First Hawaiian Bank has been the state’s top corporate donor in all but three of the last 13 years, contributing more than $70 million to charities across Hawai‘i since 2011.

That’s an impressive and consistent record, cherished by the state’s philanthropic community. Reliable corporate giving is the category most celebrated by those who rush to the aid of victims, including groups that helped out after four major disasters in the state over the last seven years.

Not only has First Hawaiian Bank been a perennial top gift-giver for more than a decade, it also shines in another area: money raised by employees, separate from corporate giving. Although the bank’s total corporate contributions in 2024 totaled $5.7 million – second only to Matson’s $7.6 million – the bank’s employees donated another $873,987 of their own cash.

First Hawaiian’s 2,019 employees also volunteered 11,211 hours of their time for charitable work.

The bank staff’s level of community concern and involvement is a point of pride for Bob Harrison, chairman, president and CEO of First Hawaiian Bank, even though the employee fundraising group operates outside of his chain of command.

The employee-run giving program, he says, “just goes miles above everyone else in that category. Others maybe have higher overall in-kind and other kinds of cash donations, but that really does stand out.

“And that’s why when you ask about the culture here about giving, it’s really important. What’s another cool thing is we make it available to our retirees as well, and a number of them continue to give even after they retire.”

Although the employee-led program operates separately from the corporate side, the company offers paycheck withdrawals for those who take part. Employees select a leadership group and choose which charities receive the funds. Last year, employees sent money to about 30 different charities.

The employee group, called Kōkua Mai, is currently led by Kayla Smith, the bank’s marketing programs officer, who has been involved with the program for more than two years.

“We host [an annual kickoff rally] at the start of the campaign so employees can meet nonprofit leaders face to face, hear their stories, and see firsthand where donations are going,” she says. “That connection makes a big difference in how people choose to give as well as how much.

“Branches and departments enjoy creating fundraisers like shave ice and Molokaʻi Bread sales, Zippy’s tickets, book swaps, and even white elephant sales. It has become a fun competition and a shared way for all of us to support our community.”

98-99% PARTICIPATION

Bob Harrison, First Hawaiian Bank

In a recent video interview with Hawaii Business, Harrison was joined by a group of executives spread across six time zones. On the monitor, he bears a slight resemblance to Bing Crosby, displaying a relaxed affability and smooth confidence – a style that can sway board members but can also make envious competitors wish he was on their team.

When Harrison suggests to his executives that charitable giving should be at the heart of what the company does, you can envision Crosby’s character in the classic film “White Christmas” rallying the troops for a surprise tribute to their former general. Everyone gladly pitches in.

“You know, there might be a little bit of arm-twisting here and there,” Harrison says with a wry smile about the employee program. “I’m not going to say that never happens, but there’s no way you can get 98-99% of the people consistently giving, year after year” without genuine commitment by employees.

“So, I think that’s pretty incredible,” he adds. “I’ve never heard of anybody at that level of giving before as an organization. Some of these are tellers making $18 to $20 an hour. That’s not a lot, especially in Hawaiʻi, given all the costs and everything,” yet they still give.

PART OF OUR JOB

First Hawaiian Bank employees organize their own fundraising events in addition to corporate giving, and more than 98% of the bank’s staff contribute.

Cameron Nekota, executive vice president at the bank and president of the First Hawaiian Bank Foundation, said the culture of community giving helps make the bank an attractive place to work.

“Part of the reason that I wanted to join the organization was because I felt like it was an organization that cared about Hawaiʻi, its people and its employees,” he says.

He relayed an example of the bank’s philanthropy – supporting a creative plan to address one element of the homeless problem in the state by encouraging self-sustainability.

“We were the first corporate giver to Puʻuhonua o Waiʻanae, which is the homeless encampment at Waiʻanae boat harbor, to move them into land that they had purchased,” Nekota says. “We were the lead $250,000 gift contribution to that effort.”

In 2020, some 200 people who live in makeshift shelters next to Waiʻanae Small Boat Harbor and their supporters raised $1.4 million – enough to buy 20 acres in Waiʻanae Valley – where they are building small, permanent homes. As homes are completed, residents move from the encampment to the houses.

“It was really outside of our natural wheelhouse,” Nekota says. “But again, thinking back to what is our job here – it’s to help impact community. … As an organization, to take a risk on them was something that we debated a lot. At the end of the day, we all came to the conclusion that we want to help move in ways that maybe we haven’t thought of before.”

SHIFT IN STRATEGY

First Hawaiian Bank (Top Corporate Donor #2) was first in employee volunteerism with 11,211 of volunnteer hours during work time or company-sponsored events and $873,987 in employee donations.

The shape of that potential impact took a sharp turn at the start of the year following widespread cuts at the federal level – from grants and aid, to staffing and even the elimination of whole government programs during the first months of the Trump administration.

“It looks like the cuts the federal government is doing are going to be way more than supporters of the traditional nonprofit community are going to be able to [replace],” says Harrison.

He credits Gov. Josh Green and the state Legislature for stepping in to support a $50 million supplement to nonprofit charities.

“We’re going to see where the cracks open up, see what they can fill, and whatever doesn’t work out with their criteria, see how we can support those areas that didn’t get help from those efforts,” Harrison says.

Nekota notes that the bank’s foundation has already seen a record number of requests from nonprofits asking for philanthropic support this year.

“We’re seeing tremendous need based on some of the cuts,” Nekota says. “What the bank is doing directly outside of the foundation, it’s going to be way more than we’ve done in recent memory.”

Every day across the Islands, women step into roles where the stakes could not be higher. Their jobs are difficult, stressful and sometimes dangerous but Hawai‘i depends on them to step up when lives are on the line. From emergency response and providing critical healthcare to social services and advocating for the humane treatment of animals, these women embody excellence in service to others. We tell their stories and honor their courage, resilience and compassion.

Dr. Lois Chiu

CHIEF OF NEONATOLOGY AT KAISER PERMANENTE MOANALUA MEDICAL CENTER

Dr. Lois Chiu emigrated from Hong Kong to New York City with her family when she was 9. She recalls her parents frequently reminding her and her brother about the stakes. “We came here, we didn’t speak the language, we didn’t have much money and we kind of risked it all to come here,” Chiu says. And she remembers her parents telling them: “You need to do something to make a better life for yourselves.”

When it came to careers, Chiu says her parents would approve of them being doctors, lawyers or businesspeople, and nothing else. “My brother chose business, and I chose medicine.”

While attending medical school in Syracuse, New York, she was encouraged to do a one-month “away rotation,” which enabled her to focus on a specific specialty at an outside hospital. She’d already decided she wanted to work in pediatrics and was initially interested in an allergy and immunology subspecialty.

When she applied for an allergy and immunology rotation at Columbia University, she says the only thing that was available was an NICU rotation. “I just wanted to go to New York [City], so I took it and ended up really loving it,” Chiu says of her time in a neonatal intensive care unit.

After completing a neonatology fellowship in 2009, she moved to Oʻahu with her husband to be closer to his family and began working at Kaiser Permanente Moanalua Medical Center.

NICUs are where neonatologists like Chiu care for babies born prematurely or with other health problems. The Moanalua Medical Center’s NICU has 18 beds and she says they care for an average of 14 to 15 patients at a time. According to Chiu, most of her patients are “preemies,” sometimes born as early as 22 weeks. The full gestation period is 40 weeks, so babies that premature are “barely halfway cooked when they’re born.”

Parents of premature babies are often fearful and anxious, Chiu says.

“When people imagine a baby, they imagine this big, fat baby crying. But when you’re born at 23 weeks, you’re not crying, you’re definitely not fat and your skin is so transparent.”

Their care needs are unlike those of a full-term baby. For example, “If you talk to a pediatrician, when they say they’re starting feedings on a baby, they’ll say, ‘Start with 1 ounce, 2 ounces.'” Whereas with premature babies, Chiu says, “We’re talking milliliters. Like 1 mL, 2 mL.”

The criterion for discharge isn’t based on age or weight, she says, but on a baby’s medical stability and a skills-based assessment: “In order to go home, you have to be kind of like a term baby. So you’ll have to be able to breathe on your own. You have to be able to eat on your own.”

As a neonatologist, supporting and educating parents is just as important as caring for her patients. “Many parents will tell you they’re afraid to touch their own baby because they don’t know if it’s gonna hurt them,” Chiu says, but it’s her job to make sure the parents learn how to tend to their little ones while they’re in the NICU, which makes the transition home easier.

“Family-centered care is a part of our philosophy, so parents are participating,” she says. That includes having them feed their babies, change their diapers and provide input on “what they think would make the baby get better faster.”

Because the state’s only NICU facilities are on Oʻahu, families from the Neighbor Islands face additional challenges.

“When those babies are transported here, they can stay four or five months, even longer. What happens to the mom and dad? Do they come here? If they come here, where do they stay? Many of them do not have families [on Oʻahu]. Or even if they have families here, they can’t ask the family, ‘Can I live with you for the next four months?’ So they’re often displaced,” Chiu explains.

Ronald McDonald House Charities is an international nonprofit that helps families in such precarious situations. It has two “beautiful houses” in Mānoa Valley for families to stay for free as long as needed.

Chiu has served on the Ronald McDonald House Charities’ local board for the past five years and she just finished two years as board chair.

“This charity has been very meaningful to be part of. … They provide food, like the refrigerator is always stocked with something. They have activities for the family. They have a shuttle that brings the families to the hospital and back. So it’s a very convenient and wonderful service for families who are with kids in the hospital.”

Chelsea Kahalepauole-Bizik

OCEAN SAFETY LIEUTENANT FOR O‘AHU’S DISTRICT 2, WHICH RUNS FROM MOANALUA BAY TO KĀNE‘OHE BAY

Chelsea Kahalepauole-Bizik’s life has always revolved around the ocean.

Long before becoming the Honolulu Ocean Safety’s first wahine lifeguard lieutenant, the Kailua native recalls going out on her father’s boat: “I was 5 years old [riding] on his back while he was diving for tako in Kāneʻohe Bay. I thought it was so cool, catching tako to make squid luau.”

Around the same age, she says, she “learned how to surf at Castle Point, which is on the far left side of Kailua Bay.” And at 11, she fell in love with paddling. When interviewed, Kahalepauole-Bizik, now 34, was training to compete in her 10th Na Wahine O Ke Kai, a 41-mile outrigger canoe race from Molokaʻi to Oʻahu.

Her lifeguarding career started at a hotel pool when she was 18, where she learned the job’s fundamentals. She says that initial experience helped her develop “the eye for children in trouble” and recognizing what lifeguards call “climbing the invisible ladder,” because contrary to what is often portrayed in movies, a drowning person is rarely yelling for help or making large splashes. Instead, they often silently struggle to breathe and keep their head above water, which usually looks like them trying to grab onto a ladder that’s not there.

After joining the city’s Ocean Safety team in 2011, Kahalepauole-Bizik was assigned to District 2, which includes Moanalua Bay to Kāneʻohe Bay. She says the Windward Side was “a great place to start” because “it’s such a mix of different types of beaches.”

One challenge is Hanauma Bay, where “at any given time, about 200 people are in the water, face down,” so lifeguards must learn how to identify someone who’s lost consciousness among a sea of snorkelers: “One of the telltale signs is the top of the snorkel is in the water. You count how long the snorkel has been in the water; 15 seconds, then you’re like, ‘OK, that person needs help.'”

Meanwhile, down the highway is Sandy’s, a popular surfing, bodysurfing and bodyboarding spot that has a powerful shore break notorious for breaking bones. “So, you’ve got back injuries, neck injuries at Sandy Beach and Makapuʻu, and then you’ve got CPR cases at Hanauma Bay, Kailua and Waimānalo. You have a mix of all of it.”

