Today and Wednesday, a contingent of volunteers from the design firm Stantec will converge on Puuhale Elementary School to spruce up the campus and share some quality time with the students.
The volunteers will help with painting, landscaping and a few minor repairs as well as read and talk story with the kids. The effort, offered in conjunction with the Honolulu Community Action Program Head Start, is part of the international company’s annual Stantec in the Community Week, which mobilizes thousands of employees in service to their local communities.
Spearheading the two-day project at Puuhale is senior associate environmental engineer Nancy Convard because, well, of course.
Because who else would it be?
For the well-traveled Convard, who chose Hawaii as her home because she loved the community and chose Stantec because she believed in its mission of working to improve communities, projects like this are an end unto themselves.
“It’s just super rewarding being able to see kids smile and take pride in their school,” said Convard, who participated in a similar project in Kunia last year.
Convard’s altruism was apparent at an early age. The eighth of nine children, she grew up in rural northwest Connecticut, where she excelled as a three-sport athlete and learned the value of giving back by volunteering at a school for the mentally disabled, where her mother worked.
After completing high school a year early, Convard attended Worcester Polytechnic Institute, where she graduated with distinction with a bachelor’s degree in environmental engineering. She remained in Massachusetts for three more years working for the Environmental Protection Agency before “itchy feet” and the looming threat of budget cuts prompted her to join the Peace Corps.
Convard fulfilled a two-year commitment, plus an extra year of teaching, in Thailand. There she worked on a project to extend and maximize farming seasons through water resource management and engineering. As a side project, she also secured grant funding for new school classrooms, which she helped to design and build.
Her time in Thailand fostered in Convard an interest in the ways in which engineering could impact community health. Her desire to pursue this new passion eventually brought her to the University of Hawaii and the East-West Center.
Convard had visited the state before and had come to love its “diversity of cultures and sense of ohana.”
“I wasn’t here for the beaches,” she said. “I liked the laid-back sense of community here.”
In two years, she completed both an master of science in civil engineering and a master of public health in environmental health. While contemplating further studies in a Ph.D. program, Convard was offered a job in Palau leading the Environmental Quality Protection Board, which she accepted.
Convard returned to Hawaii three years later having restored the board to full operation and leaving it in capable local hands. Over the next decade, she worked as a consultant to a variety of private companies and public agencies. Along the way, she also reconnected with an old friend from back home. Daniel Kailukaitis moved to Hawaii within six months; the two were married a few years later.
The couple spent several years bouncing around the globe, relocating to the Philippines and Australia (and traveling throughout the Pacific region) as part of Convard’s new job with the Asian Development Bank, and settling for a time in Maryland, where Convard worked as a senior operations adviser for the Millennium Challenge Corp.
They returned to Hawaii — for good, Convard said — three years ago.
“It’s the one place we consider home,” she said.
And today, at Puuhale, she’ll do what she can to make her home a better place.
“It’s so easy but it makes a difference,” Convard said.
Reach Michael Tsai at mtsai@staradvertiser.com.
