Land, agriculture and community based policy, with Honolulu's first Chief Resilience Officer
Josh Stanbro developed and led the Office of Climate, Sustainability and Resilience for the City and County of Honolulu as its first Chief Resilience Officer. Josh is now in Washington DC and is Deputy Director of the Policy Lab with Elemental Excelerator, a global nonprofit accelerator for climate tech which was founded in Hawai’i.
His path from California to Hawai’i of itself tells a valuable story of 21st Century Hawai’i. And because Hawai’i was once and hopes to again be a place of sustainable agriculture, his previous work at the Trust for Public Land and the Hawai’i Community Foundation, leading up to the Mayor’s office, tells a story of the transformation efforts underway, and the expanding reach of the Hawai’ian Renaissance.
From Josh we learn about the landmark case on Hawai’ian property law that inspired him to go to law school; about the sustainable agriculture projects he worked on while at the Trust for Public Land and the Hawai’i Community Foundation. We talk about the dozen good reasons to buy local; about inclusive, community driven governance; and how politics is like surfing.
Overall we get some info on Hawai’ian activist history, a fair amount of historical and modern land use info, and a lot of good wisdom about leadership in governing. And finally, we learn what three wishes he would have, to help Hawai’i achieve its Aloha Plus challenge goal of getting to 30% locally grown food by 2030.
For more info:
The Resilience Office of the City and County of Honolulu
The Hawai'i Community Foundation
The Trust for Public Land, Hawai'i
Credits:
Host Intro: 00:02
I wanted to interview Josh Stanbro because of the key role he had in leading the office of climate, sustainability, and resilience for the City and County of Honolulu. Josh is now in Washington DC, and is Deputy Director of the Policy Lab with Elemental Excelerator, a nonprofit accelerator for climate tech. Elemental Excelerator was founded in Hawai’i, but has now grown into a national organization supporting climate technology and community equity.
My plan was to talk with him about how, in the role of Chief Resilience Officer for the City and County of Honolulu, he set up the position of Food Security and Sustainability Program Manager in the mayor's office. He's brilliant at policy and the process of policy. As we began our discussion, though, I learned so much more about his career trajectory. It struck me as we were talking that his path from California to Hawai'i itself tells a valuable story of 21st century Hawai'i. And because Hawai'i was once and hopes to again be a place of sustainable agriculture, his previous work at the Trust for Public Land and the Hawai'i Community Foundation leading up to the mayor's office tells a story worth hearing of the transformation efforts underway and the expanding reach of the Hawai'ian Renaissance.
I think you'll be as compelled as I was by the way he describes his process of learning about the inner layers of the Hawai'ian community, and about community needs. He says: “it took a long time, but it was the fastest way to progress.” It’s a thought we could all take to heart. Listen along as we learn about the landmark case on Hawai'ian property law that inspired him to go to law school. Learn with me about the sustainable agriculture projects he worked on while at the Trust for Public Land and the Hawai'i Community Foundation.
He and I talk about the dozen good reasons to buy local; and an extra enjoyable part of the conversation for me is our discussion about inclusive, community-driven governance, and about how politics is like surfing. Overall, we get a good bit of info on Hawai'ian activist history, a fair amount of historical and modern land use info, and a lot of good wisdom about leadership in governing. And finally, we learn what three wishes he would have to help Hawai’i achieve its Aloha Plus Challenge goal of getting to 30% locally grown food by 2030.
I'm Paula Daniels, host of the 30% project.
[music]
Josh: 02:41
[birds tweeting, gentle acoustic music]
I grew up on an apple farm in northern California, from small kid days. And it got burned up in a huge forest fire in the 90s, early 90s.
Paula:
Wow.
Josh:
My grandma had lived on the Big Island when we were little kids, and we used to go out all the time. And so we actually did sort of a trade of land. With the salvage logging proceeds from the fire, we bought a coffee farm in Kona. And that's where, after college, I met up with my parents there, and we built an off-grid home and did Kona coffee for several years.
There is this asphalt basketball court that I played on in Hawai’i as a kid, and like Jerome Kanuha, and the big guys that ran that court, I would listen to them talk about paddling, and, what they were doing in terms of family get-togethers, and sovereignty, and all this stuff that you don't get exposed to in the history books. And it opened up a different window in terms of what Hawai'i is for folks than those that visit for a week. And it was just… that landed differently. And I think it opened up, like, the 360 degrees of dimensionality of what a complex place Hawai'i is, which made it more interesting and exciting for me.
That sort of richness where I came from Northern California, was there as well. There's a heavy Native American population that had resisted entering a treaty for a long time. So a lot of the kids that I went to school with as a kid were coming up with some of the same stories and histories, so I guess that sort of resonated when I was in Hawai'i, it was like oh, there's a very similar, very… This is, this is America.
Paula: 04:58
Yeah, this is America.
Josh: 04:59
But forgotten, and asort of erased history of what was there on the land, and all the knowledge and the wisdom that came with that.
Paula: 05:10
Interesting to me that, that you had -, were at least adjacent to conversations about sovereignty when you were spending the summers there in Kona.
Josh: 05:19
You know, honestly, this is something that I learned and I'm still learning. Working in Hawai'i is that sort of sense of: if you know where you're from, it makes it a whole lot easier to deal respectfully and reasonably with the people who are from there for a long time. For thousands of years, right? Because I think there's a lot of folks that come in and either think they know the way or think that they can immediately just become “of” the place. And that's not entirely true. I think that's hard for folks to come to grips with, because they want to belong.