Kahalepauole-Bizik also spent time in dispatch, where she acquired other skills: “I feel like dispatch was a really good place for me to learn how to be a supervisor, because you listen in on all these different calls and how the other supervisors handle them, and it’s all just scenarios, right? You start to look at things as a scenario. … Then you understand what information is needed to pass along to the other departments, like HFD and EMS and the Coast Guard.”

When four Honolulu Ocean Safety Lieutenant positions opened in 2023, Kahalepauole-Bizik applied and interviewed for the job alongside 20 to 30 other lifeguards.

“I was hoping I did well, but you never know,” she says. “I got a phone call and the chief told me, ‘We’d like to offer you the position. You scored third highest out of four, so the position that’s still open is in District 2.’ I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, that’s where I’m from,’ and I kind of teared up a little.”

As a lieutenant, Kahalepauole-Bizik serves as both a mobile responder to calls at unguarded spots within her district, including China Walls and Spitting Caves, as well as a supervisor during rescues at guarded beaches.

“If there’s only one guy, then of course, you’re jumping in to help and assist. … You’re making sure the communication is getting out there and that backups are coming for your tower guards, making sure your tower guards have all the equipment that’s needed. And then, after the scenario is finished, replenishing their equipment, getting their statements of what happened and making sure that they’re OK.”

What advice does she have for other women interested in Ocean Safety? “Probably just what I got said to me, which is just stay true to yourself, share your aloha and give everything you got. When you don’t have any more to give, give some more. That’s one thing females are good at – giving their all and giving their aloha.”

Yna Zimmerman

PRIMARY CARE NURSE AT KAISER PERMANENTE KONA MEDICAL OFFICE

Yna Zimmerman, R.N., is on a mission to make quality healthcare more accessible in Kona.

With 17 years of nursing experience in Northern California, she joined the Kaiser Permanente Kona Medical Office in 2022 and quickly identified a significant limitation in their Nurse Treatment Center’s triage.

“If a patient comes in with, let’s say, chest pain, which is the common one, our options were limited to just [making] future appointments or ‘I’ll call an ambulance for you,'” she says. “Now, we try our best to accommodate that patient without an appointment.”

Zimmerman and her fellow nurses are now able to ask a supervising provider to order an EKG so they “can rule out if it’s real chest pain or just heartburn,” she says, which saves the patient the scary experience of being redirected to the ER but unsure if they’re having a heart attack.

“Even though it says we don’t have emergency services here in Kaiser Kona, they still trust us to take care of them, so that’s why we try our best.”

The Nurse Treatment Center has expanded its capabilities in other ways under Zimmerman’s leadership, including offering more kinds of pulmonary testing and placing Holter monitors that record patients’ heart rhythms. “So instead of the patient flying to Oʻahu to do that, the patient will be coming to our clinic,” she says, which saves them time, money and hassle.

Continuing to expand services offered to patients in Kona is top priority for Zimmerman. “I believe all nurses have the same mission: to save lives. But with limited resources, we cannot do much. I’m hoping for this clinic to expand so we can provide more care for our patients. … That’s my opinion, and that is my passion, and I really want to help. I even told them that I’m willing to work 12 hours if you open an urgent care, so let’s just get it started.”

Although her team is not yet able to insert a PICC line – a long catheter inserted into a peripheral vein, typically in the arm, for long-term intravenous treatment – the nurses at Kona Medical Office are now able to assist patients with PICC line dressing changes and teach them how to care for their PICC line at home.

Indeed, Zimmerman says education is an important part of her job: “It’s a privilege for me to educate my patient, whether it is an insulin teach or glucometer teach or even just a simple antibiotic self-administration teach. I feel like I give them comfort when I sit down with them and give them instructions in the easiest way possible that they can follow. They appreciate that a lot, and I don’t let them go until they feel comfortable doing so.”

Zimmerman attributes her aptitude for nursing to being from a family of caregivers. “My sister is an OBGYN doctor and my aunties are all nurses. … So it kind of inspired me to do nursing and provide care for people in the community, but especially the unfortunate ones. I guess it’s in my blood,” she says.

Though they may not have as many resources as facilities on Oʻahu, Zimmerman says, she finds strength in her colleagues, who have become like a second family. “We are like a big family, so we support each other,” she says, citing a work culture where potlucks are a frequent and beloved tradition. “Even when we don’t have any reason for potluck, everybody brings food, so it makes my heart happy.”

Kapua Chang

RESCUE WATERCRAFT OPERATOR

Honolulu City and County Ocean Safety employs about 300 lifeguards, but only a dozen or so are women. Among them, Kapua Chang holds the distinction of being Oʻahu’s first and only woman rescue watercraft operator.

“From the moment I got into recruit class as a lifeguard, I remember seeing the boys out on the jet ski and being like, ‘Wow, that’s the job that I want to do,'” she says.

After becoming an ocean safety officer in 2021, Chang immediately started training for the additional certification. She says she continued building her skills as a water woman by following the advice of veteran guard Tau Hannemann: “Get in the water every day, whether it’s a train or it’s a surf or to explore your zone … and be confident in wherever you are.”

This dedication was put to the test when she enrolled in Ocean Safety’s seven-week intensive rescue watercraft program in 2024. “At the very beginning, my head instructor, Ian Forester, told me in front of everybody, ‘Kapua, congratulations for being the first female. But just because you’re female, we’re not gonna take it any easier on you.'”

Chang says she wouldn’t want it any other way “because then the guys in the tower would say, ‘Kapua had it easy, you know, she had special treatment.’ Absolutely not.”

Trainees must pass several tests to become certified rescue watercraft operators. “The first is a written assessment,” says Chang, who explains the course has five required reading materials. “There’s about 50 questions, about 10 questions from each manual, and you have to pass with an 80% or higher.”

After passing the written exam, trainees face a physical assessment that requires them to expertly operate a jet ski in 25-foot surf on the North Shore, as measured by the Hawaiian scale. (The face of such a wave would be about 50 feet.) That means knowing how to harness the power of adrenaline without letting it take over.

“There was so much adrenaline running through that class,” she says, it’s imperative to know how to “scale it back and rest your mind from spiraling out.”

Trainees also take turns playing the roles of patient and crewman while simulating rescues in massive surf. In hazardous conditions, “you have to be on it. Every detail, every move, is very critical, because not only your life is in danger, but also the crewman that you’re working with, the patient that you’re working with. So you have to be on your best game, top tier.”

Chang was one of four graduates that completed the program in December 2024. Because she’s “at the bottom of the totem pole in terms of seniority,” she still works primarily as a tower guard. Nevertheless, she’s eager to take every chance she gets to be on the watercraft. “If I can get a day on the ski,” she says, “I’m absolutely excited. I’m stoked.”

The two positions work hand-in-hand to protect people both close to shore and further out to sea: “The jet ski is considered the tip of the spear of Ocean Safety,” she says. “When you’re on the ski, you’re moving and assessing situations quickly but thoroughly to help whoever’s out a mile away or several miles away from the tower.”

Four years into her lifeguarding career, the Lāʻie native has already worked in four out of the Island’s five districts, with only the Leeward Side to go.

Although her natural inclination is to stay low-key, Chang says she now feels it’s important to be more visible “to show wahine, hey, I did it. You can do it too. And I’m not going to be able to do that behind the scenes or behind the curtains.”

Dr. Linda Wong

TRANSPLANT SURGEON AT THE QUEEN’S MEDICAL CENTER

Growing up with two physician parents on Oʻahu sparked Dr. Linda Wong’s interest in medicine at an early age. She understood then that being in medicine “kept my parents busy all the time, so something must be going on that makes them want to stay at work so much and not come home.”

During her third year of medical school at U.C. Irvine, she did rotations in different departments to determine what she should specialize in.

“I liked surgery the best” because you’re “able to do something with your hands and get something accomplished, which is instant gratification. I think with [other forms of] medicine, you have to be a little bit more patient,” Wong says.

When it came time to choose a fellowship, she leaned toward pediatric surgery but was dissuaded by the extra years of training required by that sub-specialty. Her father was a kidney transplant surgeon and although Wong wasn’t sure she wanted to follow in his footsteps, she chose a transplant fellowship in San Francisco. She admits she “went into it halfhearted,” but her sentiment changed after she took part in her first liver transplant.

“I saw this young woman who had some sort of autoimmune hepatitis, and she was about to die. She was in the ICU, and she had all sorts of tubes and breathing tubes. She was barely responsive. Her kidneys were not working, and she was probably a day from dying. … I went to another city and procured a liver, and I helped them put it back in. Surgery took like five or six hours, and the next day, she was up and awake, watching cartoons, and they took out all the breathing tubes and she was back to normal. It was that epiphany moment where you know that you’re going to do something that’s truly life altering.”

After completing her fellowship, she wanted to stay in California, but her dad pleaded for her to return home because the Islands lacked a liver transplant program. He said: “If you stay in California, the transplant surgeons are a dime a dozen. … They don’t need you like we need you.”

She says she asked for five more years, but he took matters into his own hands, calling one day to say, “I put your name on the stationery, and I put your name on the door, and I bought you a one-way ticket, so you’re going to come, and this is when you’re going to start.”

Her father, Dr. Livingston Wong, performed the state’s first kidney transplant in 1969, and she performed Hawaiʻi’s first liver transplant in 1993 at the same hospital, St. Francis Medical Center. Wong has since performed more than 400 liver transplants and now heads the state’s only liver transplant program, at The Queen’s Medical Center.

Beyond liver transplants, Wong less frequently performs other surgeries, including kidney transplants and removing cancerous sections of livers and pancreases.

“It’s a pretty intense thing,” Wong says of liver transplants. After taking the donated liver out of ice, “We basically have 45 to 60 minutes to sew it in, or the patient dies. So there’s a lot of tension, a lot of nervousness in the room, because you got to sew and you got to sew quickly. I can’t make mistakes. There’s no room for errors. It’s probably like being those Blue Angels pilots – a little error and, you know, plane blows up, right? It’s the same idea here.”

Wong explains how she manages the stress: “I exercise a lot. … A lot of cardio stuff, a little light weights, stretching. … It makes your resting heart rate a little lower. So when you get under stress, your heart rate will get faster, but it’s not going super crazy.”

Her other favorite way to decompress? “Baking cookies and mochi and other stuff. Being in the kitchen and making desserts, it’s kind of like operating, doing stuff with your hands, keeping them busy. You can be creative and make up stuff that you know didn’t exist before.”

Vinnesha Porter

CLINICAL DIRECTOR AT THE INSTITUTE FOR HUMAN SERVICES

Having experienced generational homelessness for the first 12 years of her life, Vinnesha Porter says she knows what it’s like to live in abandoned homes, on the beach or with random folks until her parents returned from their “drug trips.”

Even after her grandparents adopted her and her siblings, she says “life wasn’t that much easier.” But rather than being defeated by her unstable upbringing, Porter gained a superpower: empathy.

“Because I knew what it was like to be in the dark and feeling alone, that was my drive to support and help people,” she says, which led to getting a job at the Institute for Human Services 15 years ago.

IHS is a local nonprofit that offers personalized support and solutions to people in crisis, including those struggling with homelessness, mental illness and addiction.

Porter admits to suffering culture shock when she started as a receptionist at the IHS men’s shelter but then developed “really cool friendships with people at the shelter that I otherwise probably wouldn’t [have] engaged with.”

About a year later, she was promoted to outreach, where the “majority of our job was just being on the streets, engaging with people and bringing them into the shelter.”

