Karen Perdue is a life long Alaskan, who was raised in Fairbanks Alaska and after public service in Washington DC and Juneau, returned to her community to work and retire. She loves Alaska and the Northern lifestyle, particularly the culture and history of the region.
Perdue is grateful for the many people who guided her and gave her a chance to succeed throughout her life. She learned about public service by watching her parents, Ralph, and Dorothy Perdue. As a child she participated in many of the volunteer activities her parents were involved in as they devoted their efforts to advocacy of the Native community in Fairbanks.
One example of this ethic of public service, Ralph and Dorothy created and implemented the Alaska Boarding Home Program in Fairbanks, a program that welcomed Native kids from rural villages into their home so that they could attend school in Fairbanks. Back in the day, school options for village kids ended at the 6th grade. This Boarding Home Program allowed these kids to attend Jr. High and High School in Fairbanks.
This was a program sponsored by the Fairbanks Native Association, which was founded by a group of Native leaders in Fairbanks, including Ralph Perdue, and included a number of other families in town.
In keeping with their service to village Alaska, another family task was to support the Tundra Times. Ralph and Dorothy were friends with Howard Rock, the publisher of the Tundra Times. They shared the view that it was important to communicate what was going on in discussions about Native land claims among people across rural Alaska.
In these activities, Ralph and Dorothy were always encouraging their daughters to take risks and to give back to the community.
Karen Perdue has had a successful career in public policy which has included health, higher education, and community development. Perdue has been greatly assisted in these efforts by great mentors, cooperative colleagues, inspiring bosses, and supportive Board members.
Over the years Perdue was appointed to positions of leadership by four governors, one Lt Governor, one US Senator, the President of the University of Alaska as well community minded Board members of non-profit organizations.
When Perdue was in high school she became a student reporter, reporting on youth activities for the Fairbanks Daily News Miner. There, she was inspired by journalism, encouraged by Judy Brady and many other great reporters. Adult mentors greatly assisted Perdue; proofreading her stories, explaining the process of gathering information and researching issues within the community.
While at the News Miner, and while still in high school, Perdue through the paper’s publisher, CW Snedden, met Senator Ted Stevens. It was through this connection that Senator Stevens invited Perdue to be a summer intern in his office in Washington DC. Perdue ascribes much of her later success in public service to the lessons learned from each of these wonderful mentors.
She went on to write and publish a weekly newspaper with high school students from Interior Villages- the River Times- which won an Alaska Press Award for best non-daily newspaper.
The development of the Trans Alaska pipeline changed Perdue’s focus on how to spend her summers. She worked as a Teamster on the pipeline for four summers, a work schedule that was fourteen hours a day, seven days a week. Recently she reflected that it was while working on the pipeline that she learned how to get along in a “man’s world”. She also learned how to choose her battles, and to be clear about when to take a stand. She drove trucks through the Brooks Range and eventually became a warehouse foreman, leading an all-woman and minority crew. She also learned the value of union representation – particularly crucial in a time of sexual harassment and discrimination.
Through her work on the pipeline Perdue earned enough money to pay for much of her tuition at Stanford University. As much as the pipeline work was a learning experience- attending a large university was a major learning experience for a girl from a little Northern town. She studied broadly including literature, music, and science-graduating in 1978.
The summer after college graduation she was volunteering at the booth of Ted Stevens at the Tanana Valley Fair, when Senator Stevens stopped by. He remembered her and asked her if she had graduated yet. When she said yes, he offered her a job on the spot, and Perdue reported for duty in Washington DC in December of 1978.
This was a difficult time for the Senator and his office as his wife Ann and several others had died in a plane crash in Anchorage in December. Perdue was hired as Assistant Press Secretary. The press office was crucial to helping a grieving Senator as he navigated the restart of legislation on the Alaska National Interest Conservation Act (ANILCA). At the end of previous the congressional year, a compromise of the bill had been killed. And after the election Stevens had to face a whole new Congress.
