By Ginny Espenshade and Ashe Dias

Homer Independent Press

Last week the Homer Independent Press (HIP) went live with its calendar function, an exciting collaboration with an existing online calendar created and maintained by local youth at wherecanihomer.org. This new milestone honors the work already done by the teens on their youth calendar, “Where Can I Homer,” while challenging them to expand their project to include events and activities geared more towards adults — called “Where Can I Homer+.”

Click the Calendar tab on Homer Independent Press to find hundreds of local events for all ages on “Where Can I Homer+.” Contact the staff to learn how your events could be listed. (Screenshot from “Where Can I Homer” calendar – Homer Independent Press)


To get an event or activity listed, organizers can contact the calendar staff through the contact button on the home page at wherecanihomer.org or by emailing them at admin@wherecanihomer.org. A member of the team will reply and set up the best way to get information posted going forward. Community feedback and input is crucial to the ongoing success of this new collaboration.

Looking for something to do Saturday? See what “Where Can I Homer+” recommends. (Screenshot from “Where Can I Homer calendar” – Homer Independent Press)


Four years in the making


The work on an online calendar for kids and teens in the greater Homer area began in 2022, when Kenai Peninsula Youth Court and the Southern Kenai Peninsula Resiliency Coalition realized and began working to meet the need for current and centralized information for kids. At first the two agencies took disparate paths toward this goal, but eventually they merged efforts. 


Kenai Peninsula Youth Court (KPYC) gives kids a second chance by diverting their misdemeanor or underage drinking matters to a peer court. Traditionally, Youth Court sentences included community work service, but in 2022 the youth volunteers began to also value and credit community engagement as another possible consequence for offenders. This approach is consistent with a basic principle of primary prevention that connecting youth with engaging and safe activities helps prevent unhealthy choices.


When the Youth Court started to include community involvement in their sentences, they realized that it would be more effective if they also provided the youth in trouble with up-to-date information on the activities and events available. What they discovered was a multitude of calendars for each organization or venue, all in different formats, on separate websites, and with mixed degrees of accuracy. This led them to begin working on developing and implementing their own vision of a centralized, online calendar for and by youth.


A vision for youth by youth


KPYC funded a work group of teens that began the process of looking at calendars and directories from all over the world, discussing what they liked and disliked about each of them. The students working on this initial stage of the project included Ashe Dias, Thea James, Kea Neveras, Augustine Schneider, Lukas Renner, Judah Klann, Alana Houlihan, Alivia Fefelov and Ludmilla Basargin. 


Meanwhile, the Southern Kenai Peninsula Resilience Coalition (SKPRC) was bringing together youth serving agencies to discuss how to improve the lives of Homer area youth. At one gathering on May 31, 2023, a prevalent theme was how difficult it was to know what programs were available at any given time, even for the other agencies working with youth. The Resilience Coalition funded a position for a teen whose duties included collecting information about teen activities and events and sharing that information in a weekly instagram post. Sofia Loboy held that position until she graduated in 2025. 


These two efforts united in 2023 with KPYC and SKPRC making a commitment to fund one or two teen positions each to collaboratively create and maintain the calendar. Ashe Dias and Sofia Loboy continued to be involved in the project, and they worked with local graphic designer Jody Mastey with Fiddlehead Creative to create the name, logo and website.


The next step, in the fall of 2023, was a series of “tea parties” — gatherings with youth serving groups to explain the website and establish connections between the providers with the youth working on the calendar. The goal was to connect the event and activity organizers with the youth entering their data, a relationship that would help ensure timely and accurate information on the calendar. Around this time Ella Gustafson, Poppy Smith and Ahni Cook joined the staff as additional “Youth Connectors.”


Thousands of events for all ages


The website went live in September 2024. Since then, more 1,400 events have been listed, with everything from games at the Gilded Table to the Homer Pool schedule. More than 100 organizers and even more venues have been entered. As the work continues, the project is currently recruiting additional teen staff members whose main duty will be outreach, to get more of their peers to use the calendar. (More information about that opportunity can be found on the website.) Since its launch in 2024, the focus of the calendar has been on activities and events for youth, while it has also included many family friendly multi-generational activities.

The “Where Can I Homer” team maps out its work in 2024, including, from left to right, Ahni Cook, Sophia Loboy, Ashe Dias, Poppy Smith and Jody Mastey. (Photo provided by “Where Can I Homer“)


The newest development for the calendar came this spring when the Homer Independent Press reached out to explore the possibility of partnering with “Where Can I Homer” to sync the calendar on the news outlet’s website, with an additional section for events and activities geared towards adults only. That partnership became a reality on April 16, 2026, when “Where Can I Homer +” went live as the calendar for the Homer Independent Press.


According to a Memorandum of Agreement signed just last week, the paper will pay for the Youth Connectors’ work on data entry for the adult events. While this development was not foreseen by the founding teens, it is a welcome expansion of the calendar’s reach, and it is consistent with the shared value of community wellness through engagement and activity. Just days after the launch of “Where Can I Homer +,” the calendar received more than 14 new events to post from several new partners.