The licensed mental health counselor says she learned how to build a rapport with people by “not judging them, just meeting them where they’re at and making them feel like I’m not there to change their life. I’m there to give them the resources and the tools they need to make the decisions that they feel comfortable making.”

It’s different when someone faces psychosis and presents a danger to themselves or others. She says if “their drug use is extreme, or their mental health causes so much distress that they’re not even able to make decisions for themselves,” IHS has the right to take that individual to family court and request a petition.

Porter explains the petition is good for two years and if “you refuse psychiatric medications and intervention, at that point me and my staff are allowed to take you into the hospital by virtue of HPD and the sheriff’s department, and they have to take their psych meds.”

From Porter’s perspective, nobody deserves to be written off as a lost cause: “What I tell people is, these are your moms, your brothers, your sisters, your auntie who, for some reason, either genetically or through long term drug use or trauma, they are mentally just not stable, but that doesn’t make them less human. These are people who just need time, attention, love and care and the right resources.”

She now serves as IHS’ clinical director, focusing on providing extra resources and support to her staff. “I’m constantly looking at the … people coming into all of our programs, and I’m always working with leadership to develop more services, a better approach.”

Despite their best efforts, some people still succumb to their struggles. “But that doesn’t stop us,” Porter says.

She adds it’s imperative that she and her staff take care of themselves and decompress, because “vicarious trauma is very real,” and the heavy moments and emotional exhaustion that come with the job are balanced by a concerted effort to celebrate every win.

“My biggest pride is putting people in housing and visiting them later and seeing how truly happy they are and unified with their family. … That’s what keeps me coming back every day, is just looking at how people can turn their lives around with the right support.”

Melanie Keolanui

OPERATIONS BATALION CHIEF AT HAWAI‘I COUNTY FIRE DEPARTMENT

After graduating from Hilo High School, Melanie Keolanui left her coastal hometown to play NCAA Division I volleyball at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska. Keolanui says moving from Hawaiʻi to America’s most landlocked state – so-called because it’s the only one where you have to cross at least three states or Canadian provinces to reach seawater – was “super scary,” but she was determined to compete at the highest collegiate level.

Sports are “something that’s made me who I am, being a part of a team and working towards a common goal,” she says, and it’s a mentality that “translates over to the Fire Department pretty easily.”

After earning her bachelor’s degree in kinesiology, Keolanui returned to Hilo and, a few years later, trained to become a firefighter EMT with the Hawaiʻi County Fire Department. When she joined in 2006, she was only the fourth woman to ever work for the department in its history, which dates to 1888.

A fire calls for them to be a “firefighter first and then a medic second,” she says, but most of their calls are about medical emergencies unrelated to fires.

“I always knew I wanted to do something in the medical field,” she says. “My dad had heart problems. He died when I was 16, so I grew up seeing him have issues with his health, and I always appreciated and looked up to the firefighters. They came to our house all the time.”

She says those formative experiences make her job more meaningful: “I have extra pride being the person who shows up to try to resolve whatever the issue is.”

Soon after becoming a firefighter EMT, she completed an extra year of training to become a paramedic. As a paramedic, “You’re pretty much in charge of the ambulance and patient care. You can give controlled medications. You can take over someone’s airway with intubation. … So you’re basically performing advanced life support,” she says.

Keolanui worked as a firefighter paramedic for nine years before being promoted to fire equipment operator in 2016. In that role, she drove the fire engine, operated the truck’s tools and managed the water supply at fires.

Three years later, she became a fire captain, which put her in charge of a station. “I was lucky enough to get Central [Fire Station] in Hilo as my first assignment, which is kind of rare to get assigned where you live right away.”

At the time of her interview, Keolanui was captain at Haihai Fire Station, where six people work under her per shift.

And as of Oct. 1, she will be the fire department’s first female operations battalion chief, marking the third consecutive position for which she’s the first woman.

The promotion carries a steep increase in responsibilities. “As the battalion chief, you’re in charge of half the island. So your subordinates are the fire captains at each of the stations,” she explains.

Keolanui leads the East Battalion, which oversees 10 fire stations stretching “from Kaʻū all the way to Honokaʻa.” That’s an area greater than 2,000 square miles, or more than three times the size of Oʻahu.

Over her two decades at the Hawaiʻi County Fire Department, she has received countless expressions of gratitude for her service, but she says one phone call stands out.

A woman who Keolanui helped back when she was a paramedic intern tracked her down: “She said, ‘Hey, I don’t know if you remember me. I got your name through, you know, the coconut wireless in Hilo. … Thirteen years ago, you were there in the hospital when I was in labor with my daughter. You left before she was born, but you started my IV. I always have a hard time getting IVs, but you got it on the first try. And you were just so caring and so nice. I’ve been trying to find you ever since.’

“She said she named her daughter Melanie. I’m like, ‘What?’ And she goes, ‘Yeah, I named my daughter after you. … I always liked that name, and then the way that you treated me that day, it just was like, yeah, I’m gonna name her that.’ So obviously, that’s an honor.”

Anna Neubauer

PRESIDENT AND CEO OF THE HAWAIIAN HUMAN SOCIETY

From cleaning kennels at a veterinary hospital when she was 14 to her current role leading the Hawaiian Humane Society, Anna Neubauer says her career has been defined by a single question: Where can I have the greatest impact?

“I loved veterinary medicine,” she says, “but I saw that I could have more of an impact and help more people in our community, as well as help many, many more animals, if I went into the animal shelter side.”

After earning her bachelor’s degree in biology and becoming a certified veterinary technician, Neubauer shifted her focus. With a friend, she co-founded a cat shelter and then a spay/neuter clinic in Fort Collins, Colorado. It’s a project she says she’s “really, really proud of.”

Her subsequent nine years working at a large Denver shelter, combined with a master’s degree in nonprofit management, gave her a holistic skill set.

“Every experience that I had, every educational opportunity I took, really built me up to do what I’m doing now. Sometimes your path isn’t a straight one … but you end up where you’re supposed to be.”

In 2019, Neubauer was recruited to be president and CEO at the Hawaiian Humane Society, where she now oversees 170 employees and 1,300 volunteers.

Under her leadership, the organization has made significant policy shifts by examining what they do as an organization and how they do it.

“We’re here for our community, we’re here for the animals that need us, but we’re not the best at everything,” she says. “We’re not, you know, wildlife rehabilitators and things like that.”

She says her team worked hard to change the public perception that the Hawaiian Humane Society is “all things and everything for animals.” Instead, “let’s get the animals to where they need to be initially.”

For example, wildlife is “very sensitive to handling, very sensitive to their environment … so what they need right away is getting them connected to the wildlife rehabilitators and the folks that are experts in that area.”

Another major shift was their approach to cats. “We can’t just take cats in and take cats in and take cats in because we only have so much space,” Neubauer says.

Now, they focus on a trap-neuter-release program to manage the stray cat populations. If a “cat comes in that’s injured or ill, we want to make sure that they’re doing well … so we’ll address that differently. But for those cats that are in stable environments, that have a community cat caretaker and are well managed in their space,” they’ll get returned to where they were found.

She says this change in strategy “has really allowed us to help save more animals.” It’s also helped to educate the community about the organization’s mission, she says, and in turn, the community helps “us do the work that we do.”

Ultimately, it’s the human-animal bond that inspires her most. While she loves many things about her job, the stories that “give me chicken skin” are the ones where her team helps people keep their animals.

Through their Pet Kōkua program, the Hawaiian Humane Society offers several resources for animals at risk of being surrendered, including a pet food bank that offers temporary assistance for owners who need food for their animals.

It also offers low or waived-fee microchipping, which became mandatory for pets over 4 months old in 2020, and sterilization services for pet owners on government assistance or experiencing homelessness.

“Sometimes their animal is all they have,” she says. “And to be able to help that, I think that’s really, really impactful for me.”

PART I: HOW EMPLOYERS DRIVE WOMEN AWAY

The “problem employee” label has followed Claire from office to office, year after year.

She got that reputation when she threw away an old collection of adult videos from a public space at her agency. The material was clearly inappropriate for a professional workplace, but no one had ever objected before, she says. And her colleagues, all men, were angry about it.

Friendly rapport turned to icy silence. Claire says she had navigated the rough-and-tumble of the workplace with a quick laugh and an occasional well-placed verbal jab, but this situation was new.

“I became public enemy number one. This was the start of me speaking out, and then getting just absolutely crushed for it,” Claire says. She asked that her real name not be used for fear of further retaliation.

“My hairstylist said my hair had started falling out,” she recalls. “It’s like one of those things where you see stuff and maybe it’s not a big deal early on, but over time, whether it’s people not taking you seriously, or not listening to you, or getting dismissed, it’s like death by a thousand paper cuts.”

Just as the stress of being ostracized began taking a toll, she was promoted into a new position and arrived at the job in the exurbs of Honolulu, hoping for a fresh start.

But news of what she’d done had traveled throughout the organization, and the response was mostly harsh: she wasn’t a team player, she wasn’t like them, she didn’t belong. And they’d keep making her feel it.

Claire eventually hit her breaking point and transferred into a completely new role with the agency.

“Quiet Firing”

Claire is now a mother navigating solo parenting. Recently, out of the blue, the agency’s leadership team informed her that she needed to take on extra shifts, including in the dead of night.

“They’re well aware of my situation. They know there’s no one at home to watch my child,” says Claire. “It’s unreasonable. It’s almost like quiet firing.”

She pushed back. “I said, you guys talk about family first, but what do you act like? What you’re asking of me is cruel.” While friends have volunteered to stay at her house when she’s called out at night, the arrangement is unsustainable, she says.

Claire sees a therapist and a naturopath to deal with the years of chronic stress, and she’s trying to get another position that doesn’t demand overnight work. She regularly contemplates leaving the agency, but giving up the generous retirement benefits feels like a bad financial move, particularly with years of parenting ahead.

“People have asked me if I’m going to stay, because it’s been so toxic for so long. But as a single mom, you’re not really free to leave because you’re walking away from your financial security.” She says she may leave anyway.

Unequal, and Often Unfair

Claire’s work life has become an endurance test of impossible demands and a profound lack of care and respect from her colleagues. As one of just a handful of women in a large department, her treatment feels targeted and linked to her gender.

“There’s no doubt we have systemic sex discrimination in Hawaiʻi,” says Elizabeth Jubin Fujiwara, a senior partner at the Honolulu law firm Fujiwara and Rosenbaum. “It’s a matter of degree and how dangerous your job is as far as physical safety, and just emotional safety too. How much can you take before you quit, or before you get fired, because you can’t function anymore?”

Her description of gender-based discrimination matches what Claire has experienced: “Say you stay on the job and start suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. You’re not sleeping. You’re suffering every time something reminds you of what happened. And then you go home to your family and function there when you’ve been treated like hell all day. It’s a nightmare.”

In her decades litigating civil rights and discrimination cases, Fujiwara has seen clients dealing with bias, lower pay, inadequate maternity leaves, sexual harassment, rigid work schedules and a lack of affordable childcare. Some of the issues are grounds for lawsuits, and others just everyday hassles and heartaches.

Employment conditions, in fact, are driving women out of the workplace. From January to June 2025, the national labor participation rate among women ages 25 to 44 with a child under 5 dropped from 69.7% to 66.9%, according to U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics figures released on Aug. 1 and reported in a Time magazine article.

Much of that drop was attributed to return-to-office policies and the loss of flexibility that the Covid era gave to many workers. The loss hit mothers particularly hard.

Men earn significantly more than women in Hawai‘i, at every level of education. The average lifetime earnings of a woman with a master’s degree still fall below a man with some college experience but no degree. Listed amounts are average lifetime earnings, in 2022 dollars. Source: UH Economic Research Organization, “The Gender Pay Gap in Hawai‘i” by Rachel Inafuku, March 12, 2024.

