BOLD in Practice: Kāhuli Puts Community Voice at the Center of Philanthropy
Bold philanthropy can start with a simple shift: trust communities to define what they need.
That principle is at the center of Kāhuli, a community-led philanthropic model in Hawaiʻi that brings together Community-Centered Partnerships (CCP), a project under the Early Childhood Action Strategy (ECAS), and the Early Childhood Funders Collaborative’s Racial Justice and Equity Fund (RJEF). Rather than arriving with a predetermined solution, Kāhuli starts with community knowledge, builds relationships and gives people closest to the work a direct role in deciding where resources are going.
The approach reflects building collective power by investing in relationships, community-centered strategies and shared decision-making. For Kāhuli, that means more than inviting community members into a conversation. It means giving them a role in determining what their communities need and which local organizations should receive funding.
The name itself reflects that idea. Kalo, or taro, does not produce seeds. It is replanted from a huli, a cutting of the plant itself. Kāhuli means to transform, and the name signals that this work isn’t introducing something new to these communities. It’s helping regenerate what is already rooted there.
A Question That Changed the Approach
Kāhuli began with an outside investor who wanted to support rural communities across Hawaiʻi but recognized a fundamental limitation: the investor was not part of those communities. The question was straightforward: Who are we to say what these communities need when we are not part of them? That question became CCP’s, a project under ECAS designed to put decision-making in the hands of the communities themselves, led by Uʻilani Corr-Yorkman.
CCP and RJEF eventually found one another through ECFC Steering Committee Member Nāpua Rosehill, at Kamehameha Schools, who had an existing relationship with Uʻilani and made the introduction. Kamehameha Schools wasn’t providing funding to Kāhuli itself. The connection illustrates how philanthropy can use its influence by making an introduction because you recognize the potential of work you believe in.
When RJEF and CCP began comparing their approaches, they found significant common ground. Both were built around multi-year, trust-based funding and community-informed decision-making. There was one important distinction. While CCP’s model focused on deep, place-based investment within Hawaiian communities themselves and giving them the power to select the organizations to fund, RJEF brought a broader regional network with grassroots vision to scale those community-led solutions. That difference stood out to RJEF as a distinctive strength of the model.
Let Communities Define What They Need
Every rural community in Hawaiʻi has its own history, resources, demographics, cultural context and challenges. What is needed in one community may not be what is needed in another.
On Molokaʻi, limited access to health care and early childhood services creates barriers for families. On Hawaiʻi Island, Kaʻū’s geographic isolation means residents can be roughly two hours from either Kona or Hilo airports, making access to services and resources more difficult.
Kāhuli does not begin by deciding what those communities need. Instead, the process starts with relationships.
A community facilitator, identified through conversations with local nonprofit leaders, serves as the initiative’s connection to the community. That person helps identify residents to serve on a community panel. The panel reviews information about the community, including different survey results, U.S. Census data, and community members’ real-life experiences. Where existing information is insufficient, the community can conduct its own research. In Kaʻū, for example, the most recent community survey was several years old, so the team conducted a new survey to help inform the panel’s decisions.
The process can take months. In one community, it took a year. The facilitator helps the panel understand the available information, but the community members make the decisions. They identify organizations doing important work, invite those organizations to talk with them and ultimately determine who receives funding.
The model has also created opportunities for organizations to see and respond to needs that might otherwise remain hidden. In Kaʻū, the community panel selected two organizations that were providing the same service on the same days without realizing the overlap. Once the organizations were brought into conversation, they adjusted their schedules. One now provides the service two days a week and the other three. The result was not a new grant requirement or a directive from a funder. It came from the community seeing what was happening around them and having the relationships to address it.
Trust Is More Than a Funding Practice
Building those relationships takes time, particularly when funders come from outside the community. During the recent hurricanes in Hawaiʻi, the importance of those relationships became especially visible. Organizations receiving funding in Kaʻū were still dealing with disruptions to their own electricity and water when they called to check on Uʻilani and make sure she was okay.
Uʻilani describes the work as deeply rooted in relationships and trust. Even with cultural and personal connections to Hawaiʻi as a Native Hawaiian herself, she doesn’t assume she knows what every community needs.
The community facilitator is often the person who was born and raised there, knows the local nonprofit landscape and has relationships across the community. That person helps identify the panel members who will make the funding decisions.
For RJEF, the partnership also offered a model for deeper trust with grantee partners. The experience reinforced that funders do not need to control every part of the relationship to ensure accountability. The accountability comes from within the community itself.
Uʻilani points to a Hawaiian concept that captures this more precisely than “accountability” does. She calls it hilahila and describes it as something deeper than embarrassment: a shame so heavy that you cannot live with yourself for having let someone down.
That’s the force holding Kāhuli’s grantees to their word, not a funder’s reporting requirement, but not wanting to disappoint the people they answer to every day.
As Uʻilani put it: “You don’t need to hold the rope so tight. Because the community is going to hold it tight for you.”
What Flexible Funding Crystalizes
The value of unrestricted funding becomes clearest when organizations have the freedom to respond to what their communities actually need. They’re able to use resources where the community sees the greatest need without first having to fit that work into a funder’s predetermined priorities. One example is a community health organization in Kaʻū that had been operating for 28 years but was close to shutting down. Its 80-year-old founder had gone without a paycheck for an extended period and was considering stepping away from the work. Kāhuli’s funding helped stabilize the organization. The founder was able to begin receiving compensation again, and the organization could focus on strengthening its foundation. Now, the organization is in conversations with Kaiser about potentially becoming a Kaiser community hub.
On Molokaʻi, community members have also supported the opening of a new health care center. Other organizations have used flexible funding to pursue longer-term opportunities, including conversations on expansion of services and organization growth.
Kāhuli’s grantees have now experienced unrestricted support and are beginning to ask other funders why philanthropy cannot work this way more often. Having concrete examples of what flexible funding allowed them to accomplish empowers them to demonstrate what can be accomplished more often when they have flexible, longer-term resources.
Building Collective Power in Practice
The power is in the relationships: between community members and organizations, among local organizations, between facilitators and residents, and between funders and the people they support. It is also in the decision-making. The community panel decides which organizations receive funding. The facilitator helps create the conditions for those decisions. The funder provides resources and support without assuming it knows better than the people living and working in the community.
That requires funders to loosen control without abandoning accountability. It requires listening before prescribing. It requires recognizing community knowledge as an asset. And it requires trusting that people who have been doing the work in their communities for years often know what they need to move it forward. Kāhuli’s model teaches funders that even if it can be uncomfortable to practice, listen to communities, trust their knowledge and give them real authority over resources.