Jason Chang served for nine years as chief operating officer, executive VP and then president at the Queen’s Health Systems.

Then on July 12, Jenai Wall, chair of the system’s board of trustees, announced that Chang would take over as CEO. Immediately.

Jill Hoggard Green, hired as CEO in 2019, was out and Chang was in. “The board extends its heartfelt mahalo to Jill for her dedicated service and leadership over the last five years,” Wall said in a written message to the Queen’s leadership team that did not explain the abrupt transition.

In the weeks after Chang’s responsibilities changed overnight, he had few openings on his calendar and twice had to reschedule my interview. But he smiled frequently and showed no signs of stress when I eventually sat with him in his old office (he had not yet moved into the CEO’s office), a room lined on one side with pictures of his wife and three children and on another with a large picture of a beautiful Kaua‘i waterfall.

Though he was born in Fresno and spent his early career in California and Texas, Hawai‘i is now home for him and his family. “We fell in love with Hawai‘i. God willing, I want to retire here,” he says.

Following is a condensed, lightly edited version of my exclusive 40-minute interview with him.

Q: What are your short-term and long-term goals for the Queen’s Health Systems? Let’s start with short term.

I think the most immediate thing is we need to stabilize our financials. Not just here, but health care around the nation. The last two years have been really challenging. Costs have gone up with inflation. There’s wage increases among our regular staff and our physician staff. I can’t just raise prices. It’s basically fixed pricing.

So you have to figure out how you can be more creative within. And the needs for access to care for the most vulnerable patients, patients with behavioral issues or homelessness issues – that’s not slowing down. In fact, it’s actually increasing. So how do you take care of patients that need us the most, yet still be financially sustainable? There’s a very fine balance and that margin that used to be there, it’s gotten tighter.

Sustainability is the first thing. Got to take care of our people, that’s the second-most important thing. Our staff. We have really loyal people here. If you’ve ever walked through the hallways and talked to any one of them, you’ll feel that aura of living and working for the queen. The values are aligned.

That’s special. I’ve worked in California and Texas and you don’t get that same feeling. People are here to take care of their community, people are here because of the mission. So we have to make sure they feel valued and know there’s a future for them at Queen’s.

We just celebrated 165 years this year and largely our mission hasn’t changed. Our job is to fulfill the intent of Queen Emma and King Kamehameha IV: to provide in perpetuity, quality health care services to improve the well-being of Native Hawaiians and all the people of Hawai‘i.

King Kamehameha IV and Queen Emma went door to door to raise funds for the original hospital.

One hundred and sixty-five years ago, that’s what they set out as the mission, when they saw 70% of the native-born population dying over their lifetime because of disease. And so they went door to door to raise funds, founded a hospital right here on this campus, the Manamana property. And that’s why there’s this aura when you walk across this campus – that legacy is now our job.

Q: What about long-term goals, maybe five, 10 years from now?

I think that there’s a lot of opportunity for Queen’s to expand our reach. We have hospitals on O‘ahu, a hospital on Moloka‘i and a hospital on the Big Island. And now we have a medical group that’s dispersed around, but mostly in the same places.

We’re not on Kaua‘i or Maui, we don’t have a presence over all the Big Island. There are rural communities where people are not getting care, preventive care, cancer care, cardiac care.

Long term, I think we can use technology, we can expand our footprint, we can build culturally sensitive care that communities around the state embrace, so we become the true health care system for the entire state of Hawai‘i.

Q: One project you recently launched was the Aukahi Center, which collects data to help manage patients throughout the Queen’s Health Systems.

That is a special project to me. The name Aukahi is fitting because it means water rolling down a mountainside, converging and flowing into a larger stream. I feel the data that’s flowing through this command center is exactly that. Information about patients in our hospitals, patients that need to be transferred, wanting to see a doctor or get an MRI. Aukahi is like an air traffic control center. We can oversee things that we’ve never been able to see in real time before.

Say a patient needs an MRI, a cardiac consult and physical therapy before they can go home that day; we can see that and assign a cardiologist, then get that patient into an MRI, and then get that physical therapist there so the patient doesn’t languish in the hospital longer than they need to. It helps move people through the system.

Chang at the Aukahi Center, which was one of the projects he helped launch before becoming CEO. It is designed to help manage patients more effectively by using data collected throughout the Queen’s Health Systems.

We can do other things like remote patient monitoring. We can see if a patient’s diabetes is becoming uncontrolled, call them and say, “You need to see your doctor,” before they end up in the emergency department. Aukahi is the first of its kind in Hawai‘i.

I think the piece that will add to it is the ability to dispatch the state’s helicopter system – getting patients from a Neighbor Island to a destination they need as expeditiously as possible.

Q: Queen’s is taking over the dispatch function of Medevac helicopters on Maui this September, but Queen’s is not on Maui. Why take on that contract?

It’s us dipping our toe into dispatching the helicopter. There’s one helicopter now and we will learn how to dispatch this helicopter safely – getting a patient from Maui to the next destination they need. It could be within the Queen’s Systems, it could be to a different system. Essentially, we’re doing something good for everybody.

There will be more helicopters in the future, but let’s start with one, and then it’ll grow to three, and then we’ll go to five and seven. That’s the way we’re partnering with EMS to get patients to and from places as quickly as possible.

Now, if you get into a car accident on the Big Island, the ambulance picks you up, takes you to the nearest hospital, they stabilize you, put you back in the ambulance, drive you to the airport, fly you to O‘ahu. You get picked up by the ambulance, they drive you here to The Queen’s Medical Center. What if the helicopter picks you up at the crash site and flies you here? Then you’ve cut three, four hours.

For patients that have heart attacks, strokes, trauma, this could be the difference between life and death or not having quality of life.

Q: Let’s talk about one of your biggest challenges: staffing. It’s always been hard for health care to fully staff, then the pandemic and the retirement of baby boomers made it harder.

One of our biggest challenges over the last three, four years has been recruitment. And it’s not just nursing. But we’re trying to partner better with universities, community colleges, high schools, get people interested in health care, show them that you don’t just have doctors and nurses in a hospital. There are hundreds of different jobs we need.

What we haven’t done in the past is hire them without any experience. In the past, if you are clinical especially, we wanted you to get three years of experience. The risk is that, nurses in particular, go to the mainland and never come back. So let’s give them a job. Provide protected time for them to train, get oriented, be safe, and then let them fly and give them career opportunities to grow.

If you want to be a cardiac nurse or ICU nurse or surgical nurse, they can see the path within the organization. We’ll take that journey together.