Especially, doing work with the Trust for Public Land, and a bunch of rural areas in Hawai'i, sitting down and listening to what the past is of the place, and the story of the place, and what people actually wanted to see happen in their communities took a long time, but it was always the fastest way to get to a durable situation and solution, or to what what actually needed to happen, as opposed to bringing in a template and assuming that if it worked somewhere else it would work.
Paula: 06:47
I'm really struck by that statement, that you were saying it took a long time, but it was the fastest way to progress. There's a saying, progress moves at the speed of trust, and trust moves at the speed of relationships.
Josh: 06:59
Yeah, yeah, that is so true. It'll never not be true.
And I think, I think there's a lot of, I mean we're seeing it now with the environmental justice movement. You know, I'm up here in Washington, DC now. Tthe big climate bill just passed. And people are talking about working in communities and the Justice40 element of working in frontline communities. This concept of progress moves at the speed of trust, is something that in Hawai'i has long been the code. Folks up here [in DC] need to pay attention to that, and integrate that into how they work with an ailing community. Because it's not like it has necessarily happened here. There's been a lot of talking at people and not talking with people.
Paula: 07:52
Mm-hmm. So what made you want to go to law school?
Josh: 07:55
I was sitting down at Pine Trees at Kohanaiki in Kona on a weekend, and I was working construction at the time, and Uncle Angel Pilago, who was basically behind the PASH case - which is one of the biggest, most momentous, revolutionary cases that came out of the Hawai'i Supreme Court around property rights - was down there. And I was talking with some folks, and basically, I was listening, and I was curious, and he invited me to sit and talk, and learn more about the history of the place and the case. I was blown away, I was just, you know, the fact that property rights could be understood to be subject to Kingdom law, and raditional and cultural gathering rights – it had never occurred to me that that is something that could happen in the United States under private property law.
And it was something that really, really, really needed to happen, not only in Hawai'i, but across the country, if you're going to have a sustainable sort of future. So I just got totally fascinated and realized that this had been done through law, had been done because of some courageous lawyers that work pro bono to get it there. I was inspired to go learn more about that and try to be part of the structural solution to some of the sustainability and civic issues.
Hawai'i is an amazing place in terms of the grassroots momentum and understanding around environmental sustainability issues. And yet a lot of times the law and the structures of law don't help that, they actually hamper what people know in their bones needs to happen in terms of, thinking about the benefit of “we” rather than “me”.
It’s what kuleana as I understand it means in terms of having rights, but also having responsibilities and upholding both of those.
Angel is the poster child for what it meant to be somebody who was being proactive about protecting what he thought was important for longer term generations, and then also being politically engaged. He ran for council, was on the city council, or the county council on Big Island, I think made a lot of difference. And I was inspired.
Paula: 10:58
Can you give us a bit of a summary on the case you were talking about? School us in it.
Josh: 11:03
Yeah, so it’s the Public Access shoreline Hawai'i case, PASH. If you own a home, if you're lucky enough to own a home or land in Hawai'i, if you look at your title, right at the bottom, it'll probably say: this land is subject to traditional and cultural gathering rights for Native Hawai'ian population, something along those lines. And the only reason that's there is because Uncle Angel and a bunch of folks basically challenged the right of a resort or development to block anybody from crossing the land to go fishing.
And so, since Kingdom days, there's always been this carve-out for the people of a specific place to be able to go gather resources, and plants, and fish and what you need in order to subsistence survive in that space, no matter who owns the property, as long as it's not developed. And so this was a Supreme Court case that basically, after 100-plus years, said “yes” and affirmed that even if there's a private property owner, if it's an undeveloped land, the folks who are of that place still have the ability to cross that land, and go across it; they can't be excluded to exercise those rights, which is revolutionary in terms of Western law. It's not revolutionary at all in terms of traditional Hawai'ian law.
And, in fact, there's a whole series of cases which I came to learn about after going to law school, where Chief Justice Richardson, who was in the Hawai'i Supreme Court for a long period, in the 70’s, 80’s, 90’s maybe, had all kinds of rulings around. That's why we have public beaches in Hawai'i. That's why people can't kick you off the beach, is because there's a traditional Hawai'ian right to be able to [be there]. People got around by canoe, and they had to pull their canoe up out of the highest wash of the waves in order to go do commerce and whatnot, and then jump back and go elsewhere. So you can't block people from having the ability to access those shorelines.
It's great stuff. These are the things that make our quality of life in Hawai'i different and better than, in some cases, anywhere else in the nation because you have this value on community over the value of the individual's benefit.
Paula: 13:47
So you got your law degree, and you knew you wanted to come back and work in Hawai'i, and you started with the Trust for Public Land. What did you do there?
Josh: 13:55
Yeah, so we got a chance to work with communities to essentially protect the lands that they identified as being really critical for whatever reason. It could be recreation, it could be coastal access, it could be agriculture. We did a couple of agriculture projects. And that's where it really opened my eyes to the importance of having long-term, secure access to land for agriculture, because so much land had been tied up in big sugar plantations like the Big Five in terms of their ownership. It was really hard for people to get access to land to do farming.
So we did a project with Galbraith estates, which is now being actively farmed in central O’ahu. That was a Trust for Public Land project. I think that closed a bit after I left there, we finished that project. We did a bunch of projects with kalo, lo’i, around the state to make sure that there were places where people could plant and, practice sustainable livelihoods.
There are also ones that we didn't get right too, that really were frustrating. In Ka’u, there was a bunch of sugar workers who had been given plots of land to do coffee and to become their own small farming entities after they lost the sugar jobs, after the plantation went out. And while I was there, there was an effort to try to give them - they were just sort of utilizing the land without adding any title to it, or having any security and ag takes a lot of investment, you gotta get water there and machinery, you're planting things that may not bear fruit for four or five years in some cases. And so, we never were able to put together the deal, although I think it's starting to happen now, where those folks that had invested all of their livelihood and their time, in cultivating these five-acre parcels and growing some of the world's best coffee.. wanted to see if we can get them a title. I wasn't able to do it then, but I think it's actually happening now.
