The best Christmas gift James Koshiba would like to see from Hawaii may be no present, at least not a physical gift.

Koshiba, 38, is executive director of Kanu Hawaii, a community-activism nonprofit with a focus on sustainability issues, founded in 2007. The organization is reprising a form of its annual campaign to reduce trash during the holidays, when 25 percent more waste is generated than during any other period of the same duration.

"No Waste Challenge 2011" includes various events and seminars regarding our consumer-driven, waste-choked society, but it centers on a pledge people can take to limit themselves to one bag of household trash per week through the end of this month. More details are at kanuhawaii.org.

Kanu numbers its membership at about 15,000; Koshiba said the largest "bubbles" are people in their 20s and 30s and those in their 50s.

Making personal pledges to abandon old habits is a core part of Kanu membership. Organization leaders have found through surveys that some of its challenges, such as eating more local foods, have been easier for members to maintain, while others, such as changing transportation modes, have been tough.

"The kinds of behaviors that are social are easier and much more fun to change than the ones that are individual," Koshiba said. "The actions that you don’t do with other people, that’s harder because you don’t have that peer pressure."

Beyond pledges, Kanu leaders hope its members build on their personal pledges and turn to a more vocal form of advocacy. The context provided by populist movements such as the tea party and Occupy Wall Street, though arising from divergent political philosophies, is encouraging, Koshiba added.

"I think that’s great," he said. "The pain and frustration that’s out there is finally giving rise to this.

"I think the thing the tea party and Occupy have in common is a belief in people power, and a common frustration that the people power hasn’t been a reality in a system that’s claimed that it responds to people power."

QUESTION: How did you get involved in this kind of work?

ANSWER: I guess the important part of my personal story is I am way, way out of any element I trained for, right now. … The policy stuff, yeah, it helps to be a little bit of a wonk, and I understand that. But really what we’re doing is more of community organizing and community building, and that is far, far outside of my comfort zone and anything I was trained to do.

Q: What kind of job were you trained to do?

A: A policy analyst, working in some department or in the Legislature. A consultant, that kind of job … and nonprofit management, which is part of my work.

Q: What was the hardest part of adjusting to that?

A: The hardest part, I think, has been being out in front of people. I chose this kind of wonky line for a reason. I’m an introvert by nature and I prefer to be behind a computer screen. That’s taken a lot to get used to.

Q: Are you adjusted to it?

A: I’m totally grateful for the job that I’m in; 99.9 percent of the world’s population probably doesn’t get to work on something they care about. … That’s a super privilege.

Q: Can you describe in a nutshell what Kanu does?

A: Bottom line is we’re trying to build a grassroots social movement for a more sustainable, compassionate and resilient Hawaii. And we ask people to start with changing themselves. It’s a big, broad mission statement.

Q: Don’t people get frustrated, when they realize some personal changes are harder than they expected?

A: Really, that was the whole idea, to meet people where they’re at, and to communicate to folks that, wherever you’re starting there’s a way to be involved, there’s a step to take. And the point of that was on the one hand to encourage change to happen, with lots of individual steps. But I think even more important than that was making folks aware of the fact that change is really hard. So when we get to the point of advocating for others to change, we should be coming at it from the perspective of, "Hey, I’ve tried to change, I know how hard it is, but now I’m asking you to change, too."

Q: How did Kanu start?

A: It really started as a conversation among friends, and friends of friends, in about 2005. We were all at that time in our 20s and 30s … and we got together to talk about our worries about the future, building a future for ourselves in Hawaii. And they fell into those buckets of, we worried about the environment, we worried about local culture, and the aloha spirit in particular, and we worried about the economy and our own economic survival and the vulnerability of our community. There were about 40 people in that first group. …

And we finished in a couple of weekends and we had this grand plan, and we patted ourselves on the back. And then, thank God, we did the homework step of looking back at 30 years of plans in Hawaii and realized that we weren’t saying anything particularly new or different; that goals about greater economic security and energy and food, a more diversified economy, more attention to environmental sustainability and conservation, and preserving Hawaii’s unique culture, both the diversity and the aloha, those were always on the top of the list, in state plans going back to Hawaii 2000, which was written in 1978, I think.

And so then we kind of scratched our heads and said, well, then the question is not "Who has the best plan?" but "How do we start moving on this stuff?" … And we were sort of stumped.

So we went around the room, and it was literally a set of conference room tables, and we said, "Let’s each start with a commitment, one commitment to change something in our own sphere of influence — it can just be my own personal behavior about something — that starts to move us in that direction."

Because the important thing to us seemed to be to build movement, and not to come up with the best idea….

It turned out to be such a powerful experience for us to do that, that we thought, look, let’s try to replicate this experience for as many people as possible, engage folks in a conversation about what matters to them, ask them to start with a personal change, and try to build a community of people that have really had that shared experience and connect with each other through their commitments.

Q: How would you gauge the progress in the overall movement?

A: Maybe I’d describe where we’re at in two different ways. One is the progress we’ve made with the community in being more aware and personally engaged in the process of making Hawaii a more sustainable place, both environmentally and economically. And I think in the past four years that we’ve been around, there’s been a lot of progress. It’s much more a part of our mainstream culture and social norms. Words like "sustainability" are part of the conversation, when they weren’t four years ago. So I think that part has been relatively successful, in terms of the awareness, and a kind of baseline in terms of personal behavior change …

But the part that is the next step, the next important step is yet to materialize. And that is that all these people, these committed, well-intentioned people who are living their values now I think need to start speaking out as a group, to change some of the institutions around us, and that includes both business and government.

Q: So you turn people into more advocates?

A: That was always the intention. You start with a personal commitment, meet folks where they’re at, and then encourage folks to take bigger and bigger steps, and eventually get comfortable with the idea of sharing their ideas with other people. … But the thing that we always wanted to be mindful of was that that activism would always be rooted in the humility that comes with having tried to change yourself. …

It wouldn’t be just pointing the finger and saying, "This is your fault, you fix this problem." It’s "I know I’m part of the problem — I’ve tried to change myself to help solve it. Now, can you change, too?"

Q: One of your former founding Kanu colleagues, Andrew Aoki, left the staff of the Abercrombie administration recently in the context of an internal conflict. Did that episode change your own perspective on political involvement?

A: I think that was one of the events that led me and us as a group, Kanu, to say, "Next year, let’s really focus on a push to get people’s voices back in government, on equal footing."

It’s really different kind of work for us than it has been. We’re going to be doing outreach to folks who aren’t very active in the political process, young people and low-income folks. We’re going to be trying to be playing much more of a watchdog and awareness-raising role, around the points where money really does influence policy. And we’re going to be doing a lot more work around the elections: registering folks to vote, voter education, get out the vote.

The link back to the change in the administration is … it felt like a return to more of a political insiders’ set than opened up to new people.

Q: Are you satisfied with the pace of change? Are you frustrated?

A: I think, for both myself and others who are kind of part of the leadership of Kanu, there’s a healthy frustration, and maybe a healthy impatience. … We’ve been struggling with that as an organization for a year and a half or more. …

The other part of where we’re at is, times have changed, radically. When we launched four years ago, it was a really hopeful time … and now it’s completely different. There are tents on the sidewalk now where before you didn’t see them. There’s a palpable frustration, economic frustration and political frustration. And you see that expressed in social movements across the country.

Times have changed, and I think the moment is right for Kanu as an organization for making this shift, finally.