The Motherhood Penalty

In Hawaiʻi, data about working women, including mothers, is similarly concerning. From 2015 to 2022, the average male in Hawaiʻi out-earned the average female by 50%, according to American Community Survey data reported in a UH Economic Research Organization blog post in March 2024. Nationally, the gap is even larger, at 69%.

That same UHERO post showed that women in Hawaiʻi needed at least a master’s degree to match the lifetime earnings of a man with some college experience but no degree. The largest gap in pay happens at the highest levels, with women working as chief executives, financial managers and pharmacists earning significantly less than men.

And getting to those top roles remains difficult. While women make up 47% of the state’s workforce, only 63 women occupied the top-most executive position in Hawaii Business Magazine’s latest Top 250 list of the state’s largest organizations. That’s about 25% of all chief executives on the list. When looking at the list’s 100 largest companies – those reporting gross annual revenue of $81.6 million and up – just 9 women occupied the most senior position. That, of course, is just 9% of those elite chief executives.

According to the UHERO post, the wage gap between Hawaiʻi men and women starts in their mid-to-late 20s, at which point men’s income grows much more quickly than women’s and continues over the course of their careers. The divergence happens at the same time that women begin having children – 27 is the average age of a first birth in Hawaiʻi – and accumulates as a lifelong hit to their financial well-being, nicknamed the motherhood penalty.

In Hawaiʻi, the median annual earnings for working mothers with full-time jobs is about $56,000 a year. For fathers with full-time jobs, that number is $72,000, according to a May 2025 report from the national Institute for Women’s Policy Research. About 66% of mothers with children under 18 worked full time, year-round, in Hawaiʻi, as opposed to 82% of men, according to that same report.

The motherhood penalty can start as soon as a baby is born, given that only 32% of working people in Hawaiʻi said their employer offers paid family and medical leave, according to a 2024 survey commissioned by the Hawaiʻi Children’s Action Network. In the 2025 legislative session, a bill to enact a statewide paid family-leave program died, as have similar bills repeatedly over the past decade.

HCAN’s survey also found that 63% of Hawaiʻi residents have taken time off to care for a newborn or sick family member, or because of a serious illness or injury. Of those, 30% took unpaid leave, or quit their jobs altogether.

Beyond pay and policies, sexual harassment remains a problem in Hawaiʻi workplaces. According to an article on Fujiwara and Rosenbaum’s website, more than 60 sexual harassment complaints are investigated each year by the state Civil Rights Commission and the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, but that number is considered just a small fraction of actual cases, most of which go unreported.

A Culture of Silence

Soon after she stepped down as director of the state Department of Human Services in 2016, Rachael Wong filed a sexual harassment complaint against then-Hawaiʻi House Speaker Joseph Souki. The Hawaiʻi State Ethics Commission, after hearing complaints from Wong and other women, called for his resignation.

While Wong went public about her experience, none of the others who filed complaints did. And they still haven’t.

“I thought my job was to keep the door open, to pave the way so that others could come forward. And nobody has,” Wong said in a recent interview. “It really, really surprised me. I’m fifth generation here, and I hadn’t realized the extent and depth of the culture of silence. Don’t stick your head out. No make waves.”

She co-founded the organization Safe Places & Workplaces to shine a light on the pervasiveness of sexual harassment and to advocate for safer, more respectful workplaces.

A survey about sexual harassment in Hawaiʻi that her organization conducted in 2019 found that 52.2% of women and 42.4% of men said they experienced sexual harassment at work. But only 18% told an HR representative, and just 9% filed an official complaint.

In addition to cultural norms about sticking out, attorney Fujiwara attributes some of the fear to Hawaiʻi’s anemic labor market. The high cost of living means nearly everyone needs to work, yet there’s not an abundance of jobs. Many women, worried about losing their jobs, will say nothing.

Even heavily protected state workers are afraid to speak up, she says. “You can’t get more protection than the state Constitution, and union and civil service protection, but they are still afraid. They need the job.”

Strong Laws, Troubling Realities

Fujiwara grew up in New Orleans, at a time when it resembled “an apartheid state” for Black people and women had few opportunities. She rebelled and left for Hawaiʻi, where she earned a master’s degree in social work from UH Mānoa and a law degree from the William S. Richardson School of Law.

In 1986, she founded her own practice focused on civil rights and employment law and has since helped push forward some of the nation’s strongest laws protecting women, and workers in general.

For example, jurors in Hawaiʻi are asked to use a “reasonable woman” standard, rather than a “reasonable person” or “reasonable man” standard, when evaluating sex discrimination, sexual harassment and pregnancy discrimination cases. That shift in focus means that deciding whether or not touching is harassment depends on a woman’s perspective, she explains.

Legal language around equal pay was recently strengthened to better ensure Hawaiʻi women are fairly compensated, says Fujiwara, and a law preventing employers from asking about salary histories was passed to prevent lowballing women and other job-seekers.

In June, the Hawaiʻi Supreme Court ruled in favor of a city worker who had asked for a new boss because her current one was discriminating against her based on gender and disability. She claimed her employer then retaliated against her with a demotion. The court found her request for a new boss was a reasonable accommodation that should have been honored.

But what the law says and what a person experiences can be very different things. Fujiwara sees rampant problems, particularly in lower-paid service and hospitality roles.

Hawaiʻi’s tourism economy, for instance, “is based on the sexualization of women,” she says, with the expectation that “they’re supposed to be smiling all the time at the customers, even if they’re sexually harassing them.”

Employers routinely fail to protect employees from hotel guests, she says, despite a legal requirement to address this kind of “third-party harassment.” Additionally, Fujiwara says that in cases where the harasser is a male coworker, the unions often protect the men.

But most women never get anywhere near a courthouse. They’re often afraid to even speak with a supervisor or file an internal complaint for fear of retaliation, which can take frightening dimensions.

Fujiwara has seen women working in commercial kitchens who were threatened with knives. In an extreme example from decades ago, one of her clients, an apprentice in a union job, was almost thrown off a rooftop by male coworkers who didn’t want her working there.

Other clients couldn’t find another job. “They have literally had to move to the mainland because they feel like they’ve been blackballed,” she says.

More often, retaliation plays out in slights, taunts and the slow poisoning of a person’s work and life. “Even if she isn’t fired,” says Fujiwara, “her employer and her co-workers know how to make her life miserable.”

“Pure Punishment”

When Naomi looks back on the difficult year of 2022, she says she wishes she had never filed a sexual harassment complaint. The blowback in her small office at the state Department of Defense left her isolated for months, growing increasingly depressed, with only “menial tasks” assigned to her.

“I definitely got to the point where I just was so miserable every day. I hated everything about being alive and having to go into work,” says Naomi, who asked that her real name be withheld for privacy reasons.

“You can’t escape thinking about how you got there, with you being alone in an office all this time,” she says. “It truly felt like pure punishment.”

She started the job in 2021 and wasn’t concerned about working with the all-male team, who she expected “will always have my back,” she says. On her first day at work, her boss quickly disabused her of that idea by making references to the male anatomy and sex with his wife.

“That set the tone for how things were in the office,” Naomi explains.

One of her coworkers, meanwhile, needed constant attention, she says. He liked to troll people on Reddit and make her read his comments. He insisted she taste the food he brought for lunch. He once asked over and over if she would play ball games with him and, when she declined, he demanded that she clean up the office instead.

His lack of boundaries made her deeply uncomfortable. But this co-worker was best friends with the boss, who instructed the team to deal with his idiosyncrasies, help keep him organized and never make him mad.

Finally, the coworker asked Naomi if he could give her herpes, and annoying behavior turned into harassment. She told her boss that she needed him to do something to stop the behavior. Soon afterwards, her boss referred to her as a “bitch.”

Naomi filed an official discrimination complaint with the HR department, and her boss and coworker were moved into another building during the investigation.

Nearly all of her allegations were confirmed, including sexual harassment on the part of both men, as well as racist comments directed to a Black coworker, ethics violations for asking Naomi to do work for her boss’s daughter, and a breach of confidentiality during the investigation on the part of a female HR employee.

One of the “corrective actions” required, she says, was that the entire team had to retake sexual harassment training, herself included. “I used the system as they asked me to and now, as a result of that, I needed to prove that I have learned, once again, how to use the system that is not going to work for me.”

After mediation and training sessions, her boss and co-worker returned to the office, while Naomi landed another job with another agency. She says she’s happy to work with a professional team where no one calls her the “little gal who works on social media.”

But she would be very hesitant to file a complaint again. “If I were ever in that situation again, I would probably think really hard before saying something, because I am a woman who went through that situation and got no help.”

PART II: WHAT SUPPORTIVE EMPLOYERS DO DIFFERENTLY

When she was in her 20s, “I couldn’t imagine the life I have now, with the company I have now,” says Nicole Velasco, who works in business development in the Hawaiʻi office of NORESCO, a national energy company. She’s worked there for nearly a decade.

At the moment, she’s at home with a new baby, and with a toddler in tow. After the births of both her sons, she was given three months of paid time off from the company, and she’s currently negotiating to extend her leave beyond that.

But back then, before she switched to the corporate world, Velasco was a stressed-out city employee, trying to extract herself from a bad relationship and trapped in a workplace grind that seemed to never let up.

The pace ended abruptly in 2017 when she was fired from her job as executive director of the Honolulu Office of Economic Development. Looking back, she believes the official reasons were spurious, including being on her phone too much, despite handling the office’s social media. She thinks the unspoken reason was that she failed to conform.

“It came down to not fitting a particular expectation that had been established before I walked through the door. … They saw me as a young local girl, and it was a ‘She should just know to bring donuts and coffee’ thing,” Velasco says.

“Then I arrived, and I proved to be ‘difficult’ because I said I’m not going to be a ‘yes man,’ I will push for innovation and question things, and I want to know why I have to clean up your messes. … I really cared about my team as people, but I operated a little differently.”

The rupture from her job was “heartbreaking,” she says, but also a “blessing in disguise.”

“Had they not fired me, I probably would still be there because I believe in our people and in our community and that we want things to be better,” she says. “But it was actually killing me, and I don’t say that facetiously. I had been whittled away from a health perspective. I was developing cancer and just turning 30.”

Her medical treatments were successful, and she soon landed a job that supported her in ways she never expected. “This is a different environment – it took me by surprise,” she says of the Massachusetts-based company. “It’s people forward and team forward.”

In her first meeting with her boss, Velasco says he asked her what she wanted from the job. “I told him to be able to take care of family, to take care of my health, to live a life and not feel guilty about it. He looked at me like that’s pretty basic.”

She says her employer has assisted her at every critical juncture in her life since that talk. When she was being stalked and felt threatened, the company immediately changed the office locks. When her grandmother was dying, she was given time off to care for her. When her children were born, she got company-sponsored paid leave.

And when she returned to work, she could do it from home, and with no pressure to return to the office. “I’ve never once been made to feel guilty,” Velasco says.

The difference in workplace cultures continues to amaze her and makes her question why often-touted local values can be absent in the workplace.

“How did I get trained to believe my needs were too much?” she asked. “By the same culture that prioritizes ʻohana. Let’s reevaluate our collective contract with each other and ask ourselves if we’re satisfied with certain infrastructures and systems. And the answer is probably no.”

She still remembers a city employee who needed to leave early to pick up her son from elementary school. The father had forgotten the boy, and it was getting late. Shortly afterward, an HR director chastised Velasco for letting the employee go, thus squandering the “public asset” of required work time.