Security is another area having challenges finding qualified people. But you come in with us, get a few years under your belt and there’s a career ladder for you to step up and get more competency. Maybe your aspiration is HPD or with Honolulu Fire. This could be that career ladder to you, maybe not just within the organization, but helping provide the security we need today.

Q: What are your other challenges?

Access. What we’re living through today, we didn’t anticipate. We knew there was going to be more patients, more need for diagnostic imaging and doctors, but the pandemic accelerated it. Now we are seeing our hospital census in the range of 102 to 105% of capacity. And the patients are sicker.

We need to figure out ways we can use technology to be really smart about how to get a patient through the acute part of the health care system so they can transition to post-acute. We have partners in the community that they can move to, because as the quaternary facility (where patients receive the most advanced and specialized level of medicine), we need to be ready for the sickest patients.

Our community hospitals are also running full. Queen’s Medical Center-West O‘ahu is now seeing nearly 185, 186 patients a day in the emergency department. It’s just a hair behind the Queen’s Medical Center-Manamana (the original Punchbowl Street facility), which is the trauma level-one emergency department.

The main building of the hospital around 1898.

It’s a big challenge. Our teams have been fantastic. You walk in, you would never know that they were under such stress. But we know they are. So how can we help alleviate the working environment challenges?

Step number one includes building more facilities. West is going to add 48 beds to their emergency department. We’re expanding the emergency department here at Manamana. That helps relieve some of that pressure.

Making sure everybody on the team knows the path we’re on. Make sure they know, “This is the plan and we’re going to walk this plan arm in arm.” Then give people an opportunity to have a voice. We’re not talking about unilateral decisions; we want open-door policies where people can come in and talk about the things they think should happen.

I’ve always believed that the best guidance comes from the people working on the front line; they know what’s happening, they can tell the temperature of the organization. And if they feel safe enough to tell it to you, all I have to do is listen. So you’ve got to have a great relationship with the people doing the work. The best part of my day is walking the halls and talking to people.

Q: When you look back at your career, what experiences especially helped you prepare for this job as CEO of Queen’s?

I’ve had great mentors over my career, people who took time to help me grow and learn how to succeed in the hospital industry.

One amazing piece of advice early in my career was that I needed to get experience in the for-profit world. So I went from a Catholic hospital to a for-profit, publicly traded health system in Texas and worked there for several years before I came to Queen’s.

It’s very different than the not-for-profit health care world. It’s predicated on making a margin. You have shareholders, calls every quarter. I learned to advocate for the things that are important to that health system, to that hospital you’re running, which is an asset of the corporation. And if you sacrifice patient experience, patient access, trust in the community, then you diminish the value of that asset for that corporation. In that for-profit world, you learn to balance advocating for the services the community needs yet have enough margin for the parent corporation. It’s a very challenging environment – pressure cooker every day.

Coming to Queen’s allows me to use that business acumen and to be a good steward of resources, but at the same time, embrace the mission that Queen’s has been leading for 165 years. It gives me personal fulfillment, being able to do things for the community, plant roots and be here for the rest of my career, God willing.

Q: What’s one other thing happening at Queen’s?

We’re looking at populations that are very vulnerable and seeking creative ways to care for them. Behavioral health is a good example. And we’ve learned we can’t do that by ourselves. Building partnerships with like-minded organizations has been tremendously fruitful.

Q: Who are some of those partners?

Kamehameha Schools, Lili‘uokalani Trust, IHS (the Institute for Human Services), St. Francis Healthcare System. There are so many out there. And the more we partner, I think the better health care is going to be.

This audit was especially useful, says City Auditor Arushi Kumar, because it was published in June 2023, during the City Council’s budget hearings.

“It was a great conversation starter for the budget hearings, as vacancies dominated the conversation,” recalls Kumar. “Every department director was asked about their vacancies and what their plans were to fill them before June 30. So, while it was nice to get recognition at a national level, the ultimate goal is to have an impact at the local level.”

City Council adopted five pieces of legislation related to the audit’s findings and recommendations that affected both city and state agencies.

The city’s auditor is one of many people working behind the scenes in Hawai‘i and across the nation to ensure companies, nonprofits and government agencies follow standards and best practices in finances, operations, IT, HR and other important areas. Auditors aim to provide independent, objective evaluations of operational business activities, and report to senior management.

The judges for the Association of Local Government Auditors awards cited the Honolulu audit’s focus on an issue that was both timely and full of significant risk – risk in terms of dollars at stake and breadth of services affected.

The audit was even more impressive considering the absence of reliable data. The city’s Department of Human Resources couldn’t even provide a timely record of actual vacancies that passed the auditor’s reliability test. While most audit shops would understandably conserve resources and terminate the audit due to unreliable data, the city’s office forged ahead, justifying the decision by pointing out that stakeholders were making critical staffing and budgetary decisions based on faulty data. This helped convince city officials to take action to improve data reliability.

The report also dove into process bottlenecks. For example, it found the city’s HR Department was using four separate unlinked databases for hiring, onboarding and terminating personnel. The department also had no formal process for abolishing old positions that would likely never be filled. This meant that, for an unknown number of vacancies, their related funding could not be released for other priorities.

Beyond Scathing

While “scathing” audits may grab headlines, Kumar says, the perceived friction is necessary to define a problem, unearth its root cause and help fix it: “We are part of government checks and balances. The City Council uses us to hold executive departments accountable for how they’re spending taxpayer money.” But tracking agency spending, according to City Audit Manager Christine Ross, is “just step one.

In order to add value, auditors have to be able to answer, ‘So what?’ ” Ross says this requires persistence, curiosity, critical thinking and creativity.

Government performance auditing has been embedded in Hawai‘i’s Constitution since 1950, even before Hawai‘i became a state. But the first state auditor, Clinton Tanimura, was not appointed until 1965. This activation coincided with a nationwide trend reflecting public concerns about increased government spending on welfare and regulatory programs in the 1960s and 1970s. The public demanded information on how governments planned to ferret out waste, fraud and abuse, and whether public programs were meeting their stated objectives.

In Honolulu, the Office of the City Auditor was created within the city’s charter in 2002, after similar voter calls for accountability following scandals involving government officials and lack of transparency over public funds. That mission continues, says Kumar:

“ ‘Government performance auditing’ has less to do with spreadsheets and checking every dollar than trying to assess the outcome of programs and processes. The term ‘performance’ is right there in the title.”

