Gov. Josh Green on Monday provided the keynote address for a three-day conference on sustainability at Chaminade University and pledged to generate billions of dollars from philanthropy and outside investment to make Hawaii the first state to become fully reliant on clean energy, among other initiatives to make life in Hawaii easier.

About 60 students, faculty and deans from Chaminade, Hawaii Pacific University and the University of Hawaii attended Chaminade’s People, Planet and Prosperity for a Sustainable Future Conference and were urged by Green to present his administration with their ideas “that mean something to you,” as he put it.

Green also pledged to continue to work to pay off student loans, retain and return expatriate health care workers, teachers and social workers to transform island life for the better, and to build 50,000 badly needed affordable homes — while doing more to help low-­income families and reduce the governmental and health care costs of Hawaii’s 8,000 homeless people.

With Hawaii in need of 12,000 teachers, Green pledged to expedite affordable housing projects that already have been approved but remain stalled, sometimes by duplicate red tape from the city and state.

Projects aimed for Honolulu’s urban core and along the city’s rail line remain a priority, he said.

“Without housing, there are no nurses,” Green said. “Without housing, there are no teachers.”

He also wants “local kids” to be trained in emerging technologies — from remote, white-collar jobs in the islands to converting Hawaii’s aging and damaging septic tanks.

“I want higher education for everybody to the extent that they choose it,” he said. “There are going to be opportunities galore. … We need so many things. We might as well try them all.”

Green urged those in attendance to provide his administration with their own ideas on where else Hawaii should go.

“We’re innovating fast,” he said. “We’re going to do it, so be ready. This should be a dynamic few years.”

Green has been urging federal support to build more affordable housing from U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Marcia Fudge, who is scheduled to visit Hawaii over the Fourth of July holiday.

Green, America’s only sitting governor who also is a medical doctor, repeated his mantra that “housing is health care.”

He’s expected to show Fudge the newly opened “medical respite” kauhale for discharged homeless patients with nowhere to go but who are too medically fragile for life on the street.

The kauhale sits off Punchbowl Street — with The Queen’s Medical Center and governor’s mansion serving as bookends on either side.

Fudge, Green said, is “passionate about small states willing to take risks.”

The medical respite kauhale will save Queen’s, Medicare and the state millions of dollars in health care costs.

Through donations — including of $50,000 and $100,000 — Green said it cost nothing to build, although the state will finance ongoing social service assistance to the patients.

Out of Hawaii’s homeless population, 2,000 are chronically homeless “and in deep trouble,” meaning 3.6% of Hawaii’s homeless consume 61% of Medicare costs — or $1.3 billion, Green said.

“They were costing $82,000 per person per year,” he said.

One homeless person alone made 242 hospital visits in a year, representing just one of hundreds of homeless patients “who consume a huge amount of resources and never get better.”

The medical respite kauhale, Green said, “is already blowing my mind. … This will save $1 million a month just because people will not have to go in the hospital. And all of that savings is tax dollars. Not one single penny.”

He listed a handful of homeless-related projects between the city and state that Green said “save a ton of suffering.”

Green then showed a picture of him aboard the Hokule‘a voyaging canoe with Nainoa Thompson, CEO of the Polynesian Voyaging Society, and said that the worldwide voyages of the Hokule‘a offer a metaphor for Hawaii working together and reducing “cultural divisions” while spreading a global message of sustainability and cooperation.

“If a Jewish man from Pittsburgh marries a Hawaiian Mormon … it’s doable, it’s possible,” he said.