“We need to have a long, overdue conversation to think about how we got here. Why are we more concerned about recouping one-and-a-half hours of wages and not about a small child left on the roadside?”

Evolving Workplaces

For all the social changes of the past decades, workplaces can often seem stuck in the past. Schedules are fixed, with office hours often conflicting with school hours. Remote options from the pandemic have been clawed back by many employers. Family leave remains one of the stingiest in the world.

Some of the problems spring from lack of awareness, says Wong from Safe Places & Workplaces and the executive director of the professional development organization One Shared Future. Many leaders simply don’t know much about their employees’ lives.

“There’s one of your reliable team members, who’s making choices for their livelihood and not able to be there for their child or their aging parents,” she says. “And it’s never dawned on you that a policy could totally change productivity, culture, the bottom line, everything because you’re an old-school guy and have a really supportive family structure, and you don’t think about those things.”

Other impediments to changing workplace cultures reflect how society is structured.

“We’re still in a patriarchal culture of male leadership looking a certain way and then female leadership trying to look that way as well, versus what does female leadership uniquely look like?” says Kerrie Urosevich, the executive director of the Early Childhood Action Strategy and a founder of the ʻOhana Workplace Alliance.

The alliance looks at disparities between men’s and women’s experiences in the workplace, and ways to close the gaps. One trouble spot is women’s lower pay, which Urosevich attributes partly to men’s more assertive negotiating skills.

She shares a revealing example from her own experience on the hiring committee for a head of school. The committee’s male pick asked for $30,000 more, which they offered. When he ended up declining the position, the group selected a female candidate the following year and offered her the original salary. She accepted.

“We all started celebrating,” says Urosevich. “Then one of the women on the committee says, ‘Absolutely not. We need to offer her $30,000 over because she’s more qualified than the guy we interviewed last year.’ And I felt so ashamed. The funny part was that when we offered the candidate $30,000 more, she was really taken aback.”

Evaluating Companies

Urosevich and her team advocate for policies such as pay parity audits, remote work options, mental health programs and childcare subsidies, or even having companies develop their own childcare workforces and pay living wages.

The group is in the early stages of devising a grading system that evaluates an employer’s family-friendly policies, which they could use to attract new hires. What a family-friendly workplace looks like will vary from employer to employer, and even employee to employee.

Urosevich, the mother of three, now in their late teens and early 20s, says that many workplace policies are based on models from the 1950s and ’60s, and they’re hopelessly outdated. She particularly dislikes the idea that people in roles like hers need to be at specific workstations, at set times.

“The context is just so dramatically different now. With technology, we can be much more flexible and actually retain staff because of that,” she says. “You’re not making employees choose between their own health and their work, or their family and their work. They can take care of it all more holistically and meet deadlines and be an awesome employee.”

For Ben Treviño, the father of a young daughter and an alliance member, and the network coordinator of the Omidyar Fellows Program, work-from-home options are invaluable, but the physical workplace can be equally so.

“It’s an important space,” he says. “In the same way that we invest in our homes as a place we want to live in, how do we make workplaces a place we want to be, to be a shelter when home can’t be that?”

Another scoring system is now being developed by Llasmin Chaine, executive director of the Hawaiʻi State Commission on the Status of Women, and Aleeka Kay Morgan, executive director of the Nurturing Wāhine Fund.

Their planned gender-equity scorecard will measure organizations in areas such as compensation, hiring practices, women in leadership roles and flexible work arrangements. The scorecard is being developed based on models used elsewhere.

The goal is to recognize organizations doing good work, spotlight best practices and provide support so everyone can improve, says Chaine. “If we’re not giving folks the tools to implement policy and shift things in a positive direction, then we’re missing half of what’s needed. Ultimately, we want everyone to thrive.”

Examples of Sexual Harassment

• Using sexist slurs such as “bitch” and “slut”

• Talking about body parts inappropriately

• Making sexually explicit comments

• Demanding a date in exchange for a job or promotion

• Repeatedly texting or calling in a harassing way

• Sharing sexual content without permission

• Following someone in a way that makes them feel uncomfortable

• Purposely touching in an unwelcome way

• Offering inappropriate gifts

• Forcing a sexual act without permission

DESIGNING BETTER WORKPLACES: FOUR APPROACHES

Med-Quest: Rare Telework Options in the Public Sector

Hawaiʻi Medicaid Director Judy Mohr Peterson takes a refreshingly simple and direct approach to the job of leading about 250 employees and serving more than 400,000 Hawaiʻi residents in the Med-Quest program.

“We focus on getting the work done, and we try to be as flexible as possible while recognizing that people are trying to be good parents and raising a family and living their lives,” she says.

Some employees need flexibility to deal with family obligations. Some can do their work mostly or completely at home. Others need or want to work in the office.

To meet those divergent needs, Peterson has kept the telework model from the pandemic days, despite pressure from legislators and other state officials who want to see “butts in the chairs,” she says.

Currently, about half the team works remotely at least part of the week – more than any other division in the state, she says. And their productivity has risen because of the arrangement, she says, and continues to: “People have actually gotten more productive over time.”

“Telework really aligns with our mission and vision,” says Peterson. “We’re about promoting health and wellness, and having healthy families and healthy communities. You can’t have that if you’re not treating people with respect.”

As the mother of two adult daughters, Peterson is empathetic to her team’s struggles, especially the female managers with young kids who feel guilty about falling short in their jobs and at home. She reminds them that “this idea that women can do everything is false.”

She also tells them that fathers are rarely in similar positions, “because whether we like it or not, and whether we acknowledge it or not, women bear the brunt of the caregiving … and nothing else gets moved off their schedules,” she says.

Flexibility about where and when the work gets done helps employees stay in their jobs. “Our division has a reputation for, one, being mission driven, but also we’ve been able to retain people.”

Since she arrived in Honolulu from the Oregon Medicaid office a decade ago, Peterson has introduced innovations such as medically tailored meals for diabetic patients and programs that link health care and housing.

She’s now preparing for the challenges ahead, as new Medicaid work requirements threaten to strip away people’s health insurance. Her division is looking at how to get clients into jobs, job training and volunteer opportunities so they can keep their coverage.

“Our team believes in what they’re doing. They know that they’re making a difference for hundreds of thousands of people,” says Peterson. “We try to create an environment that is supportive of the team, that values them, no matter where they are in the organization.”

Hawai‘i Foodbank: When Focusing on Pay Really Matters

The Hawaiʻi Foodbank distributed more than 21 million pounds of food and served 154,000 people a month in fiscal year 2024 – the same number of people as at the height of the pandemic and twice as many as in 2019.

The enormity of the task keeps the organization’s president and CEO, Amy Miller, focused on practical matters. For her team of 70, that means meeting their immediate need for better pay.

When she arrived in 2021, many weren’t earning a living wage, she says. Employee surveys showed overall favorability scores were 59%, compared to an average score of 71% among food banks nationwide.

“It was pretty awful,” Miller says. “There were people who work here that needed food assistance. It wasn’t right for us to be contributing to the problem. People shouldn’t have to work two or three jobs to make ends meet.”

She immediately lifted the lowest pay from $14 to $17, and now $19, which she says is still too low given escalating living costs. The rest of the team got a wage bump as well.

Next, she conducted a compensation survey to benchmark the nonprofit against similar ones across the country, and to map specific roles against similar roles in Hawaiʻi and elsewhere. Data came from local organizations and the national Feeding America network.

While she didn’t find discrepancies based on gender or ethnicity, she says she did find that some positions needed “equity adjustments,” which they got. The organization also launched a $50 monthly “wellness stipend” and distributes fresh produce to the team each month.

Favorability metrics rose to 73% in 2024 – a 14% jump from 2021. Retention rates have also risen, from 67% in fiscal year 2023 to 77% in fiscal year 2024, and to 85% now.

At the moment, there’s a “baby boom” at the food bank, she says, with several women and one man at home on leave. The organization works with them to take paid time off, and to ease back to the job with part-time hours or work-from-home days.

“You can’t be a stickler who says, ‘You have to be back in the office five days a week on day 91 after you gave birth,’ and then that person ends up leaving,” Miller explains. “You’re hurting yourself if you’re creating a situation where good people leave.”

Because of the nature of their work, many warehouse workers and drivers have set hours. But she encourages flexibility for those who can take it and creates paths for people who want more flexible jobs, in part by removing “weeding mechanisms.”

“Every single one of our positions will ask for a bachelor’s or equivalent experience,” she says. “We have directors who don’t have college degrees and they’re fabulous in their roles.”

MacNaughton: Diverse Viewpoints Lead to Better Decisions

At this small real-estate development company, decisions are made after open discussions and listening to everyone’s ideas. “Sometimes it takes a little more time, but the positive results are quite enduring,” says COO Emily Porter.

“Sometimes I’ll say something in a meeting that’s a bit off the wall, out of the box, and probably not the right answer,” she says. “I do it because I want to make sure the room is large enough that people feel like they can share their opinion fully.”

In her varied career that included working as a litigator and in operations for a Bay Area tech company, Porter says she’s “experienced feelings of not belonging as a woman.” She’s sensitive about letting others know their voices count, and says the payoff is better, more innovative ideas.

As an example, MacNaughton bought and manages several boutique hotels in Waikīkī. The question of whether to keep or disband the valet and bell service at one of the hotels elicited a lot of emotions and conflicting opinions.

“Financially, it didn’t make sense anymore, but that team was a big part of the operation and interfaced well with other members of the front desk,” she says. After much back and forth, they cancelled the service, but employees were offered jobs at other hotels, and in some cases at other companies that MacNaughton works with.

By talking and learning about the feelings involved, “we made a good business decision in a very human-centric way that cared about the people,” she says.

Another example is working on hotel bathroom renovations. In those cases, Porter says the leadership team taps the perspectives of men and women, young and old, who have different ideas about the need for privacy or how comfortable they are sharing hot tubs and saunas. The feedback helps clarify when to provide separate or unisex facilities.

Because the tone from the top matters, the company has added two more women to the leadership team and two as general managers of hotels. It regularly reviews compensation to make sure it’s equitable, promotes people based on merit and offers flexibility in where employees work.

For Porter personally, she appreciates being able to serve on boards and work on community projects, such as a K-12 healthy relationships curriculum that she’s now developing. “I love that MacNaughton supports me to volunteer with community organizations, even during work hours,” she says.

American Savings Bank: Improvements Started with Hard Conversations

When Beth Whitehead joined American Savings Bank in 2008, she found a “great, solid, profitable company” with abysmal employee engagement scores, below 50%. As the “self-appointed guardian of the culture,” she took it as a personal challenge.

Today, engagement scores have shot up to the high 80% to 90% levels. She attributes the transformation to “the democratization of the employee experience” as the company sought answers from the entire staff about what a great company would look like to them, and where ASB fell short.

The responses led to dramatic changes, she says. The bank immediately revamped its family-leave policies to offer three months of paid leave, with the option to work part-time with full-time wages in the first month back on the job.

It runs annual, mandatory training on respect in the workplace, with lots of role-playing. “We’re trying to make sure that we are empathetic toward each other. … If we want to be collaborative and work together, we have to understand and respect each other,” says Whitehead.

She says the bank’s leaders undergo extensive cohort-based training in how to seek out feedback and accept the responses, which can be uncomfortable. In the end, she says, “I think we all have work to do on getting outside our definition of ourselves and our perceptions of greatness, as in our company is great, so how can you say something bad about us?”

And they act on feedback to fix problems. In one instructive example, Whitehead says surveys identified serious discontent with the way the operations staff communicated with the tellers and other frontline staff. She spearheaded efforts to improve the internal website and email communications, only to receive another low score on employee surveys.

