My first interaction with philanthropy started at the YMCA of Honolulu as a volunteer for its Annual Support Campaign to raise money for program scholarships. Later through the YMCA Teen Program, I was able to engage in the Youth Participatory Action Research Grant (YPAR). YPAR guided our team through the entire life cycle of a grant. We identified issues in the community we were passionate about, conducted surveys at community events, decided on a research question, created a strategy for action, and learned to write a grant application. Our idea was to create a community garden to help provide healthy meals for the nearby houseless community. However, when we realized we were not producing enough harvest to share weekly meals with our neighbors, we pivoted our program. We supplemented the harvest by buying sandwich supplies, preparing them in the YMCA kitchen, and then distributing them weekly. We also added an educational aspect to the garden, teaching the younger students in the summer camp programs about how to care for the shared green space. This pivot in our project helped us to exercise our flexibility and problem-solving skills, which are important lessons learned for project design, management, and success. By practicing how to address unexpected changes, we were able to find another project approach that worked and built resilience as a team. Overall, the biggest impact of our YPAR project was the relationships our team built within the community.
Now, I currently serve as a Fellow at the Harold K.L. Castle Foundation through a partnership with the Kupu ‘Āina Corps. In this role, relationship building is still an important value that continues to guide my day-to-day work in philanthropy. Additionally, I am learning how to keep iterating the grantmaking process with HKLCF’s partners and staff to promote greater community impact.
In my short time at the Harold K. L. Castle Foundation, I have learned about different perspectives on grantmaking, how grantmaking helps to support emergency response and expanded my knowledge about the work of nonprofit organizations in Hawaiʻi. My work as part of the Pilina Fund team was especially exciting since it was the first time I had ever heard about participatory grantmaking. In the context of the Pilina Fund, this means that all the grant applications written to support Koʻolau communities are reviewed and vetted by trusted community leaders who have lived experience and relationships in the region. All the decision power is given to the community that the Foundation strives to support. This framework reflects the fund’s motto: “by Koʻolau, for Koʻolau,” which has been such an inspiration.
The grant amounts for the Pilina Fund are smaller (between $3,000-$15,000) than the “normal” grants funded by the Castle Foundation, but the Pilina Fund gives out a higher number of total grants to the community. It has been an amazing opportunity to learn the benefits and challenges of both types of granting approaches. I thought it was interesting how two opposite approaches towards grant-making can exist within the same foundation, at the same time. I now understand that both types of granting are a fit for different community contexts: the Pilina Fund aims to support the work of grassroots community efforts, while the larger foundation supports organizations usually working at the systems-level. Those organizations are often already well-established in the community and have work aligned with the strategic goals of the foundation. Those organizations understand the importance of relationship building and are usually willing to mālama newer non-profits and community leaders to help build their capacity.
Moving forward, I have two main goals for the rest of my fellowship term. Through the Pilina Fund, my first goal is to host a networking event for non-profit organizations in the Koʻolau who may be doing similar work in the community and are interested in doing future collaborative projects together. By inviting past and potential Pilina fund applicants to this event, our team hopes to create opportunities for organizations in the Koʻolau to connect. My second goal is to work with the Kupu Philanthropy team to learn more about event planning and networking skills. I hope to build pilina within the Kupu community and visit other host sites in the Koʻolau for their mālama āina days. Eventually, I would like to invite these host sites to the Koʻolau networking event that the Pilina Fund Team is planning as well.
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Krysta Reese is the Harold K.L. Castle Foundation Fellow primarily focusing on supporting the Koʻolau Pilina Fund. Through the Kupu ʻĀina Corps program, she was paired with the Harold K. L. Castle Foundation as a host site to support work in community-driven philanthropy.
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