News
YSEALI Fellows Join Kupa ʻAina for a Day of Service and Connection
The Opportunity for Youth Action Hawaiʻi (OYAH) Hui recently welcomed the 2025 Young Southeast Asian Leaders Initiative (YSEALI) to Kupa ʻAina farm for a day of mālama ʻāina (caring for the land), building pilina (connection), and learning about the various...
Youth Take the Lead: Second Annual Youth JAM Event at Kawailoa Exceeds Expectations
When youth are given the space to lead, extraordinary things can happen. This truth came alive at Kawailoa Youth and Family Wellness Center (KYFWC) during the second annual Youth JAM event, where young people didn't just participate—they orchestrated an afternoon of...
Photo Essay: RYSE Lifts Up Youth
Residential Youth Services & Empowerment (RYSE) helps homeless youth get off the streets with a place to stay, programs and assistance to finish school or earn their GED. Originally published by Kevin Fujii at Honolulu Civil Beat Residential Youth Services &...
About OYAH
The Opportunity for 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
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Join this work to support opportunities for 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.