“We spent a year fixing the wrong problem because we didn’t dig in deeply enough and listen enough,” she says.

The core problem was people wanted conversations, not memos. “Once we started bringing them together to talk about issues that needed to be solved, the communication score went up by 20 points.”

Four of the nine bank executives are women, including Whitehead, who is an executive VP and chief administrative officer. The bank develops talent and mostly promotes from within, including CEO Ann Teranishi and Executive VP Dani Aiu, who started as a teller 30 years ago.

“We do a really great job of nurturing talent and making opportunities available,” Whitehead says. “The culture here is one of being inclusive and welcoming and trying to make sure everyone feels valued.”

UNDERSTANDING HAWAI‘I’S EMPLOYMENT LAWS

Protection from Discrimination

It is against the law for employers to refuse to hire, bar or discharge, or discriminate against any individual because of race, sex including gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, age, religion, color, ancestry, disability, marital status, arrest and court record, reproductive health decision, and domestic or sexual violence victim status. The law applies to employers with at least one employee. Hawaiʻi Revised Statutes 378-2

Sexual Harassment

State law prohibits sexual harassment in the workplace, which is defined as unwanted sexual advances and other forms of verbal, physical and visual harassment that affects a person’s ability to get or keep a job, or that creates a hostile workplace. Hawaiʻi Revised Statutes 378-1 and Hawaiʻi Administrative Rule 12-46-109

Nondisclosure Agreements

Employers are not allowed to use NDAs to prevent employees from discussing sexual harassment occurring at the workplace, or to retaliate against them for talking about it. Hawaiʻi Revised Statutes 378-2.2

Equal Pay

Employers are prohibited from paying lower wages to employees in protected categories, compared to what others are paid, if they are doing similar work, requiring equal skill, effort and responsibility. In addition, employers cannot stop their employees from discussing their wages. Hawaiʻi Revised Statutes 378-2.3

Salary History

When inquiries are made about hiring and when negotiating employment contracts, employers are not allowed to ask about an applicant’s salary history, or to rely on that information to determine wages, benefits or other compensation. Hawaiʻi Revised Statutes 378-2.4

Pay Transparency

Employers with 50 or more employees are required to disclose an hourly rate or salary range in job postings. Exceptions include internal transfers or promotions and public-sector positions where pay is determined through collective bargaining. Hawaiʻi Revised Statutes 378-2.8

Victims of Domestic or Sexual Violence

Employers are required to allow employees who are victims of domestic or sexual violence, or parents of children who are victims, to take unpaid leave to seek medical attention or counseling, relocate residences and related activities. Employers must also make reasonable accommodations, such as changing locks, modifying work schedules or screening calls. Hawaiʻi Revised Statutes 378-81 and 378-72

Pregnancy Discrimination

Hawaiʻi administrative rules prohibit employers from excluding a job applicant or firing an employee because of pregnancy. In addition, they cannot terminate an employee for taking “disability” leave due to pregnancy, childbirth or related medical conditions. The leave must be for a reasonable period of time, as determined by the employee’s physician. Hawaiʻi Administrative Rules 12-46-107 and 12-46-108

Family Leave

The Hawaiʻi Family Leave Law says employees “may be eligible” for 4 weeks of unpaid family leave for the birth or adoption of a child. The law applies to employers with 100 or more employees, and employees must have worked at least 6 consecutive months.

The federal Family and Medical Leave Act guarantees up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave for parents. The law applies to employers with 50 or more employees, and employees must have worked 1,250 hours with the employer during the 12 months before they start leave.

Breastfeeding on the Job

Employers must provide reasonable break times for employees to express milk for one year after the child’s birth. In addition, they need to provide a location, other than a restroom, that is shielded from view and free from intrusion from coworkers and the public. Hawaiʻi Revised Statutes 378-92

Note: The summaries above describe some of the Hawaiʻi employment laws that are most relevant to women and caretakers. For the full wording of laws in the Hawaiʻi Revised Statutes, go to bit.ly/3UJSTh4.
Be advised: These summaries should not be substituted for the advice of an attorney or HR expert.

“Five years ago, everyone would have told you that’s the safest possible degree you can get, that it’s hot,” she says. “And of course, these folks are struggling.”

Watching her son enter a fast-changing labor force has reinforced her belief that higher education must go beyond preparing students for their first job. She argues it should equip them for a lifetime of profound change against the backdrop of AI and digital transformation, geopolitical volatility, climate change and generational shifts in values.

In Hensel’s view, the future will reward those who pair technical expertise with enduring, human-centered “soft” skills – problem-solving, adaptability and critical thinking – essential for navigating a world in flux.

“It really, in many respects, is the rebirth of the humanities,” she says. “How do you continually learn, acquire information, and work through ambiguity and fast, furious change in a way that lets you be successful? We are no longer preparing people for a single skill set that they then employ for the rest of their lives.”

This blend of pragmatism and optimism has already begun shaping Hensel’s early tenure at UH. She enlisted Guy Kawasaki, who popularized the term “technology evangelist” at Apple in the 1980s and 1990s and played a key role marketing the original Macintosh.

Kawasaki has since become a best-selling author and an evangelist for Canva, the online design platform co-founded by Melanie Perkins, who famously faced more than 100 investor rejections before turning her idea into a multibillion-dollar business.

At UH, Kawasaki serves as an advisor to Hensel and together they are working on new digital initiatives. He is also “a resource to faculty on strategic uses of AI across academics, research, and operations,” according to the university system’s website.

Hensel herself leans naturally into the digital age – chatting in a YouTube interview with her new dog, Phoebe, nestled at her side (which she reposted on LinkedIn, commenting, “Phoebe and I were interviewed!”) – or appearing in an Instagram reel from the UH Mānoa Alumni Makers’ Market at The Royal Hawaiian.

Hensel is equally comfortable in the classroom, online or at community events. She welcomed students back to campus, which was documented in a video posted on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter (https://x.com/UHPresident/status/1960530284035588309)

In fact, the volume of her public appearances suggests she has been UH president for years, though she has been in the role since January 1, 2025.

Ann has been with ASB since 2007 and became CEO in 2021, guiding the bank through periods of transformation. She played a pivotal leadership role during the COVID crisis, helping ASB manage unprecedented risks while continuing to support customers, employees, and the broader Hawai‘i community. Most recently, she helped lead ASB through its historic transition from Hawaiian Electric Industries ownership to becoming an independent, investor-owned bank in December 2024.

Register today.

Few things are as inextricably tied to Hawaiʻi’s culture as a fragrant and colorful lei. They’re stacked high on the shoulders of graduates, slipped over the necks of wide-eyed visitors, or draped on community leaders at official events.  

Lei making has a rich and vibrant history across the Islands. Yet over recent decades, the bulk of the lei-making industry has moved offshore, to foreign lands where growers and lei-makers string flowers into strands and sell them back cheaply to us here in Hawai’i. 

Now, the Lei Poinaʻole Project hopes to turn that around. The project created by the nonprofit BEHawaiʻi aims to revitalize and strengthen the local lei industry through community engagement and advocacy. The main mission of the group is to uplift local flower growers and lei makers to preserve the traditions of lei in Hawaiʻi. 

Launched three years ago, the program has engaged propagators on each of the main islands in hopes of building pilot projects into a statewide network of flower growers, lei-makers and vendors that can flourish as it did in the past.  

“You think about Hawaiʻi, you think about a lei,” says Brook Lee, secretary of BEHawaiʻi, who helped focus the nonprofit’s attention on the needs of struggling lei flower growers and lei makers.  

So far, the Lei Poinaʻole Project has connected with 26 existing growers, 22 new growers and 7 propagators. The goal is not just to support the big farmers, but small and medium-sized growers so that a cottage industry can thrive once again.

Sylvia Hussey

“The objective of the project at the end is to have the Lei Poinaʻole Coalition,” adds BEHawai‘i Executive Director Sylvia Hussey. “The lei project is a mechanism in which to form the coalition” that will carry on even after initial startup efforts cease. 

Lee remembers the idea for the Project stemmed from a conversation she had with a lei store owner who told her in 2020 that the lei industry was in decline and needed help. That conversation stuck with her, and when BEHawaiʻi began considering projects to fund, the memory resurfaced. The idea to support a statewide lei network blossomed. 

Lee explains: “There are a lot of people in the community who just didn’t have a touchpoint or a place, or the space, to be able to think about the idea of stewarding this thing, because it’s farm to table, which is important, but that has been the whole sort of agricultural space here in Hawaiʻi for a very long time. And it’s necessary, but we’re just trying to follow in their footsteps and expand the conversation around.” 

In 2022, the group was awarded a three-year grant from the Federal Administration for Native Americans. The grant supported eight existing and 16 new farmers across the state. While the group knew the grant couldn’t solve the problem in just a few years, it helped them start the conversations needed to build the coalition.  

Lee says they aim to help growers who have been quietly maintaining but are at a breaking point and need support. Besides foreign competitors, farmers are facing agricultural diseases and beetle infestations that are devastating long-established farms. When they contacted the USDA for help, she says, some farmers said their concerns were dismissed and they were told to simply burn the trees. 

“We’re hoping to be able to set people up, because we can’t fund it forever, but we wanted to just sort of try to piece it into a way that they can know that they’re certain CTHAR will help,” Lee says, referring to the UH Mānoa College of Tropical Agriculture and Human Resources. 

CTHAR has been holding workshops to teach people how to plant certain flowers. Experts take the participants on a walking tour of their properties to assess what their problems may be or what they should focus on.  

After the assessments, some farms are encouraged to propagate flowers in locations that have suitable growing conditions.  

Meanwhile, the Lei Poinaʻole Project has been expanding connections between lei-making families and farmers. They’ve had to overcome obstacles, too, including some growers who were hesitant about sharing details about their sites and growing practices.   

“One of the first things we explain about the project is that the project takes none of the production. We just want to help them, if it’s more plants, if it is knowledge, pest control,” Hussey says. Their focus, she says, is: “How can we help them keep all of their production and how they want to distribute that, whether it’s commercially or [through] family.” 

The Project representatives also ask growers how the group can support them through policy changes or by assisting with general practices. Everyone in Hawaiʻi farms differently, Lee says, and each person will favor certain flowers that are culturally based and close to peoples’ ohana or have a special connection to wherever they’re living. 

“A lot of times they don’t like it when people come in and try to tell them how to do something that they are doing for a very long time, there’s some cultural sensitivity around it, right?” Lee says. “Because, of course, they should know how to do it. They’ve been doing it for generations. Yeah, that’s their kuleana. And no one’s here to tell you that your kuleana is wrong or bad. You’ve been doing it. You’ve got the proof. The boots are on the ground.” 

While respecting current practices, Hussey says the farmers in the program also share their knowledge with the next generation and in the process gain a scientific grounding in how best to grow their flowers.

Insight from a New Grower  

The propagation site on Hawaiʻi Island may be furthest along among the pilot projects. It is coordinated by David Fuertes, executive director of the nonprofit Kahua Paʻa Mua. On a five-acre property in the North Kohala community of Kapaʻau, Fuertes has cuttings of a diverse range of flowering plants that, once they sprout roots, are distributed to five families to plant on their own land. 

Flower varieties in the mix include crown flower, pikake, puakenikeni, ʻākulikuli, ʻōlena as well as more common plumeria and orchids. 

Under a makeshift greenhouse, a watering system emits a spray of water for 20 seconds every hour, keeping the plants moist. The team meets regularly to discuss best practices for dipping the cutting stems into homemade root hormone mixtures that enhance root growth. They take measurements and share data so they can replicate the results that are most favorable. 

The first batch of cuttings have been transplanted, and flowers should be ready within a matter of months. 

