ʻUʻina nākolo, ʻUwā ka pihe, E Hoʻolau Kānaka!
Let our voices roar and rumble, let them cry out and be heard, a multitude is present and speaks with one voice.
The inaugural E Ho‘olau Kānaka: ʻĀina Summit was held in Hawaiʻi on June 29-30, 2018, at Kokokahi YWCA, in the ahupuaʻa of Kāneʻohe on the island of O‘ahu. Spearheaded by a robust planning committee and sponsored by the Office of Hawaiian Affairs, the Department of Land and Natural Resources, and the Kamehameha Schools, the summit brought together more than 120 participants representing over 80 community-based groups, non-government organizations (NGOs), traditional Hawaiian practitioners, private companies, and government agencies. E Ho‘olau Kānaka: ʻĀina Summit was designed to be a true community-public-private partnership to convene experts and create a call for integrated action across and between sectors.
The purpose of this summit was to take our communities’ work to greater levels of collective impact, and address accelerating threats to lands and waters by:
We encourage using the Summit purpose, actions and future outcomes, to guide and align strategic plans, policies, and culture of participating organizations and agencies, along with collaborative efforts of multiple partners. We encourage you to join our network.
The summit was held over two days to increase the depth of discussion in thematic groupings with general context setting. On the first day, three expert panels and breakout groups with all of the participants discussed the following core topic areas:
After the first day, organizers reviewed the discussion areas and ideas presented from all the breakout groups, and further distilled the ideas into six major themes for action oriented discussion and prioritization:
During the second day, breakout sessions discussed short- and long-term direct actions that could be taken related these areas. The findings and recommendations of this network have been collected and compiled into the following report. This report is meant to go beyond a simple summary of convening, toward a tool for recommendations that formulate a burgeoning framework for collective actions to begin in 2019.
