Kelvin Taketa, president and chief executive officer of the Hawaii Community Foundation, finds great satisfaction in the work of HCF, which is heading into its centennial year.

Last year the foundation gave out $47 million to nonprofits for their charitable work, focused on making life better for people in need.

Taketa said he’s proud of that record, but admits to feeling "schizophrenic." At 61 and a married father of two adopted children, he remembers a time of less inequality in Hawaii, a period he described as "the golden era."

"I felt, and a lot of my friends felt, that it didn’t really matter where you came from, there was lots of opportunity for you to be successful here," he said. "I think we’ve lost some of that. It just breaks my heart.

"I think that is a fundamental challenge for the people of Hawaii to correct, because it will unravel that social fabric of why we live here, what we love the most about Hawaii."

Taketa graduated from Punahou School, Colorado College and Hastings College of Law. His career led to the nonprofit sector back home, where he helped to found The Nature Conservancy of Hawaii. Taketa said his work with community nonprofits in defending environmental biodiversity led him to his current post, which also seeks capacity building among nonprofits.

Every morning, he said, he awakens wanting to solve a problem, but May 7 will have a particularly sharp focus. The foundation will convene nonprofits in the Advancing Nonprofit Excellence conference to take stock of where things stand in charity work. The current emphasis for HCF is to concentrate its grantmaking on "high-performing organizations," he said, and to work with nonprofits to rise to that level.

"We see every day people who really do remarkable things in terms of generosity," Taketa said. "I think that basically comes from a very human condition of wanting to feel that your life amounts to more than just yourself, that there’s greater meaning in your life than just yourself. Philanthropy is an expression of that.

"And so I think the more that the community foundation can put its spotlights on people who have done remarkable things in that respect, hopefully it inspires others to think about doing the same."

QUESTION: What’s the foundation been up to?

ANSWER: What we’ve been trying to do is get a group of funders together around an issue where we set a common goal for what we’re trying to achieve, and to hui that money together so that it has two effects.

One is, it helps the organizations that we’re working with. Instead of having to get multiple funds from multiple different sources with multiple different ideas about what success looks like, they get one grant from all of us by coming together, and we’re able to set a target or goal to work together.

Q: What’s the name of this?

A: That’s what we call funder collaboratives. We started doing them when the recession happened, through a thing called the Hawaii Community Stabilization Initiative. That was the first one. And that program was incredibly successful. We raised about $4.5 million from about a dozen funders. …

We were able to take that $4.5 million and leverage it into nearly $20 million of government assistance that those families and people could draw down on, who otherwise they wouldn’t be receiving. And we were able to help thousands of people through the recession, with credit counseling and mortgage foreclosure issues, and things like that. …

We raised that money in about 60 days. We were able to turn around in 30 days and identify organizations that were in the front lines helping families and individuals that were really on the bubble in the recession. And we were able to get them resources that they could start hiring people to help those clients almost immediately. …

That was a huge “Aha!” for us. So now we start to see the homeless situation and we’re trying to figure out the best thing we can do. And the funders all came together again and said, “Why don’t we focus on homeless families?” And the reason for homeless families is, basically 40 percent of the homeless are families. About 1 out of 4 are kids under 18. …

And we know that the homeless families, more likely than not, are more motivated to try to get off the streets into stable housing. So we wanted to work with the providers who could work with those families. And the goal of “Housing ASAP,” is what it’s called, is to move homeless families from the streets through transitional housing into stable housing as quickly as possible and to make them stick.

Q: So there would be services with this?

A: Right. So the services are provided largely through state and federal funds.

But what we’re trying to do is to make the agencies more effective at how they’re able to move families quickly through this transition. …

The goal is for them to find a home or apartment or something that they can be in, that their kids don’t have to keep moving around and changing schools during a school year. Stability is the gold standard for what you want to achieve with families that are in those kinds of precarious situations.

Q: What’s the status?

A: We’ve picked eight agencies we are working with, and they represent the agencies that deal with about half of the homeless families in Hawaii. And we’ve gotten them together so they all have a common set of metrics around what they think success looks like, how fast they can move families into stable housing.

They’ve shared their different methodologies and practices for tracking data so they can compare with each other and they can see for themselves what kinds of strategies work best to move these families as quickly as possible into stable housing. …

And the other part of it is our goal is not only to help them to become more effective at how quickly they do this, it’s also for them to be able to work together to identify either promising strategies or real barriers to this homeless situation, that they can then advocate for systems reform.

Q: How much money is there in this?

A: It’s a three-year, $4 million program.

Q: What is the money for? Is it for rentals?

A: The money for the program is largely around building the capacity and capabilities of those agencies to do this work better. So they have a significant amount of state and federal funds to do things like the programs themselves.

But what they don’t have is the money that helps them manage tracking results, for example. Like when a family comes in, how long is that family in transitional housing before they get into stable housing? And the goal in this program is to make that happen faster.

So this money is to make their work be more effective. The actual programmatic dollars are coming from federal and state resources. So this is like lighter fluid, if you will, on top of that. …

Q: This is just to amplify what they’re doing anyway?

A: Exactly.

Q: Homelessness seems like such an intractable problem.

A: What seem to be intractable problems tend to be that way because they’re very complex. …

The “aha” for the community foundation has been … that you have to approach this at a systems level and take a long-term approach. And the biggest problem with taking a systems approach has been the relative isolation between different actors or players that affect, in this case, homeless people; in other cases it may be children, right?

So, you have a Department of Human Services that has a different view of how they do this work than a nonprofit agency. And they never come together to kind of figure out how they can actually have a common goal and how they can coordinate that work and actually make it better. …

Q: More generally, on the economic recovery: From where you sit, does it seem different than it did in 2009?

A: The easiest way to understand that is how we see charitable giving. … And the sense we get from our conversations with our nonprofit grantees as well as philanthropists, is that it’s been a very slow recovery. …

We are just digesting this research we’ve done, and we are going to have this conference on May 7, with executives and board members around nonprofit leadership. And we’ll start to roll out then the findings of the latest giving study.

But I can tell you … the overhang of the recession has not gone away when it comes to charitable giving. People still feel somewhat fragile about their economic circumstance, and it has affected giving.

Q: So the need is still there?

A: I think some of the need has lessened. Certainly unemployment has gone down. But I think when you couple that with the cost of living in Hawaii and the challenges for families to earn a living wage, I think the nonprofit sector feels like there hasn’t been a decrease in demand.

I think when it comes to giving, people are generous but they’re very cautious at this point.

Q: People don’t feel like they’re rolling in dough?

A: Yeah! Even though the stock market’s at 18,000, people don’t feel like happy days are here again. People are much more prudent about being bullish about the future. …

Q: How does Hawaii stack up in charitable giving generally? Is it a good story, bad story?

A: It’s a mix. The great news is, people in Hawaii, our participation in charitable giving among households is among the highest in the country. … Consistently, since the first survey we ran in 1999 to the survey we ran in 2009, over 90 percent of the households give to charity every year. We expect the survey we are completing now will look at 2014, and we expect that will hold up. …

The mixed news is, we are in the middle of the pack nationally in terms of how much dollar-giving is done. And there are logical reasons for that, given our cost of living, right?

We still think, hopefully, there’s an opportunity to inspire people to give even more. And certainly, the community can use it. …

It’s not our job to change people’s attitude about what they think is important to themselves. What our job is, is to show them exemplars of how people have really made a remarkable difference in other people’s lives, and in the community, with a relatively small amount of money to hopefully inspire them to at least think about it.