“The families will supply local lei makers, and they can make their own lei as well,” said Fuertes. “It’s a community-based economic development program. After the initial group of growers are established, we can expand to the next generation of families.” 

Fuertes has a special connection to lei making. His late sister, Nancy Fuertes Ueno, was an award-winning lei maker on Kauaʻi. 

On the one-year anniversary of her death in September last year, Fuertes inaugurated the Aunty Nancy Lei Aloha Garden on his land in her memory in hopes of preserving the art of lei-making. 

At the launch ceremony, Fuertes told a gathering of about 100 people that while the vast majority of lei makers’ flowers come to Hawaiʻi from foreign countries, he hopes this program will help rekindle an interest in lei-making in the Islands. 

“Here in Kohala, we want to make the change. If we can get everybody to grow flowers and get farmers switching or intercropping with flower lei, we can bring the price down for lei,” he said.  

In his blessing to dedicate the site, Kahu Kealoha Sugiyama explained the social and spiritual role of lei. 

“When you pick a flower, it’s a memory between you and the receiver,” Sugiyama explained. “It starts out with one memory, one flower, and you keep adding and adding until the lei is completed. And what was just a single memory, now it becomes a story, a story between you and the lei maker. That story is precious.” 

When Hussey enlisted Fuertes to join the state-wide effort, she already knew his background — he had been her former high school teacher. 

“I was born and raised in Kohala. I’m a Kohala high school graduate, and so when we were looking for a propagation site in Kohala, there was no question who it needed to be. It would be my former ag teacher from high school who has a farm,” Hussey says. “And that’s an example of leveraging relationships to be able to find in the community those propagator sites.” 

Fuertes remembers Hussey developed an early interest in agriculture when she was one of his students.  

He said he recalls Hussey started a paʻu unit in Kohala, the ceremonial equestrian groups that ride in parades, with both the horses and female riders adorned with elaborate lei displays. 

“That was one of her first involvements with lei back in high school,” Fuertes says. 

History of Lei in Hawaiʻi 

Lei making traces back to the early Polynesian settlers in Hawaiʻi, and besides the decorative appeal, lei also served as a tribute to the gods and in some cases signified social rank in society.  

Early lei included nuts, shells and bones as well as a variety of plants and flowers. The maile lei, an open string lei woven with fragrant leaves from vines that grow in cool mountain forests, is considered among the most cherished types of lei. 

Demand for maile lei has soared in conjunction with official events and celebrations. And with the arrival of tourists, and the preference for fragrant plumeria and other brightly colored flowers, lei making became a cottage industry across the islands. 

“So what we have heard from conversations from lei sellers is that the supply is getting harder and harder to get and everybody knows, just by experience, maile as an example right there, very rarely can you get a maile of Big Island, maile of Kauaʻi, fresh maile. It’s being replaced by ti leaf,” Hussey says. 

Different lei carry different meanings with the color, flower and occasion. The maile lei was once revered by aliʻi and is given as a sign of love, respect or a blessing. 

“One of the differentiators is that it is not the demand side of lei,” she says. “There will always be a demand. It’s on the growing side and the mitigating [efforts] helping more growers there, and anybody, not just commercial growers, but family growers, school growers, backyard growers, more lei flower growers.” 

Matching Price with Value 

Another goal of the project is to change consumers’ understanding of how much labor goes into lei. More than just its price, lei hold the spirit of the farmers and those who sewed it together.   

“We know that monetizing or valuing lei is not just in a price point,” Hussey says. “We all know family members at a wedding, even graduation or Mother’s Day, that someone has given you a lei, that they have grown, they have sewn themselves, is worth so much more than when you purchase.   

“And that also influences the price point. People complain, ʻOh, the pikake is $15 a strand. My gosh, if you knew how much effort it was to grow that pikake and how valuable, you wouldn’t complain. You would value and mahalo the lei seller and the lei grower for that value.”  

The Lei Poinaʻole Project is seeking help to quantify the financial importance of lei in Hawaiʻi, starting with a baseline estimate of current local production. 

Every island has its own relationship to lei making and sewing. Oʻahu has lei stands at the Daniel K. Inouye International Airport and many lei shops on Maunakea Street in Chinatown.  

One shop in Chinatown is the family-owned Lin’s Lei Shop.  

Manager Tony Ngyuen says that it is difficult to measure how much work goes into a lei since everything is handmade. Some flowers have a special way to be plucked and processed, and can be sewn in different ways. The cost of the lei reflects the input of farmers as well.   

The most popular lei are usually the white fragrant flowers like pikake, puakenikeni, ginger and tuberose. Ngyuen explains that when picked, tuberose has a brownish tint on the outside, so it is cleaned to be white and peeled to be used in lei.  

Lin’s Lei Shop purchases pre-made orchid flower lei from Thailand since the labor is cheaper and they sell for less.  

“They create a product that is long-lasting and economical,” Ngyuen says. “It makes sense, and it provides a strong supply for the demand here.” 

One pre-made orchid lei in the shop’s lineup, already made in Thailand, is the famed Christina style lei. The Christina lei was designed in 1990 by Beth Lopez and created to honor the memory of her daughter Christina who died from lupus when she was 22. The design uses a needle and thread to sew together over 500 orchid centers. 

“Imagine the amount of work involved to make this,” says Ngyuen. “They just take a single petal from a single flower, and they create this,” he said.  

Some orchid lei have a negative reputation for being cheap or imported, but Hawaiʻi Island used to have its own honohono orchid that was specially farmed.  

 “We don’t want people to get a bad rep that lei orchids are bad, like orchids are part of our history and our culture as Hawaiian people,” Lee of BEHawaiʻi says. “But these are a different type of orchid that are mass produced in Thailand brought in by the pounds of loads.”  

Other than the orchid lei, Ngyuen says that all of the other lei he sells are handmade in Hawaiʻi, and in the back of their Maunakea Street store, family members can be seen making lei. They get their flowers from multiple farms and hobbyists across Hawaiʻi. 

While most lei are made in-store, sometimes they purchase pre–made lei from people who have trees in their backyards. Ngyuen pointed out a traditional lei made from hala, the fruit of the pandanus tree, that was made by a recreational lei maker. He said that it’s an older style of lei that isn’t usually sold anymore. 

Many lei shops, including Lin’s Lei Shop, sell flowers and lei to the mainland for graduations and other celebrations.  

“It seems like the lei culture is spreading,” he says. “So now, especially on the West Coast, it’s very common for people to receive lei for graduation. The whole West Coast, right from Washington to California, they all use lei, I think it’s good. Do I have a problem with them selling at Costco? No, not really.” 

“Support local if you can,” he says. “But other than that, enjoy a lei, enjoy the craftsmanship, enjoy the artistry. And yeah, support the industry.” 

That was the unorthodox prescription the keynote speaker offered to nearly 500 attendees at the Hawaii Business Leadership Conference at the Hilton Hawaiian Village.

Williams, a globally recognized expert on innovation, urged executives to move beyond their fixation on ROI — return on investment.

“Equally as important, perhaps more important these days, is return on learning,” Williams said at the conference in late July. “Every organization in America needs to accelerate their rate of learning. If you can learn at the pace of change, you have an advantage. But if your learning falls below the pace of change, you fall further and further behind. And that’s where we get into real trouble.

“So in order to accelerate the rate of learning, you need waste.”

The author of “Disrupt: Think the Unthinkable to Spark Transformation in Your Business” cited a litany of companies that went bankrupt or lost their edge because they failed to keep innovating.

Williams said so-called “disruptive thinking” among employees leads to uncertain results, and not all ideas need to be implemented right away, or ever.

“But you’ve got to break the cycle of incremental thinking,” the idea that today’s successful ideas will continue to serve you well into the future.

In an interview after his speech, Williams expanded upon the idea.

“Disruptive ideas, if the advantages are clear, they’re no longer high risk,” Williams said. “They’re really risking the thinking time, and that’s a matter of priorities.

“I think of different currencies in a business. We often think of money as the main currency, but there are different currencies. I want businesses to see ideas as their most valuable currency.”

Williams challenged attendees to go back to their companies after the conference and to encourage all of their employees to start rethinking everything about their businesses.

“If you don’t have new ideas, you don’t innovate, you can’t grow,” explained Williams who is also Adjunct Associate Professor of Marketing at the NYU Stern School of Business. “Particularly in mature economies like the U.S., they’ve got to get themselves in a position where they’ve got more ideas to spend than their competitors.

“That means as circumstances change, we’ve got more options. We can do A, B, C, D or E depending on how circumstances change, so we’ve got better optionality than our competitors.”

Williams insists no new technology needs to be invented for companies to thrive and grow.

“My message is everyone in the organization needs to have a comfortable fluency moving between the core business and introducing new business ideas,” Williams says. “That’s why I talk about discourse. It’s not the device that’s important, it’s the discourse.”

“Ideas beget ideas,” he says.

So how does a guy who tells others to endlessly innovate keep his own creative juices flowing? After all, Williams has more than 30 patents for product designs and is constantly pushing his mantra — innovate or perish.

He scoffs at the idea of waiting for some creative bolt of lightning to spring from casual imagining.

“I’m a big believer in deliberate creativity,” Williams says. “I don’t believe in shooting water pistols and getting people to take off ties and sit on bean bags. It’s exercising a muscle.”

He has recently gotten back in touch with a creative outlet he pursued when he was younger: drumming.

“I find that really helps with creativity,” Williams says, adding: “It has actually engaged different parts of the brain. … I think my aspiration is to be a jazz musician at some point. Jazz has a lot to do with creativity and improvisation.”

A year of corporate profits in Hawai‘i was overshadowed by a massive loss at Hawaiian Electric Industries, parent of the utility at the center of litigation over the deadly Lahaina wildfire that killed 102 people in August 2023.

Once among the state’s most profitable companies, Hawaiian Electric reported a more than $1.42 billion loss in 2024 – driven largely by a $4.04 billion wildfire settlement with thousands of Maui residents and businesses.

Plaintiffs alleged the utility failed to shut off power lines despite high-wind warnings that preceded the fire. The company, which supplies electricity to about 95% of Hawai‘i’s population, agreed to pay nearly half the settlement amount.

The state, Maui County and other defendants, including Kamehameha Schools, West Maui Land Co., Hawaiian Telcom and Spectrum/Charter Communications, also agreed to contribute to the settlement.

Hawaiian Electric’s 2024 loss was greater than the combined total annual profits tallied by 53 companies and organizations in the state during the same period, according to the annual ranking by Hawaii Business Magazine of the most profitable companies in the Islands. The list includes all the local companies whose data is publicly available or was submitted to us.

Hawaiian Electric president and CEO Scott Seu said in the company’s annual report that the Hawai‘i Supreme Court ruling earlier this year to allow settlement funds to be released helped “to move the settlement forward and provide more clarity for our company’s path toward reestablishing financial stability.”

The amount of Hawaiian Electric’s loss was also seven times the size of the company’s prior year profit of nearly $200 million.

To help pay for its portion of the settlement, Hawaiian Electric sold 90% of its stake in American Savings Bank to independent investors for $405 million in cash.

“Importantly, the proceeds from this transaction support our efforts to rebuild our financial strength while creating flexibility for how we finance Maui wildfire-related obligations and key utility initiatives, such as wildfire risk reduction,” Seu told shareholders.

“We are deeply committed to advancing our wildfire mitigation efforts, and since launching an expanded wildfire safety strategy in the wake of the Maui wildfires, Hawaiian Electric has rapidly advanced efforts to reduce the risk of wildfires ignited by its equipment.”

Dan Quinn has enjoyed remarkable success and suffered heartbreaking defeats during 23 years as an NFL coach.

