| Happy Windy March!
This month I wanted to talk about the necessity for community/public/private partnerships.
The problems we face in our community are rarely solved by a single individual, a single organization, or a single arm of government. Most successfully resolved challenges are done through collaboration. I think we all know that the Federal, State, or County government is not going to solve all the problems a community faces, in fact rarely. Not to say they do not have the ability and responsibility to address many things, but if we want something bigger, better, or faster it likely will take many willing hands to lift it to success in an expedited time frame.
Anaina Hou began developing community partnerships across the island in 2021, which is a slight deviation from the original vision of AHCP. Anaina Hou started as the “Gathering Place” and was gifted to the community by two generous people who loved Kilauea, Bill & Joan Porter. Soon following, Joan left Kauaʻi and returned to the mainland, though she sits on our board still today and remains extremely supportive and apprised of all the shifts, changes, and future vision for Anaina Hou. In 2019 I advocated to broaden the mission and impact of Anaina Hou, and with the Board’s participation and support that change was made.
Anaina Hou Community Park’s mission statement expanded from this:
Our Former Mission Statement Anaina Hou Community Park provides a gathering place in Kilauea rooted in the values, history and culture of our diverse island community.
To this:
Our Current Mission Statement Anaina Hou Community Park is a community-gathering place on Kauaʻi’s north shore that is rooted in our diverse history and where we honor the culture of these islands that calls us to Malama (care for) the land & sea, ourselves, and each other. To this end, we dedicate ourselves to developing public and private partnerships that benefit our greater island community through education, health and public safety, environmental stewardship, and quality entertainment.
Essentially, there have become two parts to AHCP, one grounded in the vision of providing the community with art, music, culture, and family activities, and the other embracing more social responsibility. Anaina Hou will always be the Gathering Place, as this is at the very heart of the organization, but it has become a more mature version of itself as new people become involved, and new community needs and opportunities are identified. The unexpected did happen and Anaina Hou was not prepared, it had never been financially sustainable and truthfully it did not need to be while Bill and Joan were involved. As the sole benefactors they financed the organization on a large scale all the way through 2018 which was the year Joan identified where funding would stop; I took the helm in 2019 and inherited an organization that was bereft of a plan or enough foreseeable revenue to ever survive.
The time for change had come and it would not be an easy transition. Much of the community had come to expect things for free and presumed the changes being made were from a greedy, uppity place. These changes have never been generated from that place, to the contrary, they came from a position of… if AHCP does not form a business model that generates enough revenue to pay the bills, maintain the property, pay the taxes and insurance, it will not exist beyond two years and everything else becomes moot. And yet, while 2019 was tough, we had no idea what was coming next…
Within two weeks of the pandemic being announced, we had to close and subsequently lost 90% of our revenue for 2020. We added a few small things to offer the community within the County’s guidelines, but largely due to the size of group activities and events that AHCP normally hosted, 2020 and 2021 did not allow for the growth and sustainability we had hoped for. However, we did have a rainy-day account and with some County and Federal funding that became available, we cobbled together enough to maintain the campus and retain a very small skeleton staff. 2020 and 2021 provided, ironically, the perfect time to step into the new aspects of our expanded mission statement, which we did in a variety of ways.
We adopted the Kauaʻi North Shore Food Pantry as a permanent member of our ʻOhana and began offering our facility to community organizations for trainings or for an access point for the things they themselves were providing to the community. The Haven was also formed to temporarily provide relief in a safe environment for keiki who’d been fully displaced in their normal routines by the closure of their schools. As all of these opportunities presented themselves, so did a myriad of like-minded partnerships form, and new partnerships continue being built today. Some of these partnerships include Kauaʻi Fire Department, Kauaʻi Search & Rescue, Wilcox Medical Center, Kilauea Elementary School, Kauaʻi Humane Society, Kauaʻi Chamber of Commerce, Kauaʻi Visitors Bureau, Kauaʻi Police Department, American Red Cross, Keiki to Career and Kauai Planning and Action Alliance, and one of our most recent ones, Project Vision Hawaii.
During this time we also discussed what we could do with our expanded mission statement on a larger and more permanent scale, and we identified two specific areas that we would focus on, public health & safety and education. We were painfully aware that in the health & safety area there literally is nowhere to go on this island (and largely the state as a whole) where individuals and families, including visitors, could go to be fully safe in a hurricane; especially the kind that are prevalent now which are vastly more stronger and move through much slower over islands and communities. We were also given a mountain of feedback that a fire station was desperately needed due to the distance between the station in Princeville and the station in Kealia. This, coupled with the vast area the Princeville station is responsible (including problematic areas like Queen’s Bath and the Kalalau Trail). Having a station somewhere between Anahola and Kilauea, had actually been identified in 2022 by a third-party utilization study as the second-highest KFD priority. Lastly, we all can see or are experiencing, the disparity that exploded during the pandemic between the cost-of-living (housing specifically) on Kauaʻi and for many, the earnings that are available. This has gone past a crisis point and needs to be addressed from many different directions. With all of this in mind, the concept for the Kauaʻi North Shore Resilience Hub (KNSRH) was born.
In 2022 for the first time ever AHCP closed in the black, and 2023 is on track to do the same...we just need to break even and put a little aside for the “next” rainy day. To come full circle, the pandemic created an opportunity for us to do more, and for community organizations across the islands to mix and match and come together in unique ways, to have bolder and more audacious visions of how we can take on bigger projects and get them done, how we can partner to reach more people, and how many hands do actually make for lighter work. We also learned that it is ok to ask each other for help, and that supporting other organizations does not diminish our own work, but rather it proves that collaboration truly is the key to overcoming problems.
We decided when we began this newsletter that each month we would honor and lift up a different community organization for the critical service and work they provide all of us; we hope you will be inspired to dive a little deeper into the work they do, become a volunteer, or make a donation if you cannot volunteer. In March, we are proud to showcase our Kauaʻi branch of American Red Cross and how, without hesitation, they are immediately there to serve and support those effected by house fires, floods, slides, and any other catastrophic event. They also are huge advocates of making sure every house has a fire alarm so that when fires do strike, the people, and hopefully the pets, have time to get out. Red Cross relies almost entirely on volunteers so please consider this avenue as a way to support your community!
And so, I think in light of our wonderfully breezy days, I’ll close by telling you to grab a keiki or two and Go Fly A Kite!
With Aloha, Jill
|