Paula: 16:27
Good. So how many of your projects were in the agricultural realm? And what were you seeing in terms of momentum at that time to continue to try to have land be available for local agriculture?
Josh: 16:41
It was really tough back then. Part of it was some of the federal dollars that were available for conservation and agricultural easements; the state didn't have those kind of dedicated funding streams to match the dollars. Sofederal dollars would come to Hawai'i, sit there for a year or two until they expired, and then go to some other state that actually had -
Paula:
Oh, geez.
Josh:
– yeah, so that had dedicated money. So we spent a lot of time, when I was at TPL, actually -
Paula: 17:09
This is the 2000’s?
Josh: 17:12
- yes, yeah, that would have been like 2001 to 2008 sort of era. And so we spent a lot of time making sure that every county had their own dedicated land fund. And the state had the legacy land fund, which sets aside part of the convenience tax with funds that can't be used for any other purpose than to help communities purchase and protect really key parcels, including ag parcels. So once those funds were in place - and those were hard fought battles, I mean, we had to basically go to charter amendments, and go to public votes during the elections. It took several years, but we finally got the state legacy land fund that set aside dollars. And once those dollars, where it became available every year and were there, then we could actually match the federal dollars and pull it down.
So during my time we weren't able to do all that many active ag parcels. What's interesting though, is that a lot of the parcels that we protected alongside the community with TPL were old, historic ag parcels, so they could have been old, sweet potato terraces and lo’i, and might have fallen out ofuse over the years or been overgrown. But in a lot of cases it protected a base for future farming activity.
Paula: 18:51
When you say lo’i, those are the sort of wetland areas where taro or kalo was grown>
Josh: 18:57
Yeah, so a lot of the low-lying areas where the streams come out into the ocean, just above those areas. We've had these little diversions that would take the stream water out through these terraces, wet terraces where the kalo can grow. That's some of the best places in Hawai'i. There's nothing like sitting on the edge of a lo’i, and watching the shimmer of kalo leaves, and listen to the sound of the water slowly run through the lo’i and drain out the other side. It's awesome.
Paula: 19:38
Yeah, just beautiful, really beautiful.
Josh: 19:41
Ka’ala Farm was really probably the biggest of that kind; we bought and protected land and donated it essentially to Ka’ala farm. They bring hundreds of kids a year up to [the farm], they have done this for decades now, to talk about the history, and how long they had been there for hundreds and hundreds of years before they got reopened in the 70’s.
So Ka’ala Farm was really the one that symbolized a lot of TPL’s work. Eric Enos was the founder of Ka’ala Farm. There's sort of a genealogy there with Ma’o farm. So there's, it's one valley over, but it was kind of the original guerrilla agricultural activity where Eric Enos, and, his friends went up and basically opened these lo’i on old abandoned lands that weren't necessarily theirs, with water that wasn't necessarily theirs, in order to establish that these places had been green bread baskets before, and not just dry cattle area that was burning from summer fires. There was a different practice and a way. And they went up and pioneered that, but they didn't have the land at the time. And so that was one of the things that we were able to do: was buy parcels, so that they had security and were able to - wouldn't be thrown out at some point.
Paula: 21:31
Wow, that's great. When you were doing all this work, did you have in mind a sense of proportion of how much you were doing and able to do, which sounds tremendous, and what the need was in terms of agricultural land?
Josh: 21:47
You always know that whatever you're doing is a drop in the bucket compared to need, but honestly, I was learning so much at the time, from all these folks that had been doing this work for decades before, I ever got involved. It felt like there was momentum. And the early pioneers showed the way for the way it was all going to be again, right? It's like a “Back to the Future” kind of thing.
Ka’ala Farm’s a great example, because when you stand there, and you look at these two or three emerald green lo’i that are thriving, and beautiful, and wonderful, and producing food for local consumption, and everything. And then you look out over the rest of the valley, and you can see the tiny lines of the old terraces that cover the whole valley, especially after fire, you can see how many hundreds of taro patches and taro lo’i there was before. And so just just even having that one postage stamp of success, I think, opens your eyes to what the past had provided and how extensive it was.
The Kohala field system’s another great example. I don't know if you've ever seen the LiDAR images of the Kohala field system? LiDAR’s a kind of radar that they use when they fly planes over. And the Kohala field system stretched from Waimea town, all the way down towards Hualalai. And it's the entire thing. If you look at the LiDAR, you can see terrace, after terrace, after terrace, after terrace, for just miles, and miles, and miles. And that's how a million people were fed. It wasn't Matson [shipping lines] at the time, right? It was hard work, and sweat, and amazing, brilliant engineering and design to have these field systems that could feed armies. And so yeah,you're right, the scale is, that it's not enough. But when you see what it was, it seems totally possible. You know?
Paula: 24:17
So it wasn't a small population that was being fed by these agricultural practices that were sustainable. It was a significant population, close to what it is now.
Josh:
Yeah.
Paula:
And when you say the past, you mean the “past past”, you mean the historical past before plantation agriculture and sugar, right?
Josh:
Yeah.
Paula:
Is that what you’re talking about?
Josh: 24:37
And you can refer to both too, because, I mean, you can think about the” past past” when you think about like, pre-contact and how that was a completely self -sufficient system, and the sort of scale that it took across the lands. But then, if you think about, even up into, through the 50’s and 60’s, there was piggeries, and chicken farms, and egg hatcheries. And there was so much going on still, up until a certain point where, before everything really kind of collapsed around, well, what's the cheapest thing? And can it be brought in from elsewhere? And all those, those cottage industries? Sort of self sufficient ones? So really there is that, that arc. But it's not that long ago, when you can look back and say, there was a lot more food self-sufficiency in the islands, even just 50 years ago.
