News
Kawailoa 2024 – Quarter Two Newsletter
An illuminating, rewarding journey toward racial equity
Originally shared on Lever For Change by Ted Gregory, click here to read. While pursuing $20 million challenge grants, two organizations focused their long-term vision and learned about racial equity. After receiving the award, they’re expanding innovative, effective...
Youth Voices Resonate: Kinai ‘Eha Receives Standing Ovation at the 2024 Rural Summit in Lexington, KY
Within each individual, regardless of background, experience, or circumstance, is a story to tell. At the beginning of May, six youth from Kinai ‘Eha along with their Executive Director, Josiah Akau, and PIDF President and CEO, Shawn Kanaʻiaupuni, PhD., traveled to...
About OYAH
The Opportunity Youth Action Hawaiʻi (OYAH) hui is a unique collaboration of nonprofit agencies at the Kawailoa Youth and Family Wellness Center that works in close collaboration with State partners. Together, alongside our State Partners, we are creating a puʻuhonua, or place of peace, safety, and healing. OYAH formally organized in 2020 under the common purpose to transform punitive modalities of treatment and incarceration with effective therapeutic community-based programs rooted in Indigenous knowledge systems and cultural practices. In this place, Hawaiʻi’s youth can learn to become healers in their own lives, in their families, and their communities
Voices of Our Community
“They helped me out, I was homeless and I work at Kupa ʻAina farm full-time now. With the help of RYSE and Partners In Development Foundation, I got my own place and now I just want to soak up all this knowledge like a sponge and teach others.”
– M. Perez-Fonseca
Get Involved
Join this work to support opportunity youth in building greater belonging, purpose, community connections, education, workforce readiness and skills to contribute to and lead healthy, thriving families and communities in Hawai’i and beyond.