Lunalilo Home, as seen from the entry gate. - Photo: Lisa Asato

By Lisa Asato / Ka Wai Ola

IT'S THE DAWN of a new day at Lunalilo Home, where at 6 o'clock on a recent Monday morning, an overnight rain grudgingly makes way for clearer skies. Inside the adult residential care home in the shadow of Koko Head in Hawai'i Kai, O'ahu, residents are in various stages of preparing for the day, and no one seems to be in any particular rush.

Henry Lot Kamehameha Lane, a retired city rubbish collector who at 62 is the youngest of the 31 residents, has to postpone his weekday morning routine of raising the Hawaiian and American flags on a pole fronting the property – because the skies still won't promise sun. So he carries them, bagged in clear plastic, while he gets his medications from licensed practical nurse Nicole Reeves-Estrada, who makes the rounds in the main gathering room, taking blood pressures and pulse and preparing customized concoctions of pills (some are crushed and mixed in applesauce) for ailments like diabetes, high-blood pressure and high cholesterol.

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Down the hall, Janice Tanele, a certified nurse assistant, soon will be coming off the night shift. Before she leaves, she tends to women and men, brushing their hair, helping them as needed in the shower, and answering a call signal from a woman who shares a room with three others.

"You ready to rock 'n' roll?" she asks as she enters the caller's room. "Not yet? OK, five more minutes."

A new day is also dawning for the Lunalilo Trust Estate, established by the will of King William Charles Lunalilo in 1883 to care for elderly Hawaiians. The once land-rich trust has seen its landholdings drop from more than 400,000 acres to 5.

Without a land base, the trust has struggled financially but the new leadership says it is turning a corner. "In the last eight to nine months we've been profitable," said trustee Harvey McInerny, president and CEO of McInerny Financial Group. That's exceptional, he said, considering 11 of its beds are vacant and half of its 25 Hawaiian residents are subsidized.

A year ago when resident fees were a little more than $3,000 a month, the trustees' mindset was "let's keep operating as long as we can," said McInerny, who was appointed trustee in May 2008. "There wasn't a lot of bridge building between different Hawaiian organizations. There wasn't a lot of strategic plan-(based) alternative revenue streams. It was pretty much the golf tournament and the lū'au are where we're going to get our operating money from."

From left Lunalilo Trust Trustee Kamani Kala‘au, Lunalilo Interm Executive Director Dr. J. Kuhio Asam, and Trustees Harvey McInerny and Stanley Hong. - Photo: Lisa Asato

But things are turning around. There are new faces at the helm, with McInerny and Kamani Kuala'au appointed by the Probate Court in 2008 to fill the vacancies left by the April 2008 death of R.M. Keahi Allen and the Dec. 31, 2005, retirement of Eugene N. Tiwanak, respectively. Stanley Hong, who has served as trustee since 2001, was kept on past the 70-year-old age cut off by the court in order to provide stability during the change. (The court has since done away with the age-limit requirement.)

The 45-bed home also has a newly appointed interim executive director, Dr. J. Kuhio Asam, who was the medical director of APS Healthcare Hawai'i from 2002 to 2008 and was medical director of Kahi Mohala Hospital for eight years before that. Asam attributed the profitable turnaround to cost cutting, more effective fundraising – its annual lū'au raised $23,000, a four-fold increase over last year – and increasing the monthly cost for residents from about $3,000 to about $4,000, which he said is on par with other adult residential care homes. The cost includes three meals a day, three snacks a day and laundry service at the home, which is staffed by 40 full- or part-time CNAs, registered nurses, LPNs, kitchen staff, office administration, and an additional number of on-call employees, said Grace Mee, Lunalilo Trust Estate manager and the home's administrative and finance manager.

Nicole Reeves-Estrada, an LPN, pulls sheets of various medication tablets from a rolling cart, where she prepares specific combinations of medications for the patients. - Photo: Lisa Asato

Asam, who is married to Dr. Claire Asam, trustee of Queen Lili'uokalani Trust, said he aims to raise awareness and instill a sense of community ownership in the home as a way to ensure its viability. Besides ideas of hosting 'ohana nights or public events when the Royal Hawaiian Band visits twice a year, one thing he'd like to see is commitment by groups like civic clubs to "decorate the dining room with flowers on the table once a month," which would be at a low cost to the group, but bring a lot of joy. "All of a sudden, they're here, they see the people and the place, and they've got an investment," he said. "Minimal time doing a flower arrangement gives them ownership.

