When I was invited to join the Power in Solidarity: Hawaiʻi Learning Tour, I thought I was coming to learn about Native Hawaiian funding gaps and philanthropic infrastructure. What I didn’t expect was to face everything I’ve lost – language, connection, belonging – and to see it reflected through the way Native Hawaiian communities are fighting to reclaim what was taken from them.
Native Hawaiian Philanthropy (NHP), in partnership with Native Americans in Philanthropy (NAP) and us at AAPIP, designed this tour to witness Native Hawaiian values of relationship, reciprocity, and interconnection. Through this witnessing, I began to see more clearly the forces that capitalism, forced migration, and colonialism have used to sever those same connections in my own life.
The Three Meanings of Everything
Keolamau Tengen of NHP shared with me on one of our van rides that every Hawaiian word carries three layers of meaning: the literal surface meaning, a deeper hidden meaning, and then the kaona, the essence beneath it. As a second-generation Chinese American, this resonated deeply. My first language was Mandarin, but I lost it when assimilating into American schools. The meanings of mandarin words, and by extension the connection to my community and culture, often feel out of reach to me.
One Hawaiian word that kept appearing throughout our visits was kuleana, translated simply as “responsibility.” The surface meaning: your duty, your task, your role. The deeper layer: your right to participate, your authority that comes from relationship to place and people. The kaona: the sacred obligation that binds you to land, ocean, family, and community. It’s a responsibility you carry because you belong, and the belonging you earn through responsibility.
Everyone we met spoke of their kuleana. Not as a burden, but as the organizing principle of their work and lives. It was the framework through which they made decisions, built organizations, and showed up for each other.
Creating Culture Through Design
The tour itself embodied kuleana in action. The organizing partners arranged site visits that wove us into their communities. Many visits began with an oli blessing, a cultural protocol that grounded us in place and purpose.
I was grateful to experience this on my first day when visiting Kūlaniākea Hawaiian Immersion Pre-School and Kānehūnāmoku Voyaging Academy. The families created Kūlaniākea Hawaiian Immersion Pre-School because the public education system wasn’t serving their children’s need for Hawaiian language and cultural grounding. The parents told us how they organized, fundraised, and built a curriculum rooted in ancestral knowledge. They described regular access to outdoor classrooms as central to their educational model.
The cultural disruption that outlawed Hawaiian language and practices for generations is being actively repaired by parents taking responsibility for passing on what was nearly lost. Their kuleana to the next generation drove them to create something that didn’t exist rather than accept what the system offered.
This work of cultural reclamation is under constant attack. Kamehameha Schools, a private institution founded specifically to educate Native Hawaiian children, was sued by the same anti-affirmative action group that dismantled race-conscious admissions nationwide. Even when Native Hawaiian communities build their own institutions with their own resources on their own land, there are forces that will try to dismantle them.
Kuleana to Each Other
Throughout the week, we kept finding ourselves in spaces, in the hills, in the ocean, around shared meals, that stripped away the professional distance. We had real conversations about what drives our work, what scares us about the current moment, and where things need to change.
We now have a kuleana to each other, to show up for the Native Hawaiian community and for each other. The tour showed me what happens when you intentionally design for connection, creating the conditions for the kind of relationships that actually change how people see their role and power.
Reclaiming Space
A moment that will stay with me happened at Shangri La Museum on our last evening in Oʻahu. The estate of Doris Duke sits on sacred land in Honolulu. On that night, the Doris Duke Foundation hosted a community reception welcoming Native Hawaiian organizations.
As the evening closed, we gathered in the courtyard and formed a circle. We held hands and those who knew the words sang a closing song. The moment felt like a reclaiming of space and power through connection and the weaving of people and purpose.
What Capitalism Has Stolen From Us
As the week progressed, I found myself returning again and again to face the fact that we have lost so much.
The Native Hawaiian leaders we met live in an intricate web of relationships. Everyone knows everyone and people hold multiple roles. They hold each other accountable through relationships and values. They make decisions slowly, with attention to how choices affect the land, the ocean, and future generations. And they do all of this while navigating the violence of ongoing colonialism, fighting for water rights, land access, and the survival of their language and practices.
