Every year HUGS — Help, Understanding and Group Support for Hawaii’s seriously ill children and their families — has a three-day Siblings Camp at Camp Erdman in Waialua.

Sisters and brothers of sick children gather to experience the beauty of the North Shore, enjoy food and fun and, especially, talk with people in the same predicament.

“We help them understand they are as important as everybody else in the family,” HUGS executive directory Joan Naguwa says. “They play and share. Kids their age are usually not able to talk about what’s going on so they get frustrated. We give them an opportunity to talk with people going through the same thing.

“We’ve had parents tell us it can be transformative. They realize I’m not the only kid going through this with my brother or sister.”

The money for HUGS’ Siblings Camp comes from the Sony Open in Hawaii.

The PGA Tour event also pays for Kuakini Medical Center’s educational brochures and a kindergarten transition program for 600 kids run by INPEACE (Institute of Native Pacific Education and Culture) with the Department of Education.

Aloha Harvest uses its grant from Friends of Hawaii Charities — the Sony Open’s host organization — to fuel, sanitize and maintain its refrigerated trucks, which rescue donated food and deliver it to social services that feed Hawaii’s hungry, such as River of Life Mission, whose professional kitchen enables it to collect the “industrial-size” donations Aloha Harvest can deliver.

When Matt Kuchar won this year’s Sony Open in January, he collected a first-prize check of $1.152 million as a rainbow magically appeared behind him.

Almost as magically, Friends of Hawaii Charities set another record, awarding $1.2 million last week to 150 community-based, non-profit organizations. They operate programs for Hawaii’s children, women, elderly and impoverished.

While the Sentry Tournament of Champions was being played at Kapalua’s Plantation Course in January, the PGA Tour announced it had generated a record $190 million for more than 3,000 charitable causes in 2018. That brings the all-time total to $2.84 billion.

Hawaii, a small, isolated state where sponsorship is harder to find, is just a small part of the Tour’s huge number. Our goal, according to FOHC President Corbett Kalama, is simply to raise more money, and help many more people.

The Tour’s announcement started with a story about how 80-year-old Sets Tasaka takes the bus from Wailuku to Hale Makua’s Adult Day Heath Center each weekday. Hale Makua is a beneficiary of the TOC, which has donated more than $6.3 million to non-profits since moving to Maui in 1999.

Coincidentally, Maui is a beneficiary of Sets Tasaka’s family business — Tasaka Guri-Guri, which celebrated its 40th anniversary at Maui Mall Monday. The fourth-generation business, best known for its frozen pineapple and strawberry treats, goes back almost 100 years here.

What goes around comes around and those millions in grants are at least as sweet as Tasaka’s legendary guri-guri.

Kalama is a Kailua graduate. He taught at his alma mater, then went on to become a Kamehameha Schools trustee and director of the Harold K.L. Castle Foundation, and worked for First Hawaiian and The Harry & Jeanette Weinberg Foundation, Inc. The latter is the Sony Open’s charity partner and has matched funds raised dollar for dollar since 2000.

“Some of these organizations, without our funding, they won’t function,” Kalama said last year. “I’d like to get more sponsors in on it. We are working on that now to see how to expand the exposure of the tournament itself and serve a much larger scope of awareness. We live in a very caring community.”

Since 1999, FOHC has given out close to $19 million. It has gone to more than 350 local not-for-profits, in grants ranging from about $1,500 to $25,000, Kalama says.

Along with HUGS, Aloha Harvest, River of Life, INPEACE and Kuakini, groups like Family Promise, Read to Me International, Touch a Heart, Aloha Medical Mission and Best Buddies Hawaii receive grants.

Kalama always tells the non-profits “you folks are the voice for those in our community who don’t have a voice.”

Some of the voices might surprise you. Bishop Museum, Children’s Discovery Center, Friends of Waialua Robotics and Molokai Arts Center and Lahaina Arts Association got grants this year. So did the Hula Preservation Society, Hawaii State Science Olympiad, Surfing the Nations and Hawaii State Women’s Golf Foundation.

The HSWGF designates much of its grant to travel stipends for women and girls who qualify for USGA national events on the mainland. This year those events are in Wisconsin, Mississippi, North and South Carolina, Arizona and Iowa.

When the golfers get to those distant places, they can thank Sony and its sponsors, fans and 1,500 volunteers.

Or they can thank them in person next Jan. 9-12, when the PGA Tour returns to Waialae Country Club as it has every year but one since 1965.