• Our Philosophy - Kahua Waiwai
• Our History
• Accomplishments
• Recognition
• Board of Directors
• Key Staff

Our Philosophy - Kahua Waiwai

HCA developed and implemented a unique holistic approach to helping families achieve and sustain homeownership. Named Kahua Waiwai, which means "Foundation for Wealth," HCA's comprehensive program includes assessment, pre-purchase education, one-on-one counseling, and access to mortgage credit - all in the context of Native Hawaiian culture.

Kahua Waiwai espouses the basic philosophy of "A Sense of Place." The home is viewed as a foundation (Kahua). Upon this foundation is built the family's spiritual values and teachings (Waiwai). It is the spiritual value of the home and its surroundings that provides stability and the opportunity for families to build a secure future. Opportunities that help stabilize family life help to create a more stable community. Thus, it can be said that homeownership encompasses more than just the purchase of a house - it is an investment in the future. A strong foundation, if built properly, will serve generations to come.

Our History

HCA opened its doors in 2000, in Wailuku, on the island of Maui, with the charge to create a community development financial institution (CDFI) that would address the organization's mission. After initially focusing on formation of a banking institution, HCA eventually settled on a mortgage broker operation within the existing nonprofit as the most efficient use of its capital resources. While developing lending programs for construction and long-term mortgages for use on Hawaiian Home Lands, HCA staff also developed a unique HUD-approved homeownership and financial literacy curriculum, adapted from standard Mainland and Native American curriculum to reflect local culture and values.

For its lending program, HCA opened an office in Honolulu and adopted a trade name, Hawai`i Community Lending (HCL). By mid-2002, HCA was offering a fully integrated program. Services included: outreach; training in financial literacy and homeownership; counseling for debt reduction, credit repair and saving; and access to construction and mortgage loans. In addition to these core services, HCA was providing important complementary services - for families, technical assistance on working through government processes and the complexities of having a home built, and for communities, assistance organizing to better address external barriers to successful community development.

In July, 2006, HCA moved its principal office from Maui to Honolulu in order to better serve families across the entire state.

Response to Need

Native Hawaiians have the highest levels of poverty, unemployment and incarceration of any ethnic group in Hawaii and the lowest levels of education and health. They are, by far, the largest group of residents in Hawaii's public housing, and U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) reports that the incidence of housing problems among Native Hawaiians is one of the highest in the country, higher even than among Native Americans living on tribal lands.

Most of HCA's work is on Hawaiian Home Lands, federal trust lands set aside by Congress in 1920 for settlement by Native Hawaiians who were not surviving in Hawaii's new, western-style economic order. Over the more than 80 years since Hawaiian Home Lands were created, less than 25% of the 200,000 acres have been settled, and nearly 20,000 Native Hawaiians are still on the waiting list to receive a homestead. Slow settlement of the Home Lands over so many decades resulted from a combination of inadequate federal and state funding with a population poorly prepared for homeownership. In recent years, federal and state resources devoted to developing Hawaiian Home Lands have increased.

In recent years, HCA has expanded its work with affordable housing programs not associated with Hawaiian Home Lands. This effort, in which HCA works with private and public partners, is in response to the State's shortage of affordable housing for local residents.

Accomplishments

Since beginning its homeownership workshops in November 2001, HCA has conducted over 130 homeownership workshops on Maui, Lana`i, Oahu, Kauai, Moloka`i and the Big Island, utilizing HCA's unique curriculum, specifically designed to reflect Hawaiian culture and values. More than 1,700 Native Hawaiian families have successfully completed the training, and over 600 have been served with individual counseling for credit repair, debt reduction, and saving for down payment.

HCA became Hawaii's first nonprofit mortgage broker in 2002 when it originated a construction loan on Paukukalo Hawaiian Homestead on Maui. Since then, HCA's mortgage broker arm, Hawaii Community Lending, has originated over 300 loans totaling more than $55 million.

But, these numbers don't tell the whole story. It is HCA's unique holistic approach and grassroots origin that enables it to bridge the gap between the native community and mainstream financial services providers. It is this factor that has been responsible for HCA's unprecedented accomplishments:

• In 2002, HCA reached out to and assisted those who had been waiting for a Maui homestead between 25 and 40 years. As a result, these individuals, mostly elderly, low-income, and repeatedly passed over in prior years, were able to select vacant lots at Waiehu Kou Phase 3 Hawaiian Home Lands project on Maui, receiving an unprecedented 43% of all awards at the development.

• In 2003, at Waiehu Kou Phase 3, HCA became the first nonprofit ever to be designated a "lead lender" by a developer on Hawaiian Home Lands. HCA processed 329 pre-qualification applications for the 76 turn-key units completed in 2004. HCA pre-qualified 259 applicants, making them eligible to stand in line to select a lot. With a standing-room only crowd, on lot selection day, all units were taken in only 3 hours. By comparison, the previous phase of the development, with a traditional lender who had been unable to pre-qualify enough applicants, failed to sell out on lot-selection day.

