About Us
Hoʻiwai Fund offers strategy, advisory, and implementation support to philanthropic institutions and individual donors across the state—translating relationships into action and ideas into impact.
Hoʻiwai Fund’s fiscal sponsorship program provides critical infrastructure and capacity for grassroots, community-serving organizations.
Hoʻiwai Fund supports funders and initiatives to design strategies, structure funds, and deploy resources in ways that are grounded in community priorities and responsive to Hawaiʻi’s unique context.
Our Values
🜄 Trust
When we place resources in the hands of community without conditions, prescribed outcomes, nor burdensome reporting, we are being honest about who already holds the solutions to the problems they face. Trust, in our practice, flows in both directions. We ask community partners to trust that we will not extract their stories, their time, or their knowledge without reciprocity. We ask wealth holders to trust that community intelligence — rooted in place, in relationship, in generations of practice — will direct resources better than any boardroom can. And we ask ourselves to trust the process, even when it leads somewhere we didn't plan. Wai knows where it needs to go. Our kuleana is create the conditions of possibility so waiwai can flow.
🜄 Community Connection
We center trust and relationship building as an act of collective care. Pilina precedes transaction, outlasts the grant cycle, and holds even when the resources run out. Hoʻiwai Fund does not serve communities from a distance. We gather on the land together, and we share meals together. We listen to what community is saying and follow where that leads.
🜄 Reciprocity
The natural order of things, disrupted by centuries of extraction and accumulation, yearns to be restored. We understand that giving is never one-directional. We are changed by being in relationship with the land and the people who steward it. And when community partners receive resources, they also give back through the stories they share, the practices they sustain, the futures they protect. Waiwai multiplies in circulation. It diminishes in a vault.
🜄 Equity
For Hoʻiwai Fund, equity is a practice of return. In Hawaiʻi, the contradiction is acute and visible: the state has the fourth highest number of millionaires per capita while facing one of the highest rates of houselessness in the nation. Twenty-five percent of U.S. endangered species are found here. Sacred water sources have been diverted for corporate use. These conditions emerged from a system designed to accumulate wealth upward and extract it from land and people.
Hoʻiwai Fund intervenes at the root. We shift control of wealth and decision-making into the hands of communities most impacted by inequity. We do not decide what communities need. We resource the people who already know.
Our Story
COVID-19 and the related shocks to the non-profit sector reaffirmed the need for a community-driven Donor Advised Fund (DAF) offering in Hawaiʻi. Ho‘iwai’s core team spent 2020 exploring the possibility and feasibility of expanding the offerings for DAF holders and their beneficiaries in Hawaiʻi. Our interviews with the philanthropic sector helped us to identify best practices in trust-based, equity driven philanthropy. Our community interviews inflected these practices with local and native Hawaiian values. Our interviews with equity driven philanthropic service providers helped us to understand how we could link these service providers together to serve Hawaiʻi’s donors.
The Ho‘iwai Fund (HF) is a resource channel, rooted in aloha ʻāina and ancestral Hawaiian wisdom, that restores the flow of waiwai to nourish ʻāina, community, and the generations yet to come. Using a human-centered design approach to developing its structure and operations, this social justice grant making and impact fund is being built from an understanding of the needs and interests of its beneficiaries: the hardworking change agents in the state of Hawai‘i, who, if better resourced, would be the solution to the problems they face.
About our Logo
Mapping: Disrupt, Reclaim & Synthesize
Reference name: Legion
Attributes: Direction of flow downstream, shape suggest a shift in water. Rounded edges on type reference the smoothing of rocks as constant water flowing over them over time. Color derives from the ‘O‘opu Alamo‘o and Hihiwai. ‘O‘opu travel Makai to Mauka over their lifespan. This span indicated a healthy return to resource abundance.
Makawalu: Multiple water sources, numbering in 8 representing Ko Hawai‘i Pae‘aina. Hierarchy = source / return / life