President’s Message: Internships

Andrew Guy, President and CEO

Storyknife, Jan/Feb 2024 edition

Andrew Guy, Calista President/CEO

Calista Corporation started out with a little over 13,000 Shareholders. Of those Original Shareholders, we now number a little over 8,000, so we are just a small part of the Shareholder base, which is about 37,000 Shareholders to date and growing.

Through internships, we can provide our younger Shareholders with working knowledge and practical skills learned through mentorships and learned experiences.

Andrew Guy, Calista Corp. President and CEO

We have to plan and raise up the younger generations to keep Calista on a prosperous path. We won’t always be there, so we need to lay the foundation for the following generations to learn, use and keep us on this path we began so many years ago.

Our future depends on building up our talent, the skills of our younger generations.

Additionally, we have to keep our traditional ways of thinking at the Board level and beyond. In our early years as a corporation, we thought we had to do business like outsiders do business, and that caused many years of financial hardship. That was the wrong path for us.

Our culture is very strong, and we have had several millennia of success in our sub-arctic climate. Those values brought Calista back. I tell our employees that our people are the most hyper-methodical, as we have a system or process for everything. We even have a process for becoming a real human being—Yuuyaraq [YUU-yah-uk].

We need to carry on that systematic approach to continue the success of our corporation. Through internships, we can provide our younger Shareholders with working knowledge and practical skills learned through mentorships and learned experiences.

Calista translates to “the worker” in Yugtun. I began work at Calista as an intern, and an internship is one of the best ways to learn the inner workings of a corporation from the ground up. As we build our next generation of youth and prepare them to serve our people, we must be willing to pass on the business and cultural knowledge to keep on the path to success.