AKMA Member Christine Hopkins Named 2026 Small Business Advocate of the Year

Small businesses spend most of their time doing the work in front of them. They’re hiring people, serving customers, chasing opportunities, managing costs, solving problems, and trying to figure out what comes next.

What’s harder is making sure the realities behind that work are understood by the people making decisions that affect small businesses.

That’s why we’re especially excited to share some national recognition for one of our own.

Christine Hopkins, President, CEO, and Managing Owner of AKMA member ASCI Family of Companies, has been named the 2026 Lewis Shattuck Small Business Advocate of the Year by the National Small Business Association.

The award recognizes Christine’s advocacy on behalf of small businesses, including women-owned and veteran-owned businesses, federal contractors, and entrepreneurs across the country. It follows her selection as the Rising Star for the same award in 2025.

For us, that progression is pretty meaningful.

Christine isn’t being recognized simply for growing a successful company. She’s being recognized for using what she’s learned running one to help make sure other small businesses have a voice too.

Advocacy Starts With Understanding What Businesses Are Actually Up Against

There’s a difference between talking about small business and actually understanding what it takes to operate one.

Owners see where regulations create unexpected friction. Federal contractors understand what procurement processes look like from the supplier side. Manufacturers know where freight, workforce, financing, certifications, and customer requirements collide with the realities of trying to produce something profitably.

That experience matters when conversations move beyond an individual company and into decisions affecting an entire business community.

It’s something AKMA thinks about often.

Manufacturing businesses, especially smaller ones, don’t always have teams of people whose job is to watch policy, attend every meeting, track every program, or explain how a proposed change will affect operations. Most are busy making the product and running the company.

That makes experienced business leaders who are willing to carry those perspectives into larger conversations incredibly valuable.

Christine’s advocacy has included women-owned and veteran-owned businesses, federal contractors, entrepreneurs, and small companies more broadly. Those groups don’t all face identical challenges, but they often share a basic need: decision-makers have to understand what policies, programs, and systems look like from the business side of the table.

That doesn’t mean small businesses will always agree on the answer.

It means their experience should be part of the conversation. And that idea is especially relevant in Alaska.

Many of the businesses we work with are operating under conditions that don’t translate neatly from somewhere else. Freight takes longer. Markets are smaller. Labor pools can be thin. Federal contracting plays an outsized role for some companies. A requirement that looks minor on paper may become much more expensive when equipment, materials, inspectors, or specialized workers have to travel thousands of miles.

Those details matter.

They’re also easy to miss if nobody explains them.

That’s one reason advocacy is more than simply asking for help. At its best, it gives decision-makers a clearer picture of how businesses actually operate so programs and policies can be built with those realities in mind.

For manufacturers, that can mean explaining why a seemingly simple procurement requirement creates a barrier for a small supplier. It can mean showing how certification costs affect a company trying to reach its first major customer. It can mean helping people understand that increasing manufacturing capacity takes more than buying equipment, or that a workforce shortage may actually be connected to housing, childcare, training capacity, or transportation.

Those conversations get better when the people doing the work are part of them.

Strong Businesses Can Strengthen the Businesses Around Them

One of the things we want AKMA to keep building is an industry where experience doesn’t stay locked inside individual companies.

We’ve talked about that with manufacturing knowledge, supply chains, workforce development, and even the lessons companies learn the expensive way. Advocacy is another version of the same idea.

When a business owner takes what they’ve learned and uses it to improve the environment for other businesses, that knowledge starts creating value beyond one company.

Christine’s recognition is a great example.

ASCI has grown from its Alaska roots into a group of companies working in supply chain, logistics, government contracting, and related services. That means Christine has seen many of the issues small businesses encounter from the inside, and she’s chosen to use that experience to advocate for a broader business community.

The National Small Business Association recognized that work first by naming her a Rising Star in 2025 and now by selecting her as the 2026 Lewis Shattuck Small Business Advocate of the Year.

For AKMA, we’re proud to see one of our members recognized nationally, but we’re just as glad to see what she’s being recognized for.

Alaska needs people building strong companies. We also need people willing to take what they learn building those companies and use it to strengthen the environment around them. Those two things reinforce each other.

A stronger small-business community creates more suppliers, more employers, more customers, more expertise, and more opportunities for collaboration. And when businesses have a meaningful voice in conversations affecting their future, we have a better chance of solving the problems actually standing in the way of growth.

Congratulations to Christine and the entire ASCI Family of Companies team on this well-deserved recognition.

We’re proud to have you as part of AKMA.

Read ASCI’s full announcement:https://www.ascillc.com/post/christine-hopkins-named-2026-lewis-shattuck-small-business-advocate-of-the-year

Source

ASCI Family of Companies, “Christine Hopkins Named 2026 Lewis Shattuck Small Business Advocate of the Year,” October 2026.https://www.ascillc.com/post/christine-hopkins-named-2026-lewis-shattuck-small-business-advocate-of-the-year