"That's what I would like to instill over time – what is it that our communities, Hawaiian and otherwise, can do to serve our people?"

The trustees have set for themselves the goal of maintaining the trust in perpetuity and are developing a strategic plan to increase income. A range of ideas are being considered to make that happen, including opening a 80-bed skilled nursing facility on the grounds that would provide services to those needing the highest level of care and whose profits would help support Lunalilo Home, which as an adult residential day care home requires residents to be able to walk or otherwise get around by themselves and eat and go to the bathroom by themselves.

Office manager Dawn Kuoha brings tax forms for Ethel Leimomi Buchanan to sign, as Henry Lot Kamehameha Lane, looks on. Kuoha caught up with them during a jam session. Buchanan, formerly a Palama, was playing the 'ukulele that she received for her 87th birthday on April 14. Lane was playing a bass that's partially made from a wash tub. - Photo: Lisa Asato

"We've actually done a pretty extensive market study for this site, looking at skilled nursing, and it was determined that in this area, it is vastly underserved," said McInerny. Although the trustees are not committing to any project yet, other ideas include working with the state Department of Hawaiian Home Lands to serve kūpuna in Kapolei.

"We have come forward with a new challenge, a new plan, new leadership and a (in-progress) new strategic plan to take us to another level," said Stanley Hong, chairman of the board of trustees. "I think … there is this perception in the Hawaiian community and in the general community that we are moving now and making progress in many different areas. And the fact that the trustees have agreed to appoint Dr. Asam, who is very well qualified and well respected in the community, that we finally have a group that is beginning to move," said Hong, an attorney whose careers includes stints as president and CEO of the Hawai'i Visitors Bureau and as an executive for Theo H. Davies and Co. Ltd. He said with three trustees, everyone has to agree to move in the same direction, if not, "you're sort of dead in the water."

"We needed to get going. We needed to all row in the same direction," he said. "We finally have reached that point."

The newest and youngest trustee, 29-year-old Kamani Kuala'au, said that as the trustees work on its strategic plan, "we'll involve a lot of stakeholders and families that will help us put on the drawing board what that potentially could look like."

Among the services the home provides is adult day care for $65 a day, including two meals. Here, director Jenelle Honbo shares a laugh with Hiroshi Masuhara, 82, Violet Lau, 91, and Kiyoko Keamo, 87, during breakfast. - Photo: Lisa Asato

"We want to provide services that are needed or wanted in the community," said Kuala'au, who is a Bank of Hawai'i senior trust officer and vice president of institutional client services. As a student at Kamehameha Schools, Kuala'au saw firsthand how misguided motivation can hurt a trust. As student body president, he wrote a letter with senior class president James Moniz supporting school president Michael Chun, who was being challenged by Bishop Estate trustee Lokelani Lindsey. His court testimony about a conversation he had with Lindsey threatening to undermine his future at Princeton University led to her dismissal.

A Maui native who remembers taking field trips to the home as a boarder at Kamehameha, he said, "Everybody has their story to tell about their kūpuna that was in the home or somebody they knew in the home and everyone has just been willing to jump in and help us support our kūpuna.

"And I think once we get our strategic plan and bring these people into the fold to help develop that we're going to be able to move forward by leap and bounds. … People are just waiting or us to ask and provide our vision for the estate."

Thomas K. Kaulukukui Jr., Queen Lili'uokalani Trust chairman, agreed, saying, his board and organization want to support Lunalilo trustees "in their efforts to implement a strategy which might someday lead to greater financial security for the trust."

"We, like others, have our own responsibility, which is primary. But at the very least we're happy to help strategize and to be part of pulling the community together to assist with the William Charles Lunalilo Trust," he said.

Jan Dill, president of the Partners in Development Foundation, said: "I see new energy and I see a willingness … to look at the larger horizon, because I think for a long time Lunalilo has been in survival mode, just trying to live from month to month. And it's hard to get the community interested in living a survival kind of existence, so that's why I think it's an opportune time to work with the community. To lay out a larger horizon that deals with the care of our kūpuna and all the issues that are involved … because it's an important field, and it's a field that's at the center of what the king intended."