Paula: 25:37
We were talking about the changes that you were making in land and agriculture. Did you continue to stay with Trust for Public Land and continue to try to increase that access to land? Or did you move on to another…?
Josh: 25:53
In all these cases, I didn't have that much to do with these amazing projects, right? Like, these were like, community-driven, a lot of the muscle and the political activity, and the fundraising came out of the communities that wanted to protect the land. So I think part of what informed my next move, which was, I was able to go over to the Hawai'i Community Foundation, and do philanthropy, so do grantmaking to community orgs that were doing great sustainability work, was fostered by that. I was just so inspired by how much could get done from the grassroots and self-organizing. That in the land space, I was thinking, “Well, God, there must be, you know, these, this kind of work happening in food and ag, and in energy, and in all the things that need to come together in order to make Hawai’i survive, and adapt, and thrive, again, given all the stuff that's happening.”
So I was able to work at the Community Foundation and organize an environmental grant program there. That took a bunch of different shapes and forms. One of them was to try to organize some of the environmental funders that, some of them from the continent that didn't know Hawai'i well, but we wanted to make sure their resources were coming in to support community efforts. Doing some restoration work in the near-shore area with federal money, making sure that federal money was actually being tapped and utilized again, to protect coastal areas that communities were really concerned with. And then we did some ag stuff while I was there, too.
There wasn't a program. But there were champions that were standing out and doing it on their own. And we wanted to try to help scale up and leverage that. So like, David Fuertes in Hawi, Glenn Teves on Moloka’i, the folks at Kāko’o ‘Ōiwi on O’ahu, those are all places where, through the foundation, we were able to give grant funds to try to help them build the infrastructure. And the equipment that they needed to go from people power to actual, like, getting equipment in and doing things faster and at scale, involving more kids in the programs. And really just like ramping it up, because we know we need 100 times more than what we've got in terms of a local food scene. These were really home-grown operations, passionate people that were going to do it hell or high water, just because they knew it was the right thing to do to make sure that there was food growing in backyards, and areas, and communities.
I think they actually had their own goal in Kohala. Honestly, I think they were one of the first communities to set a goal around how much food should come from the local community versus from outside. So that was one of those lighthouse communities that were like, man, you know, here's some funding to try to make that happen and show other folks that it can be done.
Paula: 29:41
Did you find, what sort of progress did you see in the time that you were doing that work? Especially in that community, which you have described as a lighthouse (sounds right to me from what I know).
Josh: 29:51
Yeah, all kinds of things have sprung from there. Kohala center obviously has grown a ton, and actually started doing co-ops and, and backing co-ops across the islands as a way to sort of bring lots of practitioners together and get some federal resources to make it work. I know that ‘Ulu Co-op is, I think one of the folks that grew out of that, which is now part of my new world with Elemental Excelerator.
And then, Kāko’o ‘Ōiwi’s, another one of those ones that they've just added, and added, and added, and built capacity and, are part of sort of an ahupua’a restoration from the fish pond, and the protein that can come out of there, to the kako’o and the starches, and the bread fruits, and the kalo that can come from there. And then up mauka [mountain], you've got another nonprofit that really protects the water sources, and some of the agroforestry pieces. That was one of the ones that we were really excited about, because it was a fully intact, sort of nature-based system that could produce food for local communities. And they're still growing and continuing to supply local communities with food over there.
Paula: 31:20
That's great. Do you remember what their local target was?
Josh:
No, I…
Paula:
Was it 30% by chance?
(laughter)
Josh: 31:27
I don't know. You know, it's gonna take a lot to get back to 30%.
I think people have to be realistic about where we're at now, and then what it'll take to get to, back to 30. Obviously, we were at 100 a long, long time ago. That's dropped over time. And so if it's taken 100 years to get to 10%, you know, it doesn't have to take 100 years to get back to 100. But it's gonna take a couple of decades and people are really voting with their pocketbooks, right? I mean, I think that's the biggest thing is making sure that the folks that are growing local food actually have a way to get it into the households of the people that want to support.
Paula: 32:23
Is that one of the biggest barriers you saw to the progress with the groups that you were working with when you were at the Hawai'i Community Foundation?
Josh: 32:32
Yeah, I mean, I think so. I mean, there's really good examples at small scale. So if you think about, like on Kauai’i, there was a group up north of Hanalei that would grow kalo, and they'd make poi, and then they’d take it and distribute it to, especially senior citizens. So [to] the kupuna households that were on Social Security, which is great. That's exactly what you want, you want healthy food, getting to folks that don't have the means. And the kids are getting back to the land and growing that kind of stuff.
But the scale of it was necessarily small, right, they're doing their own deliveries with probably a few hundred households. What's really exciting is what we're seeing now, is folks like Farm Link, which make it super easy to buy local online and have it delivered to your door. And I think that kind of one-stop shop, and the ability to reach thousands of households rather than hundreds, or potentially hundreds of thousands of households, really changes the equation a ton. For, both for the buyers, for the consumers, but then also for the farmers, because it makes it easier. They've got one place that can move their stuff into a restaurant just as easily as they can move it into a household, and hopefully get paid more, because it's just one stop between them and the consumer.
Paula: 34:09
So it sounds like you're saying that the most important thing to focus on is creating markets for the production, to build out supply chains. Like, that's a big aspect of what’s needed.
Josh: 34:18
Oh yeah, I mean, I think you know, this, what is the saying? If you want people to farm, pay ‘em?