While that may sound like a check-the-box exercise, Kumar says, audits help the public understand the role that government agencies play in their communities: “We’re trying to increase trust in government.”

A similar crisis of confidence spurred the evolution of private sector audits. Former auditor Gina Woo Anonuevo, now Chief Human Resources Officer at First Hawaiian Bank, recalls the transition came in 2006, when large accounting firms began to fail. That was the era of corporate financial scandals featuring Enron, WorldCom, Adelphia and other prominent companies. Stakeholders demanded more accountability from leaders of publicly traded companies. “That’s when audit became a true career profession where you needed specific skills, knowledge and experience to do the job, not just follow a checklist,” says Anonuevo.

Cops or Partners?

Because the audit industry has grown during periods of public scandal, the common perception is that auditors are like IRS agents or police officers who uphold hard-coded laws, shining the spotlight on violators. To be fair, there are similarities: auditors rely on structured frameworks and standards to scope their work, and note any discrepancies based on collected evidence. One difference: auditors recommend improvements but don’t enforce policies – that’s management’s job. And they try to have collaborative relationships with the people they audit.

Former auditor Addie Lui, now Director of Information Security at Aloha Pacific Credit Union, says leaders are not required to follow an auditor’s recommendations to the letter. “It’s up to management to accept or manage the risk, whether or not to implement the recommended control,” he says.

The auditor’s job is to clarify risks and make recommendations based on a thorough understanding of business processes and objectives: “When you write the recommendation, you let them know that if this isn’t being done, their business objectives may not be met,” he says.

As Anonuevo puts it, the auditor’s job is “to proactively identify potential issues so that we can self-correct.”

According to First Hawaiian Bank Chief Audit Executive Kristi Lefforge, “Historically, the audit practice has been more compliance focused. But it has really morphed into more of a consulting arm. It’s not necessarily that we’re punitive. In all cases, we are there to make sure that we’re safe and following rules and practices.” This is known as the assurance side of audit – examining systems and processes and reporting whether they are on track.

“But there’s another side to us: we’re trying to make sure we’re adding value,” notes Lefforge. Because auditors have a high-level view of all the risks and potential obstacles faced by an organization, they also see the other side of the coin: opportunities for improvement. This is where the consulting side comes in.

Adding Value

One example of a consulting engagement is a management review, when managers ask the audit department to lend their analytical skills and tools for an emerging need, or a specific project outside of the prescribed audit calendar. “Management could ask us to come in and do an assessment, without it being an audit,” says Anonuevo.

She and Lui worked together as First Hawaiian auditors in 2008, when Aloha Airlines filed for bankruptcy. Banks were faced with an onslaught of millions of dollars in related credit card chargebacks. Because employees had to manually type in long transaction codes to process refunds, being off by one digit could mistakenly flag a transaction as invalid. In that case, the manager of the business unit asked internal audit if they could help automate data entry and process these massive claims.

Fortunately, Anonuevo had just purchased audit software that could ingest all the transactions at once and deploy an automated filter to weed out duplicate or invalid claims. “Remember, this was 16 years ago when systems were not as advanced as they are today. It really did make the work easier; it reduced the mistakes from manual inputting and processing. Luckily our IT audit team knew how to program it, so they went in and helped them with that.”

Another example of assistance provided outside of the traditional audit is to examine incidents for potential fraud exposure, says Anonuevo. “I remember one incident where a manager called me and said, ‘I just opened up my employee’s desk and there’s tons of general ledger tickets in there that haven’t been processed.’ ” Damage control measures were clearly called for, but how much? “We sent an auditor down to look at what the scope and potential exposure were and advised management on the next steps based on the assessment. A lot of managers appreciated that.”

Overcoming Resistance

Of course, not every agency or department head welcomes an audit. In these instances, support from the top executives helps. The auditing term “tone at the top” means a body of evidence that demonstrates leaders’ commitment to ethics and internal controls throughout their organization. For auditors, this translates to responsive and collaborative auditees.

Kumar shares that, within weeks of starting her term at the city, the mayor and his management team visited her Kapolei office. “I really appreciated their show of faith and willingness to work together. They’ve set such a good tone in their dealings with my office, and a lot of that has trickled down.”

Similarly, Lefforge says she appreciates how First Hawaiian Bank’s senior leadership has a strong governance and control mindset. “I have worked historically with clients who didn’t have that tone at the top, and it’s challenging to get your work done when it’s not there.”

While leaders may support the idea, individual auditees may view auditors as non-experts intruding on processes that are working just fine – breaking what doesn’t need fixing to justify their existence. Kumar acknowledges that having virtual workplaces has hampered their efforts to build relationships: “When we are able to visit in person, we seem more human.” But not everyone wants to have auditors in the next cubicle, if they can avoid it.

Lefforge suggests the key is finding opportunities to educate potential auditees on what internal auditors do and connecting with them outside of the audit process. This shows that auditors are invested in supporting their success. “Sometimes it’s checking in with them periodically throughout the year to see what they’re doing, being aware of any new processes or systems they’ve launched, and building relationships.”

Like her private sector counterparts, Kumar tries to find common ground with resistant auditees. “We each have a lot of pride in our work because we know we’re serving the public. Sometimes it takes a bit longer for some people to realize that I mean it, but we’re all working toward the same end.” However, she acknowledges, “Some of these relationships can take a long time to change. It’s kind of a long game, right?”

Sometimes, she says, it means being hyper-vigilant for any opportunity to connect on a personal level with someone who was unhappy with their audit reports. “There was one director I didn’t have the best relationship with, but we were able to have an informal conversation – I think it was about K-dramas or something.” While it might have seemed frivolous, Kumar felt a slight thaw in the relationship. “We just kind of had a moment of understanding: we’re both just people doing our jobs.”

David Lassner is stepping down as president of the UH system at the end of 2024, 11 years and four months after being named interim president.

That’s a remarkably long run: None of his three predecessors had the job for more than five years. And the latest nationwide survey by the American Council on Education found that in 2022, university presidents had been on the job an average of 5.9 years.

UH is currently searching for Lassner’s replacement, with finalists expected to be named by September and a new leader announced in October. The university expects the 16th UH president to start work in January.

Lassner sat for an exclusive interview with Hawaii Business Magazine to share what he wants to do while he’s still leader of the 10-campus system and his plans after stepping down in December. The interview has been lightly edited for length and conciseness.

Q: Was it always your plan to step down after this year?

I started thinking about it, I’m going to say, three years ago. Every year when I had the annual discussion of my performance and evaluations with the Board of Regents chair – about how can I do better, what do they really like? – the question of succession always came up.

