and then full-time oilfield employees.

Designed to expose high school students from the Nuiqsut Trapper School to various Alpine careers, Career Quest offers job-shadowing experience with Alpine employees in the fall and local businesses and organizations in the summer. The program has served more than 300 students.

Curtis and Lance work to address community concerns and share information about Indigenous lifestyles and customs with company workers, helping to promote cultural understanding and prevent conflicts.

“Remote Alaska presents some inherent challenges. Our camps are their own little cities. We’re connected to Nuiqsut, and the roads are open to community members. Hunters have embraced the roads, and we provide safety measures for them and our workforce,” Lisa said.

Managing and mitigating the potential community impact of ConocoPhillips operations is no simple task. The mother of three grown sons, Lisa is well-versed at problem solving.

“Solutions can be as simple as asking drivers to slow down, so they don’t spray someone on an ATV with gravel as they drive by. We work with hunters to ensure they aren’t creating a dangerous situation around equipment. It’s about encouraging safe behavior.”

Lisa and her colleagues focus on ensuring ConocoPhillips activities don’t interfere with neighbors’ subsistence lifestyle, including helicopters and airplanes that may disrupt caribou.

During helicopter season, Lisa’s colleague, Village Outreach Liaison Mark Jennings, starts each day leading a conference call with aircraft operators and Nuiqsut stakeholders. The village subsistence representative shares anticipated locations of hunting and gathering activities. Call participants discuss where wildlife has been spotted on the slope, allowing helicopter pilots to make necessary adjustments to avoid these areas. As needed, pilots also adjust flight paths to avoid disturbing large groups of caribou, hunters and gatherers, other community members and gravel roads being used for subsistence activities. Charts are distributed throughout the community to identify any aircraft they might see while engaged in subsistence activities. 

“We approach development as a collaborative process, listening to community leaders and making the changes needed to address their concerns while we’re planning our projects,” Mark said.

Notable examples of this approach include cancelling initial plans for the use of a gravel island when constructing the Willow project after concerns were expressed by members of the village leadership, the Alaska Eskimo Whaling Commission and Nuiqsut whaling captains.

During the project planning process, Lisa and her team consulted with village elders to understand culturally significant areas and learn how to best support local job opportunities. Based on community feedback, roads near Willow will include pull-outs and off ramps, located every 2.5 to 3 miles, for parking and tundra access. These considerations resulted from years of communicating and addressing “constant touch points” via personal conversations, open community forums, job fairs and meetings with elected officials.

Lisa’s team hosts a Facebook page for the Nuiqsut community, provides weekly community email updates, produces a quarterly community newsletter and is always available by phone and email to discuss concerns.

“Our ongoing focus is to be a good neighbor,” she said.

The fourth member of Lisa’s team, Valli Peterson, coordinates workforce development and community programs on the North Slope. She runs Career Quest, job fairs, skiing-centered spring break camps and low-cost farmers markets that benefit the local food bank. Valli has developed strong relationships with community members and assists them with resumes and job training. An Alaska native from Bristol Bay, she grew up in a village like Nuiqsut and feels at home engaging with local stakeholders.

“These community-focused events build relationships so we can have respectful dialogue,” Lisa said.

As part of their role, Lisa and her team frequently encounter and work through conflicting points of view.

“I tell my team, there’s no wrong or right side – let’s listen to both sides and figure out what we can do better, how we can be better. There will be differences of opinion, but we can get through them.”

This dedication to reaching common ground underpins all stakeholder engagement activities in Alaska.

“We are the operator of choice for the Slope community," said Lisa. "They know who we are and who to call if there’s a concern. The community sees us as wanting to help, to do the right thing. It’s all about solving problems and building relationships – that’s what we do.”