Paula: 34:25
Yeah, buy their products, yeah.
Josh: 34:26
You know, I think there's no shortage of folks that really want to have a career. A lot of people want to be close to the land. They want to be working in this space. There's a lot of young, business-minded, entrepreneurial folks that want to be part of, the solution around commerce of local foods and marketing. But if there's nobody willing to spend the money to buy those products, then it all falls apart, right? People have to work and get a job, and if it pays a little bit more to work at a coffee shop rather than grow food, then that's probably where they're gonna go to support families. So I think it's really, really important that people think hard about where you spend your money and how you spend it, in order to support the folks that are willing to grow food for us, and get that number up to 30%. Over time.
Paula: 35:29
And that would apply to consumers as well as institutions, right?
Josh: 35:34
Yeah. In fact, I think it kind of goes hand in hand. Certainly institutions can handle certain volumes, they can buy products that might be seconds, because they're using them for, they're going to do a value add, or they're gonna use them in bulk, or they're going to turn them into something else anyway. And so, it works well for certain markets to get those, the firsts, and at scale, the institutions can take the balance.
I think there has to be a commitment by folks at the individual level and at the institutional level to support the folks in their community, right? It's really easy to go and just get something that's anonymous and from outside, and, that's the way that the system has been built. It takes a little period of discomfort, and there might be a little price point difference. But what you get for that price point difference, to my mind is, you get much better quality, and freshness, and nutritional value, because you know the miles on the product are so much less. It hasn't depleted itself of nutrients before it lands on your plate.
And the dollar stays in the local economy. I mean, that's the biggest thing is, I think we complain regularly about our dependence on tourism or dependence on the military. And the only way to turn that and begin to make sure that there's other robust parts of the economy, is to make sure the dollars that we spend in those areas don't get on a ship and hightail it off the island. And if you spend a dollar at Foodland on a local product, or at the kōkua, the co-op, or wherever else, that dollar is staying with that local institution, it's staying with the farmer that put it on that shelf, and it's never actually leaving the shore. As soon as, you know, you're buying something that came from outside, most of the dollar you just spent is long gone and left the island. Doesn't recirculate.
Think of it as just like, “oh, I should do this because, you know, it's the right thing to do”; or it's “culturally, it's a food that I want my kids to, like, be familiar with”; you know, there might be single reasons. But when you add them all up, like you just talked about there's this economic benefit. There's, you know, the secondary benefits to the folks that are working in the space, not just the farmers, but the folks that move the farmers –
Paula:
– supplied the farmers, yeah -
Josh:
- the fertilizer that was sold to the farmer, et cetera. That all adds up to like a dozen good reasons to buy local and try to support the greater ecosystem.
Paula: 38:47
Yeah, yeah, it's not only an investment in the community, but it actually returns back to you in indirect ways.
[birds tweeting, instrumental music]
Paula:
When we come back, we talk about the Honolulu office of climate sustainability and resilience, and how it ramped up its food system work during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.
[instrumental music]
Josh: 39:24
The other big piece of that is the resilience piece, and that's what we thought about long and hard when I was in the resilience office at the city was when we saw what happened with Puerto Rico, and what we saw just happened recently in Miami, lor in Florida. You know, we're a long, we’re such a long distance away, that food security piece in a crisis is gonna be worth, you know, 10x. I mean, we think of it as super valuable right now to make sure that our dollar is going as far as it can in the local economy and that we're supporting our neighbors and everything. When there's a potential hurricane and ports are shut down, and that sort of thing, that investment becomes so much more important. It becomes potentially a life and death sort of thing, right? It's priceless.
And so the more capacity that we have locally to grow, the more capacity we have locally to survive and thrive when things get tough.
So, thanks to the voters on O’ahu, they had the wisdom and foresight to basically approve a charter amendment that said, “There shall be an office of climate change” and resilience. And so the city government at that time was looking to set this thing up. I'd spent several years at the Community Foundation doing environmental grant making, and had some background with the climate issues and, and community issues. So they thought I'd be a good fit. And I was like, this is the job that finally, that brings together all of the stuff that I've been working on, but also been really concerned about in terms of the future of the island, and had kids, recently born kids at that time, and just thought, we've got to do everything we possibly can to make these islands as resilient as possible, given all of the stuff that we've unfortunately, seen play out over the last, six, seven years.
It's not a coincidence that we face, you know, rain bombs, and climate flooding, and COVID, and supply chain issues. And all of these things that could be seen as separate, are not separate at all. They're actually all rooted in the same issues and problems that have undermined Hawai'i's self-sufficiency and stability in the first place.
And so we have the chance at the office to really take a holistic approach towards all of those issues and go out to the community and ask them “What are the things that you're really worried about? What keeps you up at night?” And what can this office do to try to move elements of government to address those. And ag was a big piece of that, honestly, I mean, there was a lot of folks that identified food security as one of their top priorities, biggest concerns, and places where government ought to be doing more.
And so, we didn't get the food security part stood up right away, we had to incrementally build the office over time. We started with the things that were public safety, urgency stuff. So around the flooding, infrastructure, climate change, adaptation, making sure that we were hitting the commitments around moving to renewables and getting away from the stranglehold that oil had on our economy, continues to have. Those were the first sort of positions that we were able to get funded and hire, and we actually worked with outside groups to help do that. So it wasn't all just government dollars when we built the office. We had partnerships with different entities, philanthropies, and foundations, to fund these different positions to really focus in those areas first.