The part-time Hawai‘i resident is now starting his second season as head coach of the Washington Commanders after an impressive first season there: His team won 14 games in 2024 following a 4-13 finish the year before.

The NFL Players Association surveys players each year and its latest report card names Quinn the highest-ranked head coach in the league based on player feedback. He received a perfect score on efficiency – how effectively he uses his players’ time – and the top score for receptiveness to feedback.

I interviewed Quinn to learn how he leads, why he changed part of his coaching style four years ago, how being vulnerable can be a virtue and much more. Here is a condensed version of our conversation.

In the players union’s annual survey, your players said you are very receptive to their suggestions. How do you effectively listen and act on what you hear?

You have to provide spaces for them to communicate with you. I’ve been in the NFL since 2001, and I’ve learned as much from players as I have from other coaches.

What are you learning from them?

All of it, including a lot of tactics, because what may work really well for one person may not work as well for the next. You learn something different from each. [A player suggests something, and I] might say, “Let’s give that a shot. I think that could work.” That’s part of listening, as a leader, to make sure you say, “That’s a good thought.” It may work this week, or maybe we’ll keep working that for a while and try it a few weeks down the road. But having the space to communicate with players is important.

That sounds like you’re not always following what they say.

Definitely not. And I don’t think they would want that either. [There’s] not a lot of discussion during the game – then it’s about the execution. But leading up to that is for exploring and being curious about other ideas. But on game day, that’s not the time to try something for the first time.

How do you ensure you’re listening to every key person, not just the extroverts and loudest voices?

Part of listening has to come from the assistant coaches. I know I’ve done a good job when I hear something coming back from a player that I said only to the assistant coaches in a meeting. I think to myself, “That coach did a good job of passing the message of what we want to do.”

Another part of listening is getting to know the man before the ballplayer. Maybe who they’re playing for: “It’s for money.” “It’s for my child.” “I love competing.” If you can find out the why and you know the man, it makes a big difference, because then you know what they’re fighting for. It takes a while. It doesn’t happen in one week. Some players take longer to get to know.

When you came to Washington, you added some players who had played for you in the past, on other teams. Why was that important?

Yeah, sometimes [they’re] people who can see around the corners or be in the rooms that you’re not. They understand [and explain to the other players], “Here’s what Dan’s trying to say,” or “Here’s what he means,” because then it’s not just one voice of leadership, it’s multiple.

Early in my career, I thought leadership was me. How do I lead them? As I got further along, I realized it’s really as much about developing the leadership in others and bringing it out of them. Now, leadership is about them, what they stand for. That’s been a big shift for me.

I have to be the voice of direction, and at times be the hammer. I also know I have to develop the next group of leaders.

Using players’ time effectively is key for any NFL coach, and the players survey suggests you do that especially well. What are your guiding thoughts?

Players make a lot of sacrifices. Their families make a lot of sacrifices too. So I want to make sure that on their breaks, they get away from football and find their own balance, and that the times when they are away from their families are productive and meaningful. The times we’re together are really intense – all their focus, all their energy and intensity.

We have families come for Saturday morning walk-through practices before Sunday home games. It’s a way for the families of players and coaches to connect. A food truck or ice cream truck comes after practice. There’s nothing like it: 100 kids on the field together, yelling and full of energy, and kind of growing up together.

When you assess players for a football team, their physical characteristics are most important. What else do you value?

First and foremost, what’s behind the rib cage? Why is playing here, competing for us, so important? Is this person really committed to doing it?

The other thing I want to find out is what kind of resilience they have. Most people, whether it’s in football or in life, they’re going to go through things, so they better have some resiliency. So finding out what they’ve been doing, where they’re at, how they’ve dealt with that – I think that’s a pretty good indicator of how they’re going to respond when it gets hard. Because let’s face it, whether it’s in sports or business or in life, there’s going to be hard moments, and how you’re going to respond and react and behave in those moments tells a lot about the type of teammate you are and [whether you] can be counted on.

But even resilient people can get discouraged by hard times. How do you help pull people out of that?

It’s customized per person. The youngest players may need to hear, “You can do it. You belong in this league.” Assuring them you have their back, you have a vision for what they can do, even if they can’t see it. Tell them, “Here are the things you need to keep working on.”

That’s different from a player in the middle of their football career. For that player, it may be, “This time we do this and this, these two things.” And for the older player, maybe this is their last go of it. “Take care of your body because you’ve been playing for a long time.”

It’s being able to respond to what the individual needs at that time. But in the end, the connection between everyone is really what pulls you out, because you’re not going at it alone. Not everybody has the same energy every day: “If you pull me up today, I’ll feed you tomorrow.”

Photo courtesy: Dan Quinn and Washington Commanders

That requires trust in each other. How do you build that trust?

It takes a while and it does require honesty. At times, you must have hard conversations – you don’t have to be a jerk to do it – whether it’s performance-based behavior or whatever. Pro ballplayers have been BSed at some point – you know during recruiting [by colleges], etc, so we need to shoot it straight. “This is what we expect. This is what we need.” And more times than not, I felt they responded best.

If they aren’t aware that they’re not hitting their marks, that’s a real problem. So having the self-awareness, knowing where they’re at and then we can say, “These are the things I think we need to do over the next couple of weeks to fix those things. If you can do those, then I think it’s not going to stay at that space.”

After you were fired as head coach of the Atlanta Falcons midseason in 2020, you did something out of the ordinary: You asked a TV sideline reporter to collect confidential feedback from 30 to 40 people who had worked with you – some were supporters, but others were people you had cut or fired. When you got the anonymous feedback, you focused on the negatives, not the positives. What did you learn and how did you correct those shortcomings?

I followed a format similar to a business 360 review. In Atlanta, I worked for Arthur Blank [owner of the Falcons and co-founder of Home Depot], so I was familiar with what a 360 was in business. I wanted to do it from a football perspective. Questions like, “What went well?” “What could have been done differently?” But it wasn’t just people at the organization; there’s some players from a previous team, coaching staff, front office. I wanted to find out if I had any blind spots, and the purpose behind it was my next lap. In the next shot, I wasn’t going to repeat the same mistakes.

I got the feedback while I was in Hawai‘i, and, wow, it was insightful. I went past the good things quickly down to the bottom. It didn’t matter to me who it came from. In fact, I didn’t want any names attached. Some people called me – “Do you know this is happening?” and [I’d respond,] “Yeah, I want you to answer.”

It was helpful, because going into my next stop, I was able to apply some of those things that I specifically wanted to do better. At the time I was let go, I thought it was the worst thing that could happen professionally – early in a season [after an 0-5 start]. Looking back on it now, it was the best thing, because I don’t know if I would have had the same reflection time had I been let go in January and then started somewhere else soon after. That space, on vacation, although uncomfortable, gave me the time to find out what I could do.

Great leaders often say you don’t learn from success so much as failure.

Yeah, I didn’t want to repeat anything that potentially I could change. But you don’t have to wait until you’re let go or wait for the numbers to fall. You just have to be reflective enough. Even when it’s going good, you can ask: How can it go better?

What was the main thing you learned from that 360?

Like a lot of business leaders, I like solving problems, so I was probably spreading myself too thin. “How can I get the most out of this person?” “I can help with that.” “That’s interesting, I can help with that too.” Before long, I was working harder than I ever had but having fewer results.

So it was important to delegate. [Now it’s,] “This is the project we need to get done. See me on Thursday at 3 o’clock.” That way my focus could be on the really important decisions that we have each week, game plan-wise, team-wise. I really took that feedback to heart. My previous way of doing things came from a good place – of wanting to help – but it wasn’t the right thing to do. Now I want to make sure I keep the main thing at the very front of the line.

Today, the follow-through has become so much more important to me than just the idea. Is it going to be applied? If we have done all the preparation and made the right call, then even if it doesn’t go your way, I can live with the results.

Who are your leadership role models, inside and outside of football?

Mostly coaches that I worked with. My first job in the NFL was for the 49ers, and Steve Mariucci was the head coach. Another was Nick Saban [when he was head coach of the Miami Dolphins], and after that, the Seattle Seahawks with Pete Carroll. Those three guys, all of them were different, but, man, watching them build an organization, getting everyone on the same page – in college, you didn’t have that as much.

By going to those NFL teams, when you walked into the building, everybody knew this is how you do things. And with those three, Mariucci, Saban and Carroll, you felt that players knew it, staff knew it, it really clicked.

Outside football, the NBA has done such a great job of developing players. So I enjoy visiting with NBA coaches, although it’s not schematically the same, there’s a lot you can learn about taking a player from point A to point B and then taking them from being very good to becoming great.

You’re a very open person. What role does vulnerability play in building trust?

Great topic. There has to be vulnerable spots, so others know, “I can count on this person.” They’ve been through an experience that they’ve shared [with staff and players] on why it went well or why it hasn’t.

Being able to help somebody become their very best is what I love about coaching most. First see if we can help the coaches elevate, that helps the players. You can’t ask the players to improve and not ask the coaches to improve.

It takes vulnerability to say, “I’ve screwed this up with a player before. I’m not going to make those same mistakes.” Those things make a big impact. Our time together is short, so make sure you use the time well. If you do that right, it multiplies in the locker room. Then they can start trusting and being vulnerable with the next group of players.

For the people who are not super football fans, please explain how many people you lead?

You have 53 players on the team, 16 on the taxi squad [reserve players], 20 to 25 coaches. There are 90 that come to training camp; you cut the roster down to 53, then you can add practice squad players.

It’s always changing. No team is the same from year to year. There’s a draft [by all NFL teams of college players] and injuries. That’s why I think having a culture and a standard that you must meet as a teammate, as a coach, is really important.

You plan for everything, but things can go wrong. How do you know when it’s time to change the plan?

Early in my career, I thought, “This is how it’s going to go.” Now I’ve become much more accustomed to saying, “Adversity is coming. Things are going to have to change.” So we practice a lot of the situations – being behind, being ahead – so we can react to those each week. Every practice, from training camp through the regular season, will include some of those situations: 8 seconds left, 15 seconds; with a timeout, with no timeout; you’re down two scores, you’re down by one; you’re ahead by one, you’re ahead two. If we do those over and over, those situations in the game will feel normal for everybody. Games are super tight and intense, but the more we’ve done them in practice, we have something to go back on.

The situations don’t come up every week: Sometimes we practice something in September and we don’t do it again until November, but we have done it. I want the players to really feel ready for those spots.

Sometimes on a dry day, I’ll make the football wet – spray it, dunk it in a bucket – so we’re able to play in the rain. Some practices we were under 30 degrees, and the players were not happy, but that’s what January football is like in Washington, D.C.

Last question: How do you handle egos? Your people are getting paid millions of dollars.

It’s not just players; it’s coaches, ownership, all of it. I think it still comes back to the relationships. And if you have a good relationship, [you can say], “Hey, what’s going on? You’re not yourself right now.” And if you’ve built that relationship over time, “I’ve got you.” If you don’t have that, it’s much more difficult.

I’m much more one to go directly at it to say, “Hey man, that doesn’t sound like you. Are you pressing? Are you over-trying here? What’s the cause of this because you’re a great teammate and that doesn’t sound like you.” Those are things that can kill a team.

Pride, performing well, being excellent – love that. But if I feel like it gets in the way of the team, that’s different. So I allow some space. But if I feel like you’re going over the line into it’s more about me, I say, “Hey man, come over here and stand next to me for a while.”

We’re not going to allow one person’s ego to disrupt the team, because we’re playing for something much bigger than ourselves. Once it crosses the line into “It’s more about me,” then [I’ll say,] “If you’re not going to get back on board with the program, then next week you’re going to sit over there.”