New CEO at OHA Explains Why She Took the Job and Her Goals for Serving the Native Hawaiian Lāhui

Stacy Kealohalani Ferreira joined the Office of Hawaiian Affairs on Nov. 1 after serving as budget chief for the state Senate and in several roles at Kamehameha Schools.

The new CEO of the Office of Hawaiian Affairs describes her first days on the job as a “sprint.”

“I’m super excited to be here,” Stacy Kealohalani Ferreira says. “There’s so much potential and great opportunity.”

Here are condensed highlights of my interview with Ferreira, in which she describes OHA’s mission, her reasons for taking the job, her goals and how she hopes to build consensus on how to best serve the agency’s beneficiaries, Native Hawaiians.

Petranik: You were the budget chief at the state Senate and now you’re the CEO of OHA. You don’t shy away from demanding jobs. Why did you join OHA?

Ferreira: I’m a Native Hawaiian, and I care about and love Native Hawaiians – those that live here and those on the continent who would love to be in Hawai‘i. I care about protecting our ancestral lands. I care about our kūpuna, our keiki and making sure they feel safe and cared for.

My time at the Senate allowed me to work with the executive branch and better understand the programs that serve Native Hawaiians. It’s troubling that Native Hawaiians are overrepresented in our judicial system and social services programs.

I believe I can make a difference as a leader at the Office of Hawaiian Affairs. I have a warrior spirit and a servant’s heart. My leadership style is bold, it’s courageous, and I won’t shy away from intractable issues. And we have a board that is equally passionate and dedicated to solving those issues.

What I bring from my time at the Legislature and Kamehameha Schools are connections to a vast network of individuals, organizations and state government that I think is willing to kāko‘o on this effort of better serving Native Hawaiians and creating a better Hawai‘i for all residents. It’s going to take all of us.

Petranik: What do you see as OHA’s mission?

Ferreira: We have a constitutional mandate, so I don’t get to choose the mission. Our charge is to create better conditions for Native Hawaiians. We want to do that through our 15-year strategic plan called Mana I Mauli Ola.

We are focused on four directions: Improving education, health care, economic stability and housing. These are big buckets with deep-seated constraints and conditions that sometimes feel immovable, but if we focus on these four areas we can change the trajectory of how Native Hawaiians are thriving here.

Petranik: You took over Nov 1. What are your main goals for the first 12 months?

Ferreira: I have an internal focus and an external focus. Internally, it is to shore up the organization. We have a larger vacancy rate and I see that as an opportunity to bring in individuals with amazing skill sets and a dedication to the Hawaiian community.

I want to work with the board to make sure we have alignment on where we are going with our strategic plan. We are in year four of the 15-year plan, and I have to ensure we optimize our resources to make huge strides. A large focus for me is to create an implementation plan and making sure we deploy strong tactics and figure out new ways to achieve our goals.

OHA has historically provided financial resources to the community in the form of loans, grants and sponsorships. In order to effectuate our strategic plan, we will have to determine if the agency needs to create and implement direct delivery programs and services to meet our desired outcomes. And because we have finite resources we will have to more effectively collaborate with the executive branch, judiciary, Legislature, private and nonprofit sectors on Native Hawaiian initiatives, priorities and projects. There is a lot of great work happening across our Islands and we want to make sure that we lead and support efforts in which Native Hawaiians are being served or need to be served.

We also need to get creative about how we get them off social services, with more proactive services around workforce development, economic development and taking more control of their health and well-being versus being dependent on state services.

Similarly with the judiciary. Hawaiians are overrepresented in our prisons. We need to do more than just ensure they’re OK while being incarcerated, but also ensuring their recidivism is decreased exponentially by reintegrating them successfully in the general population. And we need to disrupt the pathway to prison.

One thing we don’t talk a lot about is the historical intergenerational trauma in the Hawaiian community that you see surface with events like the Lahaina fires. The deep-seated grief gets exacerbated during these horrific events, because we’ve never really addressed as a state the illegal overthrow, the traumas of colonization.

High numbers of incarceration, of sex trafficked women or girls and other disparities are symptomatic of this pathway of generational poverty. The cause can be traced directly back to the very sad time in our history. So there needs to be some kind of acknowledgment and reconciliation and figuring out how to address that trauma, because otherwise it persists generation after generation, and we treat the symptoms through the judicial system, with putting folks on welfare, and we cannot continue this vicious cycle.

Petranik: You mentioned the board of trustees. One issue OHA has faced is building consensus on the board and the executive team on how to deal with those issues. Do you have a strategy for building consensus?

Ferreira: The board worked together on the strategic plan, so there’s consensus about where we want to go. What trips us up is we disagree on the how, and that’s a problem with people in general, not just our board, because everybody thinks they have the best idea going forward.

I’m fortunate to have been mentored by state Sen. Donovan Dela Cruz, who is a visionary. He understands state government. If you think about the OHA board, they are a mini-legislature. They are elected officials who all represent Native Hawaiians and their particular constituencies, whether a particular island or statewide. What I’d like to bring to OHA are some practices that worked well at the Senate Ways and Means Committee. You learn each legislator’s priorities, just like our trustees’ priorities. What are your top three legislative priorities? What are your top three budget priorities?

You’re not going to get everything, but we want to be able to address their priorities – a few things for each trustee – so their voices are heard, their constituents are being advocated for, as we look at these things through the macro vision of the strategic plan.

Petranik: You’ve already talked about filling OHA’s vacant positions with the best possible people. Do you see opportunities for improving efficiency at OHA?

Ferreira: The previous CEO [Sylvia Hussey served until June 30 and Colin Kippen was interim CEO until Oct. 31] did a good job of managing OHA’s resources. At this point, I don’t think the focus is about further streamlining or efficiencies. The pendulum has to swing back toward the middle, because we’re so lean it’s almost created other concerns and constraints. We now need to be both efficient and effective so we can deliver high quality services.

Petranik: Another criticism of OHA has been a lack of transparency. What’s your feeling on the transparency needed so beneficiaries see what OHA is doing?

Ferreira: We’re a state agency, so we abide by the Sunshine Law. Our board of trustee meetings are frequent, usually twice monthly, open to the public and livestreamed, and we’ve just completed a tour of different communities across the state where we had talk story sessions – some better attended than others. The state Sunshine Law addresses the transparency issues, because we want to ensure our beneficiaries have every opportunity to weigh in on important topics on the agenda.

Folks say they want transparency, but the turnout is low. We have to figure out the balance of that. Maybe it’s not transparency, but more communication, figuring out the best channels to get information out, so folks are informed around issues in their community or that affect their personal lives, so when something concerns them they will come to a meeting or testify. So they will get their questions answered.