This is Tongass Voices, a series from KTOO sharing weekly perspectives from the homelands of the Áak’w Kwáan and beyond.
Khrystl Brouillette-Gillam and Joey Scoggins are part of the team behind the Juneau Hostel. Their mutual desire to make travel to Juneau affordable is what drives them to keep the nonprofit hostel’s doors open.
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This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
Joey Scoggins: My name is Joseph Scoggins, I go by Joey, and I’m the manager of the Juneau Hostel.
I’m from Georgia. And I never had an opportunity to really travel outside the state until I was almost 30. And then I just randomly needed a reset. So I moved out to California, because I had a friend with a couch and he said, c’mon over. I loved it out there, worked at Disneyland and all that fun stuff. One day, it just hit me. I was like, it’s March and it’s 100 degrees. I can’t live here anymore. So I went online, and I saw this hostel opportunity. I was like, you know, this is an opportunity to finally make it to Alaska, because I have been applying for jobs up here probably since I was like 19, you know, but it was always like, can you get here? Like, sorry, we can’t hire you. You know, so I finally got here. And that was the hardest part.
Khrystl Brouillette-Gillam: No, I think yeah, the point of the hostel is to provide people with a low cost place to stay. And the point, the reason why we run it with volunteers like this, is to give people like Joey and others an opportunity to live in Alaska and enjoy everything we have in Juneau, but at a lower cost.
My name is Khrystl Brouillette-Gillam, and I’m the president of the Juneau Hostel Board of Directors. So we’re the only nonprofit hostel in Alaska, and one of the very few that I can find, nonprofit hostels in the U.S. And that makes us different, makes us keep costs low. So that’s how we’re able to offer like $30 for a bunk versus other hostels that charge a little bit more.
Yeah, so what you’re seeing right now, obviously, we have a private group staying so there’s games around, and books around, and hostel’s full of life right now. In the wintertime, we don’t have that many guests. So the hostel is a very different vibe. But we’re excited to have the energy back in the hostel.
Joey Scoggins: Compared to summer months, we’ll have like a couple dozen every day, you know what I mean? It’s a lot more fun. Gentleman that came last summer, he’s a big fan of an author that lived around here. And he was actually from somewhere in Eastern Europe. He was writing his own novel, and he had hit of a writer’s block kind of thing. So he was like, I’m gonna go there, I’m gonna go to Juneau, I’m gonna walk those same paths this guy did.
Khrystl Brouillette-Gillam: So like I said, the hostel operates as a nonprofit, which is great because it keeps our costs down for our guests, but has some other problems with it. And the biggest thing is just funding of course, that’s the biggest thing with all nonprofits. We do have a source of funding through renting rooms to people, but it’s definitely not enough to cover all of our expenses.
During COVID, we had to shut down operations almost entirely. I wasn’t on the board at that point. But we had to shut down all operations, and the hostel was actually thinking about closing — was very close to shutting our doors and not being open anymore.
Joey Scoggins: This is just a few weeks ago, we had a prank call. But it turned into a serious conversation where the gentleman was concerned because all the other hostels he had called in Alaska to try and prank call had already closed down or turned into AirBNBs. And he was like, so, I was just messing with you, but I’m kind of glad you’re still there.
Khrystl Brouillette-Gillam: So if you don’t want the Juneau Hostel to turn into an AirBNB, please join the board. We would love to keep it running.
Correction: An earlier version of this story misspelled Khrystl’s name.