Waiwai – The Hawai`i Asset Policy Initiative Hawai’i

Overview:
Waiwai – The Hawai`i Asset Policy Initiative desires to build the power and voice of Hawaiian families and communities by giving them the tools and strategies they need to have choice and control over their future. Achieving this outcome will entail building a political will to change the public discourse by looking at wealth creation from a new perspective.

The essence of the Initiative is steeped within the Native Hawaiian definition of wealth –waiwai or water water. For Native Hawaiians wealth is a collective concept found in the natural environment. Viewing wealth as a collective environmental asset challenges traditional western notions and links the Initiative's wealth creation agenda to strategies that build upon, preserve, or advance social, cultural and environmental capital.

Context:
Living within a context of the fourth highest asset poverty in the country – where nearly a quarter of the state's population has insufficient assets to subsist for three months at the poverty level without other assistance and the income gap between the rich and the poor is second greatest in the nation, promoting an asset agenda in Hawai`i at this time seems an imperative. The Waiwai Initiative reflects a growing sentiment for a concerted push to upgrade the economic conditions of rural poor families. At once Waiwai not only seeks to build a policy advocacy network for families, but also seeks to build the capacity of the community economic development infrastructure in the state to implement a family wealth creation agenda – one that will be built around the cultural and environmental capital of Native Hawaiians.

Collaborative Structure & Strategy (less than 200 words):
Waiwai is a statewide collaborative effort involving nonprofit organizations, private sector representatives, public sector members, and community residents that will identify and champion policies and strategies that promote the creation and retention of assets and wealth in low income families and communities throughout rural Hawai`i.

Projected Leverage and Impact (less than 200 words):
The Waiwai initiative is intended to create the political will necessary to change public discourse around wealth creation and generate asset building strategies that help Hawai`i's rural families build on their strengths and rise out of poverty. The development of this supportive environment for increased asset accumulation, asset leveraging, and asset preservation will result from efforts to affect the following regional impacts: (1) capacity at the grassroots level in rural areas throughout the islands will have been strengthened to develop and advance asset policy and wealth building programs and projects; (2) stronger linkage and coordination among diverse but related efforts across Hawai`i will ensure a more powerful and sustained voice for an asset building approach to supporting low income rural families and communities; and (3) increased investments in rural Hawai`i by providing public and private funding and financing partners the information they need to confidently make such investment.

Programs and Projects:
The primary objectives of the initiative are as follows:

• Convene statewide conversations to explore how families can accumulate economic assets for security and legacy without impoverishing their spiritual and cultural assets. The intended result is to define asset building in a culturally appropriate context.
• Provide training opportunities for local residents to collectively act on asset building issues at the local level in order to sustain their grassroots activism.
• Create an Asset Policy Taskforce that will advocate for a long-term asset building agenda in Hawai`i and provide leadership on two or three key public policy initiatives;
• Conduct learning exchanges with other statewide asset building efforts including the Asset Policy Initiative of California and the National Rural Funders Collaborative. This will allow Hawai`i to learn from other efforts in asset building, while also sharing and inspiring others to develop asset building strategies relevant to their cultural context.
• Establish a co-learning process with the HACBED Economic Kipuka initiative, which will identify successful community and culture-based economic development initiatives around agriculture, health and tourism in Hawai'i. The intent is to develop and disseminate knowledge in the community-based economic development field

Outcomes:
The initiative seeks to increase family self sufficiency by

• Building grassroots leadership, networks, and capacity to develop and advance asset building policies;
• Increasing community capacity to plan and implement wealth creation strategies; and
• Establishing new resource partnerships to affect innovative approaches to investing in culture and values based development of Hawai`i's rural low-income communities.

Main Contact
Bob Agres (HACBED Executive Director)
Waiwai Initiative
Hawaii Alliance for Community-Based Economic Development (HACBED)
bagres@hacbed.org