OHA must empower Hawaiians

Has the Office of Hawaiian Affairs been serving the needs of the community? According to OHA’S new board chairperson, Rowena Akana, “OHA needs to get back to some of the basic needs that people have,” implying that we have not. But this is false.

For the record, OHA trustees have always supported assisting our beneficiaries to meet quality of life challenges such as home ownership, quality education and health care, employment and economic opportunities and other indicators of prosperity and human dignity. To characterize OHA’s leadership history otherwise is misleading at best and an unfair characterization of our trust management history.

OHA has implemented two different models of resource allocation in the past 20 years. In the 1990s and early 2000s, the last time Akana was chairperson, OHA pursued the failed government-dependency model of being all things to all people by providing direct services. The direct service model is an antiquated political approach that cannot even begin to address the 133 years of trans-generational trauma that has the Hawaiian community under siege. The direct services model she now intends to bring back primarily protects and ensures the perpetuation of the institution, further enslaving OHA beneficiaries rather than freeing them from an existence of living in the shadow of the government.

The second model of resource allocation, the one OHA has pursued for the past 14 years, and which could be dismantled, is the community empowerment model. This model allows Hawaiian communities to shape their own destinies, on their own terms, and allows them to redefine their status as state dependent beneficiaries to becoming citizens of an emerging self-governing entity. With this model, local communities acquire the experience and leadership capacity to cut the cord of dependency.

Turning back the clock and retreating from the strategic objective of empowering the community-based network of providers already in place is not the answer.

There is one reality of the community empowerment strategy that raises a red flag. Community empowerment is a long, slow and expensive process. It requires patience and a commitment to stay the course, remaining resilient to the likelihood of early failures, and having faith that there will come a tipping point when patience will be rewarded.

Fortunately, many organizations have already developed leadership capacity with OHA’s help, including Hawaiian-focused charter schools, and community organizations for health, reforestation, revitalization of taro fields, fishponds, farming and many, many more.

In the end, the full measure of success fundamental to OHA’s constitutional intent is to put ourselves out of business by building the capacity of every Hawaiian community to serve itself, on its own terms, and be free of the government. This is self-determination at its best. Anything less is failure.

Peter Apo is a trustee of the Office of Hawaiian Affairs, elected in 2010.