But COVID really ramped up the attention and the focus around food security. You'll remember all the long lines of cars for people that had lost their job. And then at the same time, you had farmers who had tons of crops, but the restaurants had all shut down, and so they had no place to send them. And so we saw an opportunity using some of the federal assistance funds that came with COVID to really ramp up a marriage of those two, and make sure that the produce and the products coming from local ag, that they needed to sell but didn't have restaurants to sell to, were able to be put into bags and given to people who are no longer working and didn't have a means to go and buy food.
It was a really tough time. Our office basically was working two full time jobs, we were doing our original sustainability and resilience work, because that didn't go away. Climate change is still the number one threat and an existential threat to the islands. By night, we were doing that, and by day, we were staffing the call center and answering people's questions in the early days of COVID, like, “How does this work? Where do I turn to for resources?” And we were working really closely with a bunch of the other agencies and departments about how to get help to people.
As part of that effort, we essentially helped reinvigorate and renew the Office of Economic Revitalization, which hadn't been really an official entity, the Office of Economic Development had been kind of a couple of three people shop and mostly focused on relations with Sister Cities, and some business and military stuff. COVID really called out the need for a really robust Office of Economic Revitalization that would try to really, honestly change the trajectory of the economy, and invest in the things we wanted to see as opposed to just accepting what came our way.
Paula: 46:54
Business as usual, you mean?
Josh: 46:57
Yeah, yeah. And, you know, part of that was we were able to hire Dexter Kishida who had a wealth of knowledge in local food systems, institutional buying, he had worked with the Department of Education around schools, getting some local food into schools. And so he was able to come over. And we created these positions with some of the federal funds to stand up this partnership around getting local food from farms into local families’ hands through the food bank, and we stood up food handout operations.
It was an immediate need that we were able to address, that the idea was to have this longer tail of like, okay, if we can, if we can put together these models now, and then sustain them, even after the emergency of COVID has passed, we could have a real shot at supporting our local farmers and ag; to make sure that they've got other outlets than just the restaurants that have traditionally been there.
Paula: 48:17
You're pointing out the role of government in making change in systems. Some people have diminished faith in government, and some people still see its potential. It sounds like you're on the stubborn optimist side of this equation. Is that a fair way to put it?
Josh: 48:35
Yes, I am am a… Well, I actually, I see myself as a creative opportunist. So you aren't going to get many bites at changing systems. But when they come along, if you're prepared, and you've laid the groundwork, you have a chance to really move the needle. And you're never gonna have that chance if you're not engaged in local governance.
The reality is, we all need roads, we all need schools for our kids, we all need firefighters to come put out the fire that you know, accidentally happens at your house. All of those things are government. Government works. It's just how much faith and engagement do you have in government, and the level with which the community engages in it is going to be the level of responsiveness that comes back.
But that's a two way street. You can't have government just sort of, you know, roll up their shutters and do planning without engaging with the community, and then expect them to be all smiles when they come out with a program that didn't take them into account. And so you got to – our philosophy at the Office of Climate Change and Sustainability and Resiliency was really to go out first, meet people in churches, and car dealership parking lots, and parks, or wherever people were, and talk to them about the issues that we were trying to figure out. And see what their solutions were, what their concerns were, and try to roll that into whatever we were working on, so that when we went back out to them, we can at least point to the places where we'd be able to say, “Hey, look, we heard you saying this, are we getting it right? This is what we're trying to do to address this.”
I think a lot of times, people gripe about government, and a lot of times it's earned. But if you give people half a chance to be collaborative, and participate and address the things that they want to address, they'll respond. There's an amazing amount of stuff being done at the community level, the neighborhood level, where people are working on this stuff, including food security.
A lot of people during COVID went back to growing backyard gardens, and making their own food, and getting back into local ingredients. And I think it meets a need for humans to feel connected to place. We get so busy with our lives that we forget that this is an essential tie that binds. COVID, in some ways, kind of gave the space for people to reconnect with what they really need, which is knowing where your food comes from, and having a connection to the farmer that grew it.
Paula: 51:55
And even the supply chains that seemed to work, were those that were more rooted in community knowledge, right? They seemed to know who actually had, where the relationships were, so they could get their produce to the food bank, or to this other set of relationships that can get it to people, sort of community-based relationships.
Josh: 52:14
Yeah…relationships are at the basis of everything. We know this in Hawai'i. You know, I think if, if you've been there for somebody over time, they will be there for you in the time of your need, as well. I think food is one of those places where we can exercise that muscle of community dependency, and interaction, and engagement. It's one of the easiest places to do that, actually. If you build those muscles, then you know they're there, and they're strong when you need them.
Paula: 52:53
So your conversation about government and working with communities to develop policies and programs, I think is a really important one. And it's something that we certainly attempted to do when I was working at city hall in Los Angeles and developed a lot of policies with very, very continuous, robust input from communities. I felt more like we were working with communities in designing programs, and it sounds like that's what you were talking about there.
So it puts me in mind of a couple things, in the way people think of government. One, there's a saying: “government is like digestion; when it works well, you don't know it.” I think you could add to that some corollaries, which would be: and it also depends on what you put into it. And then the converse is true: when it doesn't work well, you're very aware of that. So it sounds like you had a really good microbiome of government going there for a while.
So let me ask you about some future approaches, because we've been talking about food systems. And there's very intense interest - as you know, and you already talked about accelerating - the need to get to more local food production. We've talked about how it shows up in Hawai'i, and how much it is now, which, as you said, seems to be still on the margins of what the potential is. And there's an Aloha Plus Challenge of getting to at least 30% local food, which also means supporting small farmers and an environmentally sustainable approach to producing food by 2030, which is in eight years.
So what do you think it would take in Hawai'i to really focus attention and resources on this issue of really hitting the target of the 30% local by 2030 - the Aloha Plus Challenge? What do you think it would take? And I'll give you a magic wand if you want, to make anything happen that you want.
