Hawai‘i Leaders Selected for ‘Ōiwi Leadership Accelerator

Participants will learn leadership skills while maintaining and nourishing their Indigenous and personal identities and perspectives. Note: This story has been updated to include the 20th participant.

April 11, 2024

Noelle Fujii-Oride,

Twenty early- to mid-career leaders at organizations across O‘ahu, Hawai‘i Island, Maui and Moloka‘i have been selected for a new leadership accelerator program.

The people behind the eight-month ‘Ōiwi Leadership Accelerator hope to prepare Native Hawaiian and Hawai‘i-raised talent for key leadership roles and increase their representation in such roles. It’s being offered by People Strategies Hawai‘i in partnership with Kamehameha Schools Kaiāulu and the Hawaii Employers Council.

“I’m just really proud of the mix of the cohort that we have,” says Ku‘ulani Keohokalole, CEO of People Strategies Hawai‘i, who runs the program with partners Elena Farden and Tiffany Chang. “And I feel like we’ve curated a really intentional group of 20 people that are not just going to learn from us but learn from each other and will support each other as they continue going in their careers.”

She says demand for the program has been high. To be accepted into it, applicants were required to write essays and, Keohokalole says, some of those writings brought her and the program’s review committee to tears. Several applicants shared their struggles navigating Indigenous and Western worldviews in professional settings, and their desires to be their true, full selves in all spaces, she says. Some wrote that they want to see more Native Hawaiians thriving in their homeland and for Native Hawaiians to be better represented in leadership roles.

“As a first-generation college graduate and the only person in my family to have a ‘white collar’ job, I have struggled to navigate the Western corporate world in a way where I feel I can still honor my Indigenous identity and the worldview I was raised with, without having it exoticized or commodified,” one applicant wrote. “I believe the ‘Ōiwi Leadership Accelerator can help equip me with the right tools and community of support to straddle both of these worlds, and I am eager to find methods and places where I can show up in ways that are true to myself.”

The program’s first gathering in mid-April will target self-awareness, emotional intelligence, leadership identification and relationship building. Later, participants will learn to make lau lau as they unpack their layered identities.

“We know that one of the things that makes leaders good leaders … (is) strong emotional intelligence, and to us that means being grounded in who you are, being grounded in where you come from and understanding your own journey that you’re on,” Keohokalole says. “So we wanted to make sure that we started there with this group, that they first look at themselves and understood this to be a learning and a self-reflective journey that they’re on.”

In the second gathering in May, participants will articulate their own leadership stories within the context of sense of place, relationships and connections, as well as expanding their leadership worldview to include an ‘Ōiwi perspective, with Native Hawaiian artists guiding them along.

“We’ve been able to see the things that make leaders effective broadly and also effective in Hawai‘i, and it’s these types of competencies, the ability to know thyself, be grounded and also be able to hold nuance,” Keohokalole says.

Here are the 20 participants in the first year of the ‘Ōiwi Leadership Accelerator:

1. Alana Eagle (O‘ahu)