I recently retired after serving in Maui County’s 911 emergency dispatch center with the Maui Police Department. A civil servant for almost a quarter of a century, I’ve experienced relief, achievement and an awkward blessing of great retirement expectations.

My retirement benefits — like thousands of my fellow public employee retirees in Hawaii — depend largely on the investments of the Hawaii Employees’ Retirement System (ERS). With $15 billion in assets, the ERS has shares in more than 800 companies, which means it owns a slice of the whole economy.

A pension fund that owns a piece of nearly everything can be sustainably managed like a Hawaiian ahupua‘a, recognizing that an improper diversion of water — wai — upstream will result in a loss in the lo‘i kalo — wetland taro field — downstream. Because Hawaiians recognize that water is the source of life, waiwai is our word for wealth. An ahu-pua‘a approach to investment understands that when waiwai is excessively diverted or misused, the overall economy withers and stagnates.

An example of such a transaction took place this summer with the purchase of Whole Foods by the ERS’ second-largest holding: Amazon.

The day the deal was announced, Whole Foods and Amazon increased their combined stock market value by $14 billion (for this, ERS’ pensioners say mahalo piha).

However, dozens of grocery companies whose shares are also owned by pensions simultaneously lost $34 billion in stock market value because investors expect the Whole Foods acquisition to cause a significant “upstream” diversion of grocery sales to Amazon. For na kupuna of the ERS, our kuleana is to ensure that our waiwai is not improperly diverted. We need to ensure that our economic ahupua‘a sustains future generations so they will inherit the sweat equity we left behind as public workers, civil servants and community caretakers.

What can we do? The people of Hawaii can encourage those who invest in our corporations, which many of us are the beneficiary owners of through our pension funds, to serve the long-term interests of our communities.

Government officials can also take an ahupua‘a approach to public service. NextEra’s acquisition of Hawaiian Electric Co., for example, was rejected by the Public Utilities Commission because it was determined that the proposed purchase would result in an excessive diversion of waiwai from the community.

Another option is for corporate board members themselves to recognize that it is their kuleana to consider the needs of employees, the broader community and Hawaii’s overall sustainability. Hawaii law already allows corporations to consider other factors beyond short-term, narrowly defined shareholder interests.

Furthermore, the interests of beneficiary shareholders such as myself and those of the community are often one and the same. Such an ahupua‘a approach further serves shareholder beneficiaries because it results in a healthy overall economy, which is what ultimately increases the value of our pension funds.

For the benefit of retirees like myself and for the sake of our children and grandchildren, we need the owners of our corporations to require corporate leadership to be proactive in building lasting value in our communities, rather than seeing their kuleana as primarily extracting short-term profits while defensively reacting to community concerns and regulatory protections.

To investors who work to structure their ownership in a manner that embraces the ahupua‘a approach by requiring community consideration, creating real lasting value reflective of Hawaii’s culture and building an economic platform inclusive of our local people and their mana‘o, I say e komo mai — let the waiwai flow.