Josh: 54:51
(laughing) I'd rather have a genie in a bottle, because then I get three wishes rather than one magic wand. I'll give you my three. The first thing is, the systems that we have right now need to be more effective, right? There's an old saying: show me your budget, I'll show you your values. The Department of Agriculture at the state level gets a pittance in terms of the dollars that are allocated across the state budget. So there needs to be a political will decision that's made: we're going to prioritize food, we're going to make sure that there is a secure future for folks that want to get into ag and that in a time of need, whether it's a supply chain issue, or a storm that comes our way, or whatever else, that we've got a robust agricultural sector that's going to allow us to ride it out. It's one of the few things that we need in an island, right? We need water, we need air, we need food. We need to have that locked down. And it's not going to happen without resources and a dedicated governmental response to back that up.
And part of the reason you need that is because you don't have the land availability. Right now, you know, so much of the land is bottled up in a few landowners, that's a historical legacy of the sugar plantation era. And for the most part, most of these landowners, they have a bottom line that they want to see met. And even the farmers that are on those lands only have a month-to-month lease, or maybe a year-to-year, at best. They don't have long-term security in that land that allows them to make the infrastructure investments to get water onto their premises for irrigation, or they can't even use it as collateral to go get a bank loan to get a tractor because they don't own it. And they only have at least month -to-month. So until you solve some of that land availability/security issue that people that want to farm and are going to dedicate themselves to this, we should at least give them the respect that they've got long term security and tenure in the land that they're going to invest in, which then feeds us.
And I think the last, the third piece is, you need to have people engaged from the community, helping steer the canoe. If you don't have some community hands on the tiller, there's not going to bea faith in where the boat’s headed. And what the process is. And so, whether that's a Food Policy Council, whether that's just like heavy community involvement, and advisory groups, and really top notch innovative folks serving in governmental advisory roles, you need to have a diversity of perspective and opinions setting the policies, and really channeling those resources to where they can be most effective, and where people want to see them go, rather than just to whoever's most practiced, and been around longest, within the governmental systems that knows people and knows how to get those funds.
So it's really a participatory issue over all else, which is always the issue with governance. It doesn't matter if it's land conservation (when I worked on land conservation), it doesn't matter if it's community empowerment and civics. It's always, the squeaky wheel gets oiled and people who show up and are passionate about something through an organized community venue can make real changes. We've seen that happen. I mean, at the Honolulu, at the council level, there's now agricultural grant programs that weren't there a year or two ago; I think that shows that people are becoming increasingly concerned about food security. And we've learned a lot of lessons from COVID, and the supply chain issues, and the cost of living increasing, and there's ways to hedge against that. But you have to invest upfront in order to make sure you've got the infrastructure to really grow food locally, to protect us and our economy.
Paula: 59:17
Well, I mean, these are three really important questions, and if I were the genie, I would like to be able to grant you them, but I would have a few questions first. Which is, if you are saying that the Department of Agriculture's budget should increase, would this be a carte blanche or would you have some priorities attached to that budget increase?
Josh: 59:39
Oh, yeah, I mean, this is where I'm not going to say “this is what needs to be done” because I don't have the 360 degrees of perspective. I grew up in an ag environment, but I don't work in one now. And these things change year over year. So you have to have folks who are close to the problems there to design the solutions.
And I think, this isn't just an ag issue, either. I mean, it's not just a farm issue, this is a supply chain issue, and a transportation issue, and a water availability issue, and a labor issue. That's one that we don't talk nearly enough about, in terms of, are we do we have the folks, a supply of folks that are willing to do the work, and what's the wage that we pay them to make it worth doing? You know, those are all things that need to be figured out by folks that are closest to it. And then, them informing Department of Ag, “this is where we need help, and where we need programs”
And we need to be okay with failing, too, this is not something we're very good at in government, you need to be able to do some trials, put out some grants or add some positions. If it doesn't work, scrap it, go back and try something different. Because if we're afraid to fail, we're never gonna make any progress. In order to solve problems, you kind of have to throw different solutions at it and see what sticks and what works, and then pull back from the stuff that doesn’t.
Paula: 1:01:23
Well, and based on that, that is something that private companies and ventures, startup companies are often encouraged to do, is fail; could you learn from that? “Fail fast, but fail forward”, I think is the mantra of the venture capital world. But folks don't often allow that in government, because there's already this sort of disaffection, it's sort of as popular as complaining about school food. Whether it's good or bad, you know, that sort of thing. But it's - I'm not saying it's not sometimes without justification, but to create an environment where a government program or leader might be comfortable in experimenting might mean that it has to be deeply tied to a community-based participatory system, that community understands why you tried something, and why it might not work, but also be committed to continuing to work on making it better.
Josh: 1:02:21
Yeah, I think that's the key. And in fact, probably, the terminology shouldn't be like, “I want this thing to fail”. You want people to learn, and you learn from things not working, right? I mean, that's, this is how we grew up. And how we learn, from growing up from kids to be adults is, you try things and they don't work, and things work better and are more efficient. So I think they're, I think you've identified what the key is, is to explain to people why and what's going on. I think people are much smarter than we often give them credit for being, and they can sniff out phoniness. And there's something about authenticity and saying, “we're going to try this, we're not sure how it's going to work, we'll come back to you and tell you how it went. And if it didn't go well, we're gonna tell you what we learned from that, and then why we're doing it this way.”
I think people give you a lot more room to move when you go that extra step to explaining the “whats”, the “whys”. You definitely have a risk averse culture in Hawai'i, and in government, especially. But part of that I think is of our own doing, by covering up things that don't work as well as we want, and not talk about them, instead of saying, “Yeah, this happened, and this is why. This is how we learned, and how we're going to do it differently next time.” And I would hope that people are open to being in that sort of reciprocal relationship and learning space.