Meanwhile, so many of us live fractured lives. I’ve spent years trying to build the kind of community I witnessed in Hawaiʻi, pushing against forces I don’t fully understand that move us toward nuclear families in separate houses, careers that consume all our time, and relationships mediated by screens instead of shared meals and shared work.
My parents came to this country seeking opportunity, and what they found was a system that demanded assimilation, took my first language, and often made us choose between belonging and cultural continuity. We work for organizations whose missions we believe in, but capitalism demands we treat that work as separate from our full selves. By being “professional,” we hide our grief, our rage, and our full humanity while measuring success in metrics that rarely capture relationship, healing, and liberation.
Migration has severed many of us from ancestral homelands and the deep relationship to place. We live in cities designed to maximize convenience and consumerism and have been taught to see land and water as resources to extract.
Even those of us in the social justice sector often replicate the same extractive patterns. We parachute in to “serve” communities, we demand reports and outcomes on our timelines, we fund projects but not the relationships and cultural practices that sustain movements.
The Questions I’m Carrying
- What would it look like for those of us who’ve migrated or been displaced to build kuleana to the places where we now live? To learn from Indigenous wisdom about reciprocal relationship to land, water, and place?
- How do we rebuild the connections of community that capitalism has deliberately severed? The tour showed me that culture is a living practice, daily acts of responsibility and reciprocity. What are the rituals and practices that could weave us back together?
- How do we reclaim what was taken while honoring that we can never fully return to what was? Grieve those losses while building something new?
- How do we hold each other accountable in ways that strengthen rather than police us? The concept of kuleana seems to create accountability through relationship and shared purpose rather than through punishment. What would that look like in our organizations, families, and communities?
- How do we practice aloha toward strangers and those who we may disagree with in ways that maintain boundaries while building bridges? The Native Hawaiian leaders we met were incredibly generous with us, but not in ways that centered our comfort. How do we learn that balance?
Gratitude to the Architects of This Experience
I want to name what NAP, NHP, and AAPIP created through this partnership. These three organizations could have designed a traditional funder education program. Instead, it was something far more powerful and risky: an experience that invited us into relationship. NHP trusted us with access to sacred places and vulnerable community moments and created space for us to be informed and changed.
NAP brought decades of experience in Indigenous-led philanthropy that grounded our learning. Their commitment to cross-sector partnerships shaped the tour’s design. We at AAPIP contributed research through the 2025 AANHPI Funding Snapshot, including the Native Hawaiian data that made the case for why we needed to be there.
This partnership reflects the complex relationship between our communities. Native Hawaiians are categorized as part of the AANHPI racial group, but Asians, particularly East Asians, have often held institutional power and privilege in Hawai’i at the expense of Native Hawaiians. In Many ways, Native Hawaiians share more history with Native Americans as Indigenous first peoples. NAP and AAPIP recognize the unique intersection that Native Hawaiians occupy within our communities, and this joint venture with NHP created space to explore and acknowledge that complexity. Native Hawaiian Philanthropy opened doors throughout the tour leveraging deep community relationships built over years of working in community.
Thank you to every person and organization who welcomed us. You shared your time, knowledge, and sacred spaces with us.
Moving Forward with Kuleana
The literal meaning: I have a responsibility to increase philanthropic investment in Native Hawaiian communities and to help shift how the sector engages with Indigenous-led work.
The deeper meaning: I have the right and obligation to speak up within my institution and networks about what I witnessed. The solutions already exist if funders would listen and resource them.
The kaona: I’m bound now to these people and this place through relationship. What I learned is mine to share and to act on. The tour was the beginning of ongoing kuleana.
I’m returning home with profound gratitude for a glimpse of what we’ve lost, what we’re fighting for, and what becomes possible when we choose relationship and responsibility over extraction and individualism.
The Power in Solidarity: Hawaiʻi Learning Tour took place September 28-October 4, 2025, organized by Native Hawaiian Philanthropy in partnership with Native Americans in Philanthropy and Asian Americans/Pacific Islanders in Philanthropy. For more information about supporting Native Hawaiian communities, visit www.nativehawaiianphilanthropy.org.