• At Waiohuli, a 298 vacant lot homestead development also on Maui, Native Hawaiians who received homestead leases in 1986 waited 15 years for the state to put in the required infrastructure and allow access to the land. At the 14-year point, in 2000, while the state, county and developer were locked in seemingly endless disputes, the homestead association gave up and dissolved. HCA quickly went to work, helping homesteaders to reorganize, showing them how to deal effectively with the disputes and red tape that literally kept families locked out of their homesteads. Within a year, the Waiohuli homesteaders succeeded in getting the disputes settled, and the gates opened to their homestead. HCA worked with nearly 100 client families, helping them get their financial affairs in order so they could obtain the financing needed to build their homes.

• HCA has sponsored a number of special events, including an annual (since 2002) state-wide workshop in Honolulu on HUD's Section 8 for Homeownership program; the first two HUD Homebuyer Fairs on Maui; special workshops on the construction process and contractor options for Maui, Lanai and Molokai homesteaders; and two Maui workshops, in partnership with the Hawaii Bankers Association, on Predatory Lending.

• HCA hosted HUD Assistant Secretary Michael Liu at one of the federal agency's two statewide events celebrating National Homeownership Month. The 2002 celebration was at the site of HCA's first construction loan, on Paukukalo homestead.

• In 2002 and 2003, HCA conducted financial literacy workshops at Malama Family Recovery Center on Maui, a shelter for abused women who are also drug abusers. These classes were an integral part of the program to prepare these women for independent living.

• Lanai Island presented a unique homesteading challenge to the state's Department of Hawaiian Home lands. When 50 acres were gifted to the state by the island's owner, a nine-year deadline was set for completing at least 25 homes. Failure to meet the deadline meant return of the land to the private owner. Since a waiting list did not exist for the island of Lanai, the state had to create a new list with prioritization that met both state and donor conditions. Furthermore, housing had to be affordable to, and appropriate for, Lanai's existing Native Hawaiian families.

HCA began working with these families in 2002, providing homeownership training and counseling, as well as advocating to the state for family home prices that local families could afford and for designs that met their needs. HCA continued to work with the Lanai families and, on lot selection day in July 2005, HCA had pre-qualified 30 of 45 families that were able to select lots. Of these, 20 were low-income and referred by HCA to USDA Rural Housing Services for direct loans with favorable terms. The success on Lanai was getting all families, regardless of income level, qualified for a home or vacant lot. If local families had not qualified at this time, they were at serious risk of losing their homeownership opportunity forever, as lot selection is opened up to outsiders.

• In 2005, HCA was asked by an instructor of Hawaiian language at Kauai Community College to help a group of families that needed special assistance. These families were immigrants to Kauai from the island Ni`ihau, a privately-owned island that for decades has prohibited contact from the outside world. These immigrants, as pure Hawaiian, were qualified to settle on Hawaiian Home Lands on Kauai; however, they were unfamiliar with concepts of Homeownership and financing and had limited knowledge of the English language. In August 2005, HCA staff, using translators, conducted a workshop that introduced these families to these topics. In October 2005, 19 of these families experienced their first taste of success, qualifying for turn-key lots in the state's Kekaha Hawaiian Homestead on Kauai.

HCA staff also initiated an effort to help these families increase the economic benefit of their native craft - the making of shell leis. These leis, world famous as necklaces, often sell for thousands of dollars. However, the Ni`ihau women that gather the shells and make the leis only receive a small fraction of the retail price.

• Still in progress, is HCA's work with Kalapana families who lost their community to lava flows from Kilauea on the island of Hawaii. Assisting these families resettle on leased land provided by the state calls for homeownership training, counseling and lending. It also requires developing affordable home construction financing for land with some lava flow risk. In addition, land lease provisions that prevent passing homes to future generations and that restrict families from engaging in traditional Hawaiian economic activities need to be addressed.

Its work at Waiehu Kou Phase 3, Waohuli, Lanai, Ni`ihau, and Kalapana demonstrates HCA's ability to provide the complementary services that ensure success to the community as a whole. In all these cases, it is HCA's capacity to go beyond homeownership training, counseling and mortgage lending that distinguishes it from other providers of similar services.

Recognition

For its pioneering work, HCA has received both national and local recognition, beginning in 2002 when Michael Liu, Assistant Secretary for Public and Indian Housing for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), traveled from Washington to attend the ground-breaking for HCA's first construction loan. The loan was to reconstruct a deteriorated home on Hawaiian Home Lands for a family that had been repeatedly turned down by traditional lenders.

In 2003, HCA's leaders were recipients of the prestigious Leadership for a Changing World award, a partnership of the Ford Foundation, the Advocacy Institute, and the Robert S. Wagner Graduate School of Social Service at New York University. This award recognizes extraordinary leadership in the field of social justice.

HCA's leaders also received commendations in 2003 from the Maui County Council (the legislative branch of Maui County's local government), the Board of Trustees of the State of Hawaii's Office of Hawaiian Affairs, and the Honolulu office of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

On December 31, 2003, HCA was recognized by The Maui News, Maui's daily newspaper, as an organization that made a difference for Maui residents during 2003.

HCA also received recognition in 2003 from Rural LISC, the rural arm of Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC), based in New York, for "remarkable progress in community development."

Board of Directors and Key Staff

HCA Board of Directors and Key Staff.  (Use links or arrows to advance.)