Because people don’t last that long in these jobs. The average tenure for university presidents has gone down nationally from over eight years to under six years, and here is probably even shorter. So years back, I told the board chair: 2024, that’s enough. If I’m still here, I don’t want to keep going past that. So I’m really happy that I was able to go out when I wanted to, the way I wanted to.

Q: What are your proudest accomplishments?

I have a lot of things I feel good about accomplishing in my previous job too. (Lassner was UH’s VP for information technology and chief information officer before serving as president.) But in this job, I can tell you what people have told me they appreciate. It’s interesting that they really appreciate that it’s calm. We have our bits of drama, but in general, the institution is calm.

When I came into this job, I literally didn’t like to open the paper in the morning, because if there was a story about UH – and there often was – it was negative. And now I feel if something bad happens, we get covered – nobody gives us a pass – but by and large, the public gets to hear about the good work we’re doing. And that has changed attitudes in the community.

We’re financially secure and stable. Our budget balances, our reserves are healthy. When I came into this job, we were at the tail end of the previous recession, and then we had to go through the pandemic and manage through that financially. We’re fortunate there was so much federal support. But I think whoever comes in next will not have to worry about righting the ship financially.

We have a great team. I hope they want to stay and support the next president. I think the UH System is working together, better than ever – all the parts of it. There are times when we compete between campuses, but by and large the leadership works together.

For example in June, I spent two hours meeting with the leaders of all our campuses. We talked about issues around serving students, and how do we do that collectively rather than conversations about “Why are you doing this? I want to do that.” I think that working together is now embedded much more strongly in our DNA.

We’ve really revamped fundraising and the relationship between UH and the UH Foundation. We launched a billion-dollar fund raising campaign last year, which is amazing for this place. The last one was half that size, and we never quite announced it even.

Our extramural funding is going gangbusters. That’s the money we get mostly from the federal government, but also from other sources like private foundations, to do research or educate underserved populations or do service to the state or the region. The last two years have been the best in our history, and we’re going over $600 million this year.

The Isabella Aiona Abbott life sciences building opened on the Mānoa campus in 2020. | Photo courtesy: University of Hawai’i

It’s not just a number, it’s two things. One is $600 million of investment in UH, in our faculty and our students, and we’re creating literally thousands of jobs across the Islands. And these tend to be good jobs to work on research projects.

But it’s also a vote of confidence that all of these (funders) are entities, that when they see a problem or a challenge, they think UH is the entity best equipped to address it.

Q: You mentioned challenges like the pandemic. What were the others you faced?

The pandemic was a huge challenge. And I was super proud of how we came through it. I think, arguably, UH did as well as anybody in the state. Our students continued learning. We pivoted online quickly. All kinds of programs at UH were helping the whole state. We were doing vaccination, testing and training community health workers. Our engagement was huge.

But we pivoted online. We were among the first to say, after spring break, we’re not coming back to class. It was more of a challenge for our faculty because students were already familiar with the online environment and the tools. But we managed to get our faculty online. The bottom line is students were still graduating on time, and we were educating students as we needed to do. Even if they couldn’t go to a graduation ceremony, they still got a diploma. That was all about our teamwork.

The UH Mānoa campus saw many changes during Lassner’s tenure. Bachman Hall, built in 1949 and recently renovated, was where he worked in the office of the president. Students occupied parts of it during the TMT dispute. | Photo courtesy: University of Hawai’i

TMT (the Thirty Meter Telescope proposed for Hawai‘i Island’s Maunakea) was hard for me personally. I’d say it really divided many people inside the university and I had a lot of friends who were very disappointed in me for supporting TMT.

I have no qualms about my belief that it would have been good for Hawai‘i. I got a death threat on social media. We had students peacefully occupying our building (Bachman Hall). When they moved out of their own volition, it felt empty. But I learned a lot. It was really hard seeing the pain that was caused and would have been caused in either direction.

Q: How has the university changed since you became president?

We have more processes in place to help us do routine things. Fundraising is more effective. Our extramural funding capacity is much stronger and more effective, and lets us create jobs and help Hawai‘i.

In June, we blessed the RISE center on University Avenue. (RISE is the Residences for Innovative Student Entrepreneurs student housing facility.) We’re creating a living, learning, work environment for innovation and entrepreneurship. I think that’s going to be a game changer for Hawai‘i.

The Walter Dods, Jr. RISE center on University Avenue opened in 2023 as a student living/ learning community focused on innovation. | Photo courtesy: University of Hawai’i

I think this campus looks better every year, and I’ve been here through thick and thin. When I first came (in 1977), you literally had to take your slippers or shoes off to walk across campus when it rained because the drainage didn’t work and the parking lots were dirt.

I think the way we’ve enhanced the campus and the way it looks is a positive place for students to be proud of.

We improved our graduation rates and our retention rates. When I came into this job, the narrative was you could not graduate in four years because you can’t get your classes on time. So we looked into the data and figured out how to offer classes that students need.

Four-year graduation rates were up significantly at UH Mānoa and UH West O’ahu during Lassner’s tenure but not at UH Hilo. | Photo courtesy: University of Hawai’i

(UH reported that the four-year graduation rates steadily increased at two of UH’s four-year colleges during Lassner’s tenure. Comparing the cohort that enrolled in Fall 2013 and the Fall 2019 cohort, UH Mānoa’s four-year graduation rate went from 34.1% to 41.1% and UH West O‘ahu‘s from 8.9% to 27.6%. However, UH Hilo’s graduation rate went from 20.9% to 21%, with ups and downs in between.)

UH is pretty unique in having all public higher education organized under one Board of Regents and one president. I think we need to leverage that for the people of Hawai‘i to create opportunities on every island for every community, and get them the education they need to succeed.

Q: What is the biggest thing you’ve learned while president?

Stand by your principles. You don’t have to be disagreeable, but sometimes you have to disagree. One interesting thing about this job is you have so many people who think they know what you should do and that their opinion matters more.

Students and faculty believe it’s their university. I will hear from parents when they are unhappy about something. I report to a Board of Regents that is supposed to navigate all this. The Legislature has strong opinions and is more involved at a micro level than almost any legislature in the country. And you must have a relationship with the governor. They’re responsible for navigating the whole state forward, and the university is a huge part of helping the state succeed.

Q: What do you envision for the University after you step down?