Because the honest truth is that we are facing challenges that nobody's ever faced before. Like, we have never tackled climate change before. We haven't had to. We haven't tackled world supply chain crack-ups, because we never had to. And so the solutions to those aren't necessarily going to be new. They're going to be innovations. They're going to be ideas that people try, some work well, some don't. And so I think we got to be honest with people, what we're doing and why we're doing it. And best of all, have a conversation with them about “well, how would you do it? And can we implement some of the ideas that you have?” Because we're facing these situations that we've never faced before, some of the ideas are going to come from corners that we haven't, we don't normally engage with.
Paula: 1:04:50
Well, it sounds like it's a need for strong leadership too, in…
Josh:
Yeah, yeah.
Paula:
There's plenty of that, right?
Josh: 1:04:58
There's, you know, what we need is, we need more people to step into public service. This is one of my mantras, especially after working in local government. It's such a rewarding experience, it is such a learning experience, you learn so much about why things are the way they are and how they could be different that you would never get if you stay in your own lane.
And especially right now. There's a huge retirement wave coming in local government and state government, there's people that have served for a very long time. And they're going to be retiring soon. And so there's an opportunity for younger folks, but also folks that have been in other sectors and want to do something around that at scale, and really try to improve systems, to step into public service, and in these roles, and learn and improve the community around them when they do it.
[birds tweeting, sound of waves, instrumental music]
Paula: 1:06:04
When we come back, Josh and I talk about what policy work and surfing have in common. And some final thoughts about holding elected officials accountable.
[instrumental music]
Paula:
So yeah, this question about leadership and government is really critical. And I am encouraged because I do see a lot of younger people in their 20s and 30s running for office, which I think is terrific. One of the things I hear people getting a bit stuck on is how to organize community input or stakeholder-driven groups, councils, task force. And you've done that; do you have any thoughts on, on how to do that?
And let me set it up by saying that sometimes I've compared policy work as being more like surfing in that you have to have a little bit more of an instinct; you do have to be prepared, you need to have your surfboard and possibly your wetsuit, depending on the temperature of where you're surfing, but you need to know where those waters are, you need to be somewhat practiced and be able to do it. But then once you get into the water, it's the timing and instinct that really makes you able to catch a wave, right? And you got to take advantage of when the wave’s coming. So what I've been trying to say is there's some creativity and instinct involved in managing groups in order to be able to create these participatory governance systems. What are your thoughts on that? Do you have a different analogy?
Josh: 1:07:40
No, I love the surfing analogy. Full disclosure, I'm not much of a surfer, my brother's really good at surfing. My daughter is really good at surfing too. But having floundered around on a board a little bit, there is something there to that analogy, because if you're prepared and in the right position, then when the wave comes, you really can catch it. And I think a lot of times people say, you know, what's the saying is: “luck is opportunity meeting preparation”, right. And if people think they're lucky to be in the right spot in the lineup, and it's not really right, it takes a lot of practice to know where the break is, to know where the tide is, and you need to be sitting in the right spot in order to take advantage of what comes along.
I think the other thing is: there's a whole unwritten code around surfing, right? I mean, in terms of who gets to go, when you do or don't take off, and don't want to drop in on people. And you know, whose turn it is, and that kind of thing that you're not going to find in any library book. But you are going to learn by going and doing it and being an observer rather than a teller.
And I think there's a lot that is similar around organizing and community. First is: where do you set up? Right? You probably should stand on the shore for a while and watch what's happening with the waves before you just go paddle out into the community. You should know who's who, who's been there for years and years and years, and who has the respect of other folks, and maybe listen to them for a long, long while before you offer up what you think the solution is. Because I think necessarily, your solution is going to change from what you learned from those interactions.
And then, the other big thing is just like making sure that you are lining up the right way. So keeping an eye over your shoulder to make sure that there's not a wave coming that you haven't foreseen, right? And that happens a lot in community, too, people get blindsided, but it's really about being in the right spot. And I think one of the big things is, knowing where community is at the moment, where are they gathering? What are the issues that are concerning them; and getting a good handle on that before you introduce whatever your topic is.
I think that's rules for the road for everybody in every different sector, I don't think it's just the food sector. I think the more that people are able to get a sense of where community is at, and then enter and paddle at the right time to like, find out how to carry their issue forward in a way that actually fits with what the community wants, they’re always going to be more successful than someone that's just watching films and then go and runs out and does their own thing.
[waves crashing]
Paula: 1:11:00
You already talked about people getting engaged in government, how do we get to that? Does that mean government and political will? Or what else might it take?
Josh: 1:11:08
If you come together, and you have something that you think is really important, you can organize around that to get a charter amendment, get it put into the constitution of each county, around like a level of dedicated funding or certain things that the county should do, but I wouldn't wait for that. That's a long process and it takes a lot of lifting.
We've got ordinance language that really spells out how the city and county should be supporting local food security and agriculture, and people should hold the administration and the council accountable to that language and make sure, do we have enough positions to do that? Do we have enough grant programs to farmers to do that? Are we buying as an institution locally, like we know we should be moving the needle on local buying and consumption? You know, those are questions that people should be reading the ordinance, and then going and asking folks that are running for office.
[birds twittering, instrumental music]
Paula: 1:12:21
Many thanks to our sound engineer, Keola Iseri, and to Sue Woodard for Project Support. And to the students at Waipahu High School: thank you Carissa, Landon, and Sid for your sound creation. Thank you Ashley, Erica, and Reiko for graphic design and to their teachers, Noelle-Lili Edeger and Sky Bