As an awardee of the W.K. Kellogg Foundation’s Racial Equity 2030 Challenge, the Partners in Development Foundation will receive $20 million to go toward its Opportunity Youth Action Hawaii Collaborative at the Kawailoa Youth and Family Wellness Center, which is on the property of the Hawaii Youth Correctional Facility.
The local nonprofit is one of the five awardees being recognized for embracing solutions aimed at racial equality within social, economic or political systems and institutions.
“To have Kellogg recognize that our Native Hawaiian values and cultural practices can bring positive solutions and transformation to justice systems, to youth justice,” said Shawn Kana‘iaupuni, CEO and president of Partners in Development, “that is a racial equity shift in and of itself.”
Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders are disproportionately represented in the justice system, the former for decades, Kana‘iaupuni said. Trends from the past two years show that 35% to 37% of Hawaii’s incarcerated population is made up of those who identify as Native Hawaiian, according to information provided by the state Department of Public Safety. According to 2020 census figures, Native Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders represented 10.2% of the state’s population.
Also, Kana‘iaupuni said, there has been a lack of needed nonpunitive rehabilitation methods for those in the criminal justice system.
In 2018, when the Kawailoa Youth and Family Wellness Center was established to stress nonpunitive rehabilitation, employees, including the center’s administrator, Mark Patterson, convened members of the community to ask them how they might better serve their youth and divert their pathways into prison. Among the top concerns were providing resources to help prevent homelessness and sex trafficking.
Additionally, community input supported cultural approaches that recognize historical trauma as one of the root causes of the disproportionate amounts of Native Hawaiians in the prison system, Kana‘iaupuni said.
“And so that’s what we proposed, beginning with the idea of creating a puuhonua … as that safe place where youth can come to where they can know that they’ll be receiving a variety of different resources that they need, whether it’s ending homelessness in their lives or sex exploitation, or understanding food insecurity and what food security looks like. And then being on a path to livable wage,” she said.
The center is currently tailored for at-risk youth who are interested in participating. Prior to the pandemic, its enrollment included about 300 youths taking part in a total of six programs geared to varying age ranges: Kupa ‘Aina Farm, Kinai ‘Eha, Hale Lanipolua, Residential Youth Services and Empowerment, Hawaii Youth and Correctional Facility and Olomana School.
Through these programs, youths have access to resources like college application support and GED classes. Hands-on pursuits include assisting with food distributions, building wheelchair ramps for kupuna in the homesteads, producing Native Hawaiian agriculture and caring for cattle. The Kawailoa center sits on a 500-acre farm in Kailua.
“They can help build things for their families and really provide value,” Kana‘iaupuni said. “And when they start to get positive reinforcement from that, that’s when you see the light go on about what community means.”
When Kana‘iaupuni and Patterson were alerted to the Racial Equity 2030 Challenge, both thought the programs Kawailoa had implemented made it well suited to enter.
“It just seemed to be the right time to try and see if we can profess the model that we hope to create at a higher level, and see if we can get some resources for it,” Patterson said.
The grant money will be provided over a span of eight years and must be used to support cultural components within the center, conditions Partners in Development were happy to agree to, Kana‘iaupuni said. The funds will allow them to ramp up efforts to implement more Indigenous methodologies, and to better transition youths between various programs, she said.
Kana‘iaupuni also hopes to incorporate lessons from kupuna and cultural practitioners as well as offer resources to the caregivers and staff, who can suffer from secondary trauma.
Patterson would like to see some of the funds go toward hiring mediators to teach the youths and their families how to heal their relationships. “How do we teach families how to survive in Hawaii today? There are so many programmatic directions we can go with this funding under a cultural lens,” he said.
Despite the innovations that Patterson and Kana‘iaupuni intend to explore, they understand that the work ahead will take time and patience.
“There’s no magic pill in this work, or it would’ve been done already,” Kana‘iaupuni said. “The work is hard and it takes many hands, but we have to start somewhere. And we’re starting right here in this community in the foothills of Olomana and the youth we serve, and building from there.”
—
Racial Equity Challenge
For more information about the W.K. Kellogg Foundation’s Racial Equity 2030 challenge and its awardees, visit its website at: racialequity2030.org/home
Linsey Dower covers ethnic and cultural affairs and is a corps member of Report for America, a national service organization that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues and communities.