We have a very solid strategic plan that lays out the areas in which the university system has to make contributions to help the whole state advance around workforce, student success, economic development, and the relationship between Hawai‘i and Native Hawaiians. I think that’s something that the state’s going to have to do better at.

TMT probably exacerbated the issue. But it also highlighted the fractures that we’ve seen as Native Hawaiians have been traditionally at the bottom of lists you want to be at the top of, and the top of lists you want to be at the bottom of: incarceration, welfare, economic vitality, education and homelessness. It’s something we all have to work on.

The university plays a really big part in that. And I think we’re embracing that now.

If I were staying, I would work on economic development. Coming from a tech background, we’re always trying to get Microsoft to come here – Google, Apple, Cisco or whoever. And we have to invest in our own residents, especially the young people who come to this university, and help them figure out not just how to get a job, but how to create a job, start a small business.

We have homegrown businesses. People I know have 100 to 200 employees and multiple locations around the country. That’s all possible if we help educate and inspire students. Some will start three companies, not all of which will succeed, and that’s OK.

Hawai‘i has to be better at accepting failure. Our innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystem across the state is much stronger now than it has ever been.

Q: What’s next for David Lassner?

This is the only place I’ve ever had a real job. I started with a one-year, half-time contract in the late 1970s and never left. I kind of worked my way up to this job unexpectedly.

I’m now working as hard as ever because I have miscellaneous projects that I want to either finish off or leave in really good shape for the next president.

Left: Lassner’s first job at uh was in 1977. Right: Personal treasures line his office shelves. | Photo courtesy: University of Hawai’i

One of the contentious aspects of presidents at the end of their time is they go into what are considered golden parachutes or cushy jobs. The Board of Regents asked me about it, and I just said, “Either I’m gonna say, I’m done, or you’re gonna say, I’m done. And I don’t want us to be fighting over that. Because if you say I’m done, nobody wants to see me collecting a salary and hanging around in this place.”

So I’m going to be president emeritus for no money with a little office in the IT building, which was one of my babies in my last job. I never got to move in there; I was there for the groundbreaking but by the time we opened it, I was already president.

I have some of my old projects that I still have passion for that I’ll be able to help with, and an assortment of things that people think I’ll add value to them.

Lassner says he’ll have more time in retirement to work with the Polynesian Voyaging Society. | Photo courtesy: University of Hawai’i

I plan to travel a lot. I’ll do volunteer work. I’ve been asked about serving on a couple of boards. To those requests, I just said call me back in 2025. I don’t want to make any commitments now.

I’m really interested in conservation, hiking, the environment. I’ll be able to engage more with the Polynesian Voyaging Society.

It’s been a wonderful 47 years, but I’m ready to enjoy a little more of my time.

Q: What advice would you give to the next president?

Have a team you can trust. The people I’m around and trust the most, it’s not that they agree with me about things – it’s that I value their opinions. When I hear those things, they help.

You have to care about Hawai‘i. If you’re not from here, work really hard to learn about this place, what makes it so special, and who are the people who really care about the place, and the university and its role in the place.

The vice presidents and leaders we have are really good people. I hope whoever’s next will really try to mesh with them.

I hope people will really appreciate and support the university. This is just such a treasure for the state. And I think a lot of people realize it and take it for granted. It can really help you when the community, and especially the business community, not only appreciates you but also stands up and says that publicly.

Over four days, the cohort visited Japan’s Tohoku region, the site of 2011’s Great East Japan Earthquake and the resulting tsunami and nuclear disaster.

“The Japanese people are very resilient,” says Kim Ball, owner of Hi-Tech Maui, which has four Hi-Tech Surf Sports locations on the island. He was part of the Hawai‘i delegation and knows a thing or two about resilience himself – he and his family lost three Lahaina homes in the August 2023 wildfires. “I don’t want to say the Japanese are used to disasters, but they have had a lot of calamities hit their island nation,” he says.

One of the worst occurred on March 11, 2011. A 9.0 earthquake triggered a tsunami that reached up to three miles inland and triggered radiation leaks and disabled the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station. This triple disaster caused nearly 28,000 reported deaths and missing persons, as well as $210 billion in damage.

Feeling Understood

“I used to have this mental block, like no one could understand (what we’d been through), but of course they understood,” says Maui County Councilmember Tamara Paltin, who represents West Maui and was among the delegates. She says understanding the magnitude of what Japan went through helped persuade her “to stop making comparisons. It doesn’t matter if it’s 80 people or 101 people or 20,000 people. To the individuals affected, a disaster is a disaster. If it’s horrific, it’s horrific.”

Program delegate Maui Mayor Richard Bissen says that after the trip, he felt renewed optimism.

“I’m confident that we will recover. That was my biggest takeaway, and it was reinforced, at every turn, in every presentation. The loss of life and the amount of devastation they had, what it’s taken to get to where they are now, is just Herculean, really. But it puts things in perspective.”

Rebuilding Thoughtfully

During the trip, the group toured facilities such as a university and a hospital, and new businesses that developed in the disaster’s wake, including a hydrogen production plant; a textile factory that creates fabric for both fashion houses and aerospace uses; and a hydroponic lettuce farm created in a former elementary school.

Ball, who serves on the Lahaina Advisory Team, sees an opportunity for similarly creative economic development on Maui. “Everybody on the west side is looking for alternatives,” he says. “Obviously, tourism is what turns our wheel, but additional things so that we wouldn’t have to rely quite so heavily on tourism.”

In Japan, he says, “the private sector has led recovery efforts, whereas in the U.S. we expect the government to take the lead and then the private sector to fill in the gaps,” says Ball.

Another delegate, Kūhiō Lewis, was impressed by Japan’s forward thinking in education, housing, mental health and infrastructure. Lewis is the CEO of the nonprofit Council for Native Hawaiian Advancement.

“Japan builds for the future; they don’t necessarily build for today,” he says. “We are spending billions of dollars on Maui for a lot of temporary stuff. What could that mean, utilizing those resources to think about the future? So, when you look at Lahaina, it’s a lot of ‘in the moment,’ it’s not necessarily thinking holistically about what our needs are for the generation that is yet to come. … As leaders, we need to be mindful of how the decisions we’re making in this moment can support, positively, the future.”

Community input is vital, notes Paltin. She learned that in Namie, a town on the coast of central Fukushima, all households were surveyed as part of the disaster recovery.

Different Japanese prefectures, or provinces, had different approaches to recovery, she explains. “In some prefectures, they wanted a buffer, with nothing built near the ocean; other areas wanted to rebuild, but they did a rebuild higher than what the tsunami affected, with efforts to mitigate. That largely depended on community feedback, and you don’t want to do anything without community buy-in.”