As a result, Perdue came to be immersed in the details of the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (ANILCA). This was a conflict-ridden law regulating land use of millions of acres of land throughout Alaska.
In addition to ANILCA, Perdue also began to work on other legislative matters and in process she learned the art of negotiation, learning how to work with and get along with people of greatly diverging opinions.
She returned to Alaska in 1981 when Lt Governor Terry Miller offered her a position in the Hammond Administration. Miller was from her hometown, and she was inspired by his talent and leadership and wanted to help him in his run for Governor. Miller was talented but not elected – Bill Sheffield was chosen as Governor.
As Sheffield staffed his administration, he offered Perdue a job as the Director of Community Development, in what was then, the Department of Community and Regional Affairs. Again, Perdue said yes, and she quickly learned about the various programs the Division offered which strengthened communities across state. Along the way Perdue developed lifelong professional working relationships with colleagues from and in the many communities in Alaska.
In 1985 Governor Sheffield offered Perdue the opportunity to become Deputy Commissioner of the Department of Health and Social Services (DHSS). And again, Perdue said yes. It was in this job Perdue became very familiar with the administrative and financial structure of the Department. She also became fully aware of the Departments challenges in providing essential services to Alaska residents, through what is one of the most complex departments in state government. In this public service role, Perdue learned of the many of the complexities existing in the lives of Alaskans.
Perdue spent countless hours working with advocates to settle Mental Health Trust Lands issues, resulting in the creation of the Alaska Mental Trust Authority.
In 1989 she returned to Fairbanks and was a Consultant and a Partner in Northern Research and Planning Company, where she worked on developing standards and evaluation tools for health and social service providers, for community-based health systems for children, for the elderly, and persons with disabilities.
In 1994 Ms. Perdue was appointed by Governor Knowles to serve as the Commissioner of the Department of Health and Social Services in Juneau, a Department which she really understood. Perdue served in the position for eight years, making her the longest serving person in that role since statehood.
The DHSS addresses many of the complex issues of life and death for the citizens of Alaska. She grew to understand that government touches the lives of the poor, the sick and the young in so many ways. It became her goal to assure that her team would make these encounters as helpful as possible, particularly for children. To that end she championed pathways to expand the Medicaid waiver system, to minimize barriers to receiving health insurance, and created the Denali Kid Care health insurance program which has provided health care coverage for hundreds of thousands of pregnant moms and children over the years.
From a management perspective, Perdue set the tone for the 2,200+ person agency by seeking to generate the best in each staff member. She found that listening during brainstorming sessions generated broad ideas of how to enhance the agency’s service delivery. She oversaw the fiscal management of a $1.2 billion budget.
With the goal of improving the lives of the developmentally disabled individuals, her team closed large institutional care facilities, and created instead small group homes and independent living options. She led the state’s efforts in welfare reform, child protection, juvenile justice, and championed an initiative addressing fetal alcohol syndrome.
After nearly a decade in Juneau, she returned home to Fairbanks, where she accepted the role of Associate Vice President of Health Programs at the University of Alaska. There she worked with industry, University Chancellors, and faculty in the expansion of the academic programs of nursing, medical education, pharmacy, and behavioral health.
Over her ten years of service in this role, Ms. Perdue engaged a team of colleagues who re-imagined the higher education delivery system, one which did not rely on a campus setting but utilized a concept of Distance Education, utilizing advances in communication technology, the University was able to provide access to higher education to students throughout Alaska, including rural and remote locations. In this way the University system was able to grow he States own professionals in communities across Alaska.
A paradigm shift was beginning in professional health education. Instead of perceiving rural campus settings as a “constraint to education”, students in rural communities were valued as being “committed to place” . This resulted in a system where Alaska professionals can be grown to serve their home communities as nurses, pharmacists, nutritionists, therapists, and behavior health care providers. Students educated in their own communities tend to stay and practice there- a key strategy in breaking the cycle of turnover.
Importantly, long before the Covid Pandemic, the University of Alaska administrators, staff and students more fully developed a distance delivery of education, with the result that the University easily adapted to the constraints of gathering caused by the Pandemic.
Today the University of Alaska is a world leader in higher education distance delivery to non-campus communities. In these communities there is family support for students, creating a valuable option to traveling elsewhere, alone, to take in new knowledge.
Utilizing the University’s Distance Delivery System, Perdue and her team created pathways for rural individuals to become a registered nurses in 16 communities throughout Alaska, a program that has expanded to multiple other professions.
While serving as the Vice President of the University, Ms. Perdue engaged in other projects that celebrated the history of Alaska and the growing awareness that Alaska had a role to play in international Arctic science and policy.
She served as the Principal Investigator of “Eight Stars of Gold”, a multi-year project to commemorate the 50th Anniversary of Alaska’s writing of its Constitution. The project collected historic materials from libraries and museums and produced two one-hour public television documentaries that won National Emmy awards. The Alaska Constitution was written at a convention hosted at the University of Alaska in 1955. All living delegates were invited to a two-day community event that was held on the Fairbanks campus to discuss the constitution. Particularly important were activities that involved high school and college students in meeting and learning from the original people that wrote Alaska’s constitution.

Ms. Perdue was named and served for 10 years as a United States Representative to the Arctic Council, an eight-nation government to government forum on artic issues promoting cooperation in the Arctic. The member Nations of the Arctic Council are Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Russia, Sweden, and the United States. Her role was to represent the USA on matters of sustainable development across the Arctic region, including how Arctic peoples could be involved in the changing Arctic as the climate changes and development continued.

She also served as an Investigator of a report entitled, “The Forgotten Alaskans: The Morningside Hospital Project”. She led a team of volunteer researchers in Alaska, Washington DC, and Oregon to reconstruct the history of Morningside Hospital, in Portland Oregon, where as many as 5,000 of Alaska’s mentally ill were served from 1901-1967. For her, the true importance of this project resulted from her efforts to learn of the fate of a family member. Additionally, though her experience in the field of mental health, she understood the unresolved grief and trauma from people being permanently removed from their communities for care.
From 2010 to 2015 Ms. Perdue served as the President and CEO of the Alaska Hospital and Nursing Home Association. She represented this industry in Alaska with the Governor and the state Administration, the legislature, the federal government, and the US Congress.
In 2017 Ms. Perdue was appointed to the University of Alaska Board of Regents. She serves as the vice chair of the board. She is semi-retired, focusing her work on critical public health issues, serving on the Board of Directors of Fairbanks Community Hospital Foundation.
She is the recipient of numerous awards including the National Rural Mental Health Association Victor Howery Award and the Alaska Historical Society for her role in the Forgotten Alaskans Morningside Project. She has been honored by both the Girl and Boy Scouts as a Distinguished citizen.
She was awarded an Honorary Doctor of Laws from the University of Alaska Fairbanks in 2017.
The actions of Karen Perdue throughout her life have been of public service to the state and the people of Alaska. As one of her longtime fans and associates said,
“Karen’s ongoing commitment to Alaskans, and particularly Alaska’s health systems that serve us all, is limitless.  One of the aspects of her personality that has always inspired me is the thoughtfulness, hard work and energy she generates for any effort or organization to which she’s committed. Frankly, she’s not only one of my dearest friends, but also one of my hero’s.”
Quote from Marty Rutherford, former colleague of Ms. Perdue at the Department of Community and Regional Affairs and close friend for over 40 years.
Karen Perdue has been married to Charles Bettisworth since 1988. They are “Mops and Pops” to 4 children and are proud of their 6 grandchildren. For 40 years they have roamed the waters of Southeast Alaska in their trawler and the rivers of Interior Alaska. Perdue has become a collector of Alaska history items and of indigenous ethnographic material in order to preserve these treasures for future generations.