Josie Heyano

Josie Heyano, LMSW is a Deg Xinag Athabascan woman from Alaska. She is the daughter of Nina Heyano of Tanana and David Heyano of Ekuk. Her maternal grandparents are the late Paul and Mary Starr of Tanana and Alfred Miller of Anvik. Her paternal grandparents are the late Pete and Rosa Heyano of Ekuk.

Her passion for this work includes creating and implementing holistic and decolonized practices within service organizations to better serve Alaska Native and Indigenous people. She is driven to bring awareness to the prevalence of human trafficking in rural communities and to the intersections of MMIP and trafficking.  In her work, she hopes to collaborate with communities to understand risk factors for trafficking better, create regionally-specific prevention programs, train and empower service providers to talk about trafficking, and use her own experiences to inform policy for services and programs aimed at supporting trafficking survivors.

Josie has several years of experience providing systems navigation and advocacy for youth experiencing homelessness, exploitation, and trafficking in Alaska. She currently serves as the clinical supervisor at Seaview Mental Health Center where she is pursuing her LCSW and developing her trauma therapy skills. She previously served as a Mental Health Clinician with Southcentral Foundation stationed at the Covenant House Alaska where she worked with youth who have experienced exploitation, previous to that she was the Subject Matter Expert for Covenant House Alaska’s human trafficking prevention and intervention program. In 2022 she completed a graduate fellowship with Prevention Now, an anti-trafficking non-profit that leverages data and technology to uncover why human trafficking occurs, where she completed a landscape analysis of Human Trafficking data needs in Alaska.

In addition, Josie founded Signify Consulting, LLC in 2022 and uses this as a platform to share her experience and lend knowledge and collaboration to communities engaged in anti-trafficking work in Alaska. 

Josie is a presidentially appointed member of the United States Advisory Council on Human Trafficking, a formal platform to advise and make recommendations on federal anti-trafficking policies to the President’s Interagency Task Force to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons (PITF). She also serves on the advisory board of the National Center on Child Trafficking. In 2023 she was awarded the Federal Bureau of Investigations Director’s Community Leadership Award for her service to the community of Alaska and her collective stakeholder approach to Human Trafficking prevention and intervention.

Her work is done in memory of her great aunt Linda Miller, murdered in Anchorage in 1973, her case remains unsolved-  and for all the girls we loved who are still waiting for justice.