Disaster Sciences

The group learned about the disaster training degree at Tohoku University. Similar programs could be developed at Hawai‘i colleges, say the attendees we spoke to, who believe disaster preparedness and response training could become a workforce development opportunity for the state.

At Tohoku University, they’ve aggregated some of the standard challenges and common outcomes of calamities and studied them within an emerging field of disaster sciences, explains Paltin. “To create a disaster sciences program here, if we could have that type of data sharing, a shared data platform, analysis of what goes right or wrong in the aftermath of a disaster, it would serve not only the state, but also the next step could be to create programs on this throughout the country.”

Having that type of training and expertise, agrees Ball, “means we could be boots on the ground right away, no matter what has happened.”

Mayor Bissen says he has invited the Tohoku University team to visit Maui so they can share the program’s concepts in depth. “They’re a very resilient community and nation,” says Bissen. “They probably every three to five years face another disaster. I hate to say it, but they expect it. I think that that should be our mindset, too.”

In a rapidly changing climate, he notes, it’s not a matter of if but when a natural disaster will happen.

“Pre-disaster preparations are top of mind,” says Bissen when asked about rebuilding for resilience. “Whether we are talking about practicing evacuation routes, reducing fuel sources, or constructing fire-retardant, wind-resistant buildings.”

For example, he mentions a potential evacuation drill in Pā‘ia, along a route that used to be for sugarcane haul trucks. “They are private roads, closed, but during an emergency we’d have another route out of Pā‘ia. Having a backup to the backup to the backup.”

Another possibility is burying utilities, he says. “It is something that Lahaina has asked for, for a long time. It may be cost prohibitive, but at what point do you learn the lesson and say ‘let’s not put up a wood pole’ anymore? Newer subdivisions in Hawai‘i have solar on the roof and power underground.”

“Kibou means hope and if we’re going to give kibou to our people, we have to give it to our people with demonstratable action,” says Bissen. “To be able to say, hey, look, we have power lines underground, the tall grass has been cut down, there’s a fire break put in, sensors put into the fields.”

In addition to learning from past disasters, both at home and abroad, Paltin notes that “global partners are key, too. Japan had its first treaty with the nation of Hawai‘i in 1871, so there’s a long history of friendship and exchange. We were told that part of the reason for the program was the aloha Hawai‘i gave to Japan in the immediate aftermath of their earthquake and tsunami.”

A Continuation of Culture

Lewis found that despite the challenges Japan has faced, “their culture has thrived. It’s the underlying spirit of their people that allows them to be resilient. I think you see that on Maui, too. Hawai‘i is very ethnically diverse, much more so than Japan. But what grounds us is that culture, the Hawaiian culture, the spirit of aloha, the connection to land. You see that sense of connection to the place in Japan. They’re not just about money; it’s about way of life.”

“Post-trip, I’ve been thinking about resilience,” Lewis says, “and to me, it’s ‘What are the underlying things that make Lahaina special?’ Those are the things that we need to hang onto. I don’t think we should be building back Lahaina to what it was; I think it needs to be something completely different. But holding on to those core values and that cultural history of the place, no matter who lives there. Everything else is superficial.”

His sophomore year, he missed a meeting of the Hui O Nani Hawai‘i club, which perpetuates the culture of the Islands and provides support for students from Hawai‘i. By the time he attended the next meeting, he discovered he’d been tapped to serve as the club’s president. “It was humbling and interesting, learning to lead a diverse group in this midsize collegiate community,” he says.

Yamamoto was born and raised in Pauoa and graduated from Maryknoll School. He has been with First Hawaiian Bank for 12 years, and this January, was promoted to VP of advertising.

“I work with the advertising group, brand campaigns and strategic marketing campaigns, whether that is a product initiative or a service initiative,” he explains. “But everyone in my group wears multiple hats. It might mean helping with an event or developing a community program. We recently took over our employee giving program, which is big because like 98 to 99% of our employees participate.”

At the bank, he has helped spearhead the employee-driven LGBTQ+ resource group. “It’s not that we felt marginalized,” he says. “We just wanted to be more connected. It’s about bringing attention to things that need attention.”

He is a board member for the Honolulu Professionals Foundation, which does fundraisers for a different non-profit t each year. In 2023, the benefit was for Hawai‘i Literacy.

Yamamoto is single, with “two rambunctious dogs,” and enjoys cooking and traveling, with recent highlights including a trip to Jordan where he saw the archaeological site at Petra.

At the Hawai‘i LGBT Legacy Foundation, he is treasurer on the executive committee. “It’s an incredible group,” he says. The foundation produces the Honolulu Pride in October, “and in the last two to three years we have started a lot more community programming. We call it Rainbow Town Hall, bringing panel discussions, followed by a mixer, on various topics, like the gay wedding industry, efforts to codify same-sex marriage into the state constitution or the significance of māhū in the community. The topics are constantly changing and evolving. It’s all about making Hawai‘i a better community and a better place.”

The second, he says, “was the importance of understanding the land, of conservation and preservation.” These themes have remained constants in his life.

Waibel first worked in agricultural biotech, which included a seven-year stint in Brazil (he is fluent in Portuguese and Spanish). But he became intrigued by a wholly different job opportunity at the YMCA of the Greater Twin Cities, which includes Minneapolis and St. Paul.

“It was a values match,” he says, as he learned about the YMCA’s youth development programs and commitment to social responsibility. “I noticed that with the Y, everyone from the community can be involved.”

After 15 years there, he was chosen to lead the YMCA of Honolulu, where he started in January 2021.

“The YMCA has been around for 155 years in Honolulu,” he says. “It’s a constant evolution. We are operating out of 105 locations every single day.” This includes everything from serving the very young in the community, such as preschool age keiki, to kūpuna, who enjoy enhanced fitness programs.

Waibel is focusing on increasing the YMCA’s number of preschool spots in Hawai‘i. “The state needs 10,000 more seats,” he explains. He is also looking to create more mental health programs for children and teens, including those that focus on prevention and intervention.

“It’s personal for me,” he says. “I have two children, both of whom were diagnosed with anxiety as young children.” His children are thriving now as young adults; his daughter is a kindergarten teacher and his son recently graduated from college with a degree in audio engineering.

Waibel is a member of the LGBTQ+ community and is a happy newlywed. His spouse is from Thailand, and the couple enjoy hiking and playing pickleball.

