The 30 Percent Project: The Kuleana of Politics

Summary from Thirty Percent Project

Kuleana is “a uniquely Hawaiian value and practice which is loosely translated to mean ‘responsibility.’ The word kuleana refers to a reciprocal relationship between the person who is responsible, and the thing which they are responsible for.”  (from Hawaiian Word of the Day, Hawaii News Now). 

In this episode, we talk about kuleana and politics with Anne Frederick, Executive Director of the nonprofit HAPA, and with Thomas Heaton, reporter for the Hawai’i news publication, Civil Beat. 

Anne Frederick’s organization, HAPA (Hawai’i Alliance for Progressive Action), engages deeply in state legislative politics. It was founded in 2014 around the issues of food justice and pesticide use. HAPA also founded the Kuleana Academy, a political training and accelerator program focusing on building  capacity in community leaders on issue-based, political, or electoral campaigns. 

The first part of this episode is an interview with Anne in the middle of a busy legislative session, which found her team organizing community and stakeholder engagement on a suite of bills, which we’ll discuss.  You’ll hear about their particular focus on land use and tax incentives to level the playing field. 

I invited Thomas Heaton, a reporter at the news publication Civil Beat, to join us in the second half of this episode.  Civil Beat is a non-profit online investigative journalism publication. Thomas is a New Zealand native who came to Hawai’i by way of his interest in the food system, developed during his global reporting experience. 

An explanatory note on one of the topics:  we discussed the unexpected demise of a bill to provide state matching funds to a program we speak of as “Da Bux '' which is Hawai’i’s way of describing its Double Up Bucks program. In some states, the program is called Market Match.  Each state has their own version of the program, which is based on the federal Gus Schumacher Nutrition Incentive Program (GusNIP; also known as Market Match, Double Up Bucks, Veggie Voucher). GusNIP is a federal program, which provides people who receive Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits (SNAP, or food stamps)  up to $10 in vouchers at participating farmers’ markets, when they use their benefits to purchase  fruits and vegetables.

More Info: 

Anne’s 2023 Legislative Session Debrief (includes info on the Da Bux program, discussed in the episode)

Civil Beat coverage of a report by HAPA on pesticide use on Hawai'i farms

More about Thomas Heaton

The Hawai'i Grown section of Civil Beat, with many of Thomas Heaton's stories

Credits: 

Created, produced, and hosted by Paula Daniels

Sound engineer: Rob Pera

Theme music: Caryssa Shinozawa

Logo: Reiko Quitevis and Sue Woodard