The YMCA has local resource groups for LGBTQ+ employees and Waibel serves on a national level, supporting these groups.

“We help with best practices and addressing questions on how best to serve our members as well as our staff,” he says. “It’s about being really intentional, reviewing policies and statements and making sure they reflect the inclusive nature of what we want to do.”

Has she ever.

Cabatu played Division I soccer at Georgetown, where she majored in English and literature. She earned a master’s degree with a health care focus from the Shidler College of Business.

Her first job was in Washington, D.C., where she worked on international women’s rights and family planning, and encouraged Congress to fund programs to support reproductive health globally. “It was a political football. I came to the realization I’d grown up kind of apolitical in Hawai‘i. Not anymore!”

She is the current chair of the Hawai‘i County Committee on the Status of Women, and advocacy chair for Zonta Club of Hilo, an organization that works on behalf of women and girls.

In 2006, she joined Hilo Medical Center, which will be renamed Hilo Benioff Medical Center on July 1, 2024.

Cabatu says she loves coming to work every day, “getting to make a difference in Hilo and throughout the island. It feels like we are doing something remarkable. It’s barely a job. I call it service.”

In her off hours, Cabatu enjoys creative writing in pidgin, such as her play, “One Pretty Good Love Story,” and her one-woman show, “Mary Tunta to Da Rescue.”

The former is “a coming-of-age story of a young basketball player,” she says. “So many of us became part of the LGBTQ+ community. This was in the late 1980s and early 1990s. We are truly supportive of each other now, but I wonder what it would have been like if we talked openly about it back then.

“In the play, I wrote a line: ‘It almost felt like people could smell the gay on you.’ I felt that way because I was worried I couldn’t hide it and I was doing my best to. Many kids don’t have that level of anxiety any more about it and that’s great.”

Cabatu has a partner, who is a local therapist, and a 12-year-old daughter. “She’s a ballerina,” Cabatu says with a laugh. “I coached her basketball team for seven years and one day she said, ‘Let’s be honest, this isn’t me.’ ”

She urges businesses to participate in events such as Pride. “I was at last year’s Pride parade, and it made me so happy to see all those businesses, all the allies, the churches, the kūpuna riding the trolleys holding signs of support. It was so beautiful.”

She is a graduate of UH Mānoa, where she earned a scholarship playing for the Rainbow Wahine basketball team starting in its inaugural season in 1974. She then attended UH’s Richardson School of Law, and worked as a civil litigator, corporate counsel and law professor before becoming a state trial court judge in 1993. McKenna was sworn in as an associate justice in 2011 and is one of fewer than a dozen openly gay state supreme court justices in the U.S.

Her role as an associate justice, she says, “is a humbling responsibility but also an opportunity” to rule on issues “in a way that I hope will create a better Hawai‘i.”

She is known for advocating for equality, dignity and access for all within the judicial system. In 2023, McKenna received the American Bar Association’s prestigious Margaret Brent Women Lawyers of Achievement Award – the highest award for female lawyers nationwide.

In terms of gender issues and sexual orientation, McKenna says Hawai‘i is ahead of the national curve.

“For me, what made a big difference was that in 1991, Hawai‘i became the third state to outlaw employment discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation,” she says. That move, she says, made it more comfortable for her to come out to her colleagues.

However, she adds: “The biggest thing is acceptance by one’s family. I implore parents to accept their children for who they are.”

McKenna is single and is the proud mother of three, including a son who is a lawyer, a daughter who is in law school, and a son who is an Army Reserve officer and student.

In her down time, McKenna enjoys walking for exercise, and karaoke with her friends. Her go-to song? Donna Summer’s “MacArthur Park.” Disco fans know that song has some pretty hard notes to hit, but we’re guessing McKenna nails it.

It was a slippery slope. As a teen growing up in Kansas, Ken Kao would frequent the local video rental stores. Mainstream movie selections soon gave way to more sophisticated fare – classic films like “A Clockwork Orange,” and the works of directors such as Martin Scorsese and Terrence Malick.

“Godard, Fellini … really advanced I stuff I probably had no business checking out,” Kao says with a laugh.

Photo: courtesy of Jive PR+Digital

Kao, who lives in Honolulu, is the co-founder and president of film production company Waypoint Entertainment. He’s been a producer on a dozen feature films, including “The Favourite,” which was nominated for 10 Oscars, including a best actress win for its star, Olivia Colman. He worked with Scorsese on “Silence,” Malick on “Song to Song” and “Knight of Cups,” and Ryan Gosling and Russell Crowe on “The Nice Guys.” He also produced “The Glass Castle,” adapted from the bestselling book by Jeannette Walls and starring Brie Larson and Woody Harrelson.

Prior to launching Waypoint in 2010, Kao was a lawyer, but in his early 30s, he quit. “I realized I wanted to wake up loving what I do every day. I took a hard left; I don’t have film school training. My love for film has spawned from being a fan of cinema. I wanted to be in service and build out a career in an industry that I love so much.”

So, what, exactly, does a film producer do?

“A good producer does almost everything,” says Kao. “A bad producer can get away with doing almost nothing.” With Waypoint, he says, “I wanted to create a one-stop shop that produces, that can finance, and that provides dedicated long-term project development, creative support and collaboration, and to do that efficiently without having to rely on a studio.

“With anybody working in the film business, you’re managing a lot of egos and creative needs, some of which are healthy and some of which aren’t,” he says. “Relationships are key. I am proud to work with some of the same people repeatedly. It means people enjoy working with me and the group. There’s a trust factor that helps in the creative process, and when you find that, you tend to want to work over and over with each other. It’s not that easy to find comfort and safety in this business, to get that shorthand you develop.”

“Stepford Wives” Meets “Rosemary’s Baby”

His latest producing credit is for “Cuckoo,” which premiered in February at the 2024 Berlin International Film Festival. Written and directed by German avant-garde filmmaker Tilman Singer, the high-style horror movie stars Hunter Schafer, who came to fame on TV’s “Euphoria.” It’s slated to hit U.S. screens in August.

The Hollywood Reporter called the film “kind of like ‘The Stepford Wives’ meets ‘Rosemary’s Baby,’ with side orders of Cronenberg, J-Horror and Lynch.” Kao says he was happy to dip into the horror genre but that overall, he is “genre agnostic.” He’s worked on coming-of-age-films (“Mid90s”); action thrillers (“The Outsider”); and period pieces like “Hostiles,” which was set on the 19th-century frontier.

“Hollywood tends to exhaust a formula,” says Kao. “My focus instead has always been to find something or a point of view that is fresh, that subverts a genre, that evolves it in some way.”

It’s not easy being in the film industry these days. Streaming services that once chased prestige are now more interested in mainstream fodder than independent films, says Kao, and if they do greenlight an independent film, it’s likely to be small budget. Added stressors include last year’s actors and writers strikes, which followed on the heels of the Covid pandemic.

The film business is a microcosm of the global economy, says Kao. “I am grateful that we are still standing after more than a decade [with Waypoint]. The main thing is to be nimble and adaptative.”

Up next: “Project Hail Mary,” a sci-fi film starring Ryan Gosling, set to shoot in the U.K. this spring and a modern adaptation of “Hamlet,” starring Riz Ahmed, which is in post-production.

Lots of Other Ventures

Kao is also a co-founder and partner at Los Angeles-based Parallel, a celebrity talent partnership studio and strategic investor that launched in 2020. It works with wellness and purpose-driven brands like HOP WTR, a nonalcoholic beverage; Happy Viking, a protein drink co-founded by Venus Williams; and investment funds Springbank and Amboy Street Ventures.

Kao comes by his entrepreneurial spirit honestly. His father is Min Kao, a co-founder of navigation company Garmin, and “not only in my immediate family but also in my extended family, we have a history of taking chances and creating,” he says. “I think there’s some creative DNA in me. But what fuels my entrepreneurial spirit is to find new ways to work with people, and to create.”

“I’m super grateful that Hawai‘i has allowed us to call it home. My daughter is in school here. We’re thriving on a personal level here.”

He also seeks to foster film-based economic opportunities in Hawai‘i. “There are a growing number of productions here and crew as well, but I want to foster above-the-line work” in areas such as creative development, production and direction.

“We select honorees based on contributions to the quality of life as well as enhancing the image of the state,” says SME President Robin Kennedy. “Based on Hawai‘i Foodservice Alliance’s record of philanthropy and in particular to their dedication to serving the victims of the Maui wildfires, we are proud to honor HFA Founder and CEO Chad Buck as SME’s 2023 Salesperson of the Year.”

Hawaii Business asked Buck why and how an 18-year-old from a broken home in Chicago, with no money or contacts, bought a one-way ticket to Maui and ended up founding a company that now ranks 49th on the Top 250 list of Hawai‘i’s biggest organizations.

On His Sales Philosophy

I never had any formal training. This is what I think: Everything in life is a relationship. So when I first started HFA, my client base was exclusively family-owned restaurants. I would go to my clients’ weddings and their other get-togethers. No one else did that.

You know when you walk into family restaurants there are paper signs handwritten with marker? I’d go to Kinko’s and then show up at the restaurants with nice laminated signs. My signs are still in some of those restaurants – faded but still there.

If there’s anything I’m selling now it’s that the only way forward for Hawai‘i is together. It’s going to take all of us, it’s not just the responsibility of government. I would not exist without the community, so I don’t have the right to pull from one without giving as well. We need to build longer tables and not higher walls.

On Moving to Maui at Age 18

Buying a one-way ticket from Chicago and moving thousands of miles away from everything I ever knew was my way of leaving a broken childhood behind.

The Maui brochure just happened to be the only brochure on the counter of the travel agency that day and from where I was, that seemed to be the right path forward.

I rented rooms that kept a roof over my head. Within months I was in a relationship and a teenage stepfather and working three jobs. I had a full-time day job, an evening job and one on the weekends. I built scaffolding for a painter and delivered 5-gallon water bottles in Lahaina.

I became the youngest manager for a store chain when I was still a teenager. I would literally skip a meal to buy a business book. They had business magazines and I could read them and return them to the rack.

What He Learned Early On

I always had an entrepreneurial bent. I never had a job where I didn’t think, “If this was my company what would I do differently?” I always kept one of those little blue or red memo pads and I would write down ideas or quotes. I was fascinated by Theodore Levitt’s book “The Marketing Imagination.” This kid who never paid attention in school was reading a business book!

The most important thing I got from that book was that I had to be willing to work harder and smarter than the person next to me. My co-workers would complain that a guy was a slacker; I’d secretly celebrate because I saw that guy as competition for the next promotion.

When He Felt He Had Made It

In 2002, the Hawai‘i Foodservice Alliance made the list of Pacific Business News’ Fastest 50 Growing Companies in Hawai‘i. When PBN called for an in-person interview, I told them I was between Neighbor Islands. I didn’t want them to see my office and warehouse because it was complete chaos. If you look at the first shot in the article, I’m sitting outside the airport like some jet-setter.

Walter Dods gave out awards at the event. He was like a god to me at the time. When I got up to accept, I told the audience the only reason I did all this was so I could meet him. While I’m leaving the event, I realized it was the first time in my life that I had received a certificate of any kind.

HFA Started Providing Food, Water and Other Critical Supplies Directly to Maui Wildfire Victims, While the Fires Were Still Burning. And the Company Did It at Its Own Expense. How Did That Experience Affect You?

If you had asked me in the first week, I’d tell you there’s something about the ash in the air and having it on you.

When you’re face to face with that level of devastation, in lives and livelihoods lost, and everything they knew in this life was ashes and smoke, then you wonder what really matters now? What matters to that family who is together but has lost everything?

Mayor Richard Bissen invited me for lunch recently. When I get there there’s maybe 20 people in the room, and he’s organized the event just for me. He starts reading a certificate and then he starts reading the letter I wrote him saying that there’s no invoice coming for any of the months of deliveries and he just loses it. He’s got tears running down his face.

Finally I have to get up and say something. I started reading from our first texts as a group of responders when the tragedy was unfolding. We didn’t know each other 24 hours before and yet all our texts are already ending in “I love you.” Going through this life changing experience together we instantly formed lifetime bonds.

Giving Back

My life has been a string of miracles, and I don’t think it was designed for anything other than to give back.

I hired a guy today to work with the high schools. There’s a charter school in Kāne‘ohe with 63 special-needs students who get only 60% of the funding that DOE gets to feed their students. I get a call from the state and so I show up. We had their freshman class here in our building two hours later picking up food. We’re now getting ready to teach them a course in our commercial kitchen on preparing their meals. We just installed a large refrigerator system in the school to store the meals. And they’ve got 13 seniors who are looking for vocations because they’re not going to college. We can teach them to drive tractor-trailers, we can teach them different things.

I know what it’s like to be 18 without what seems like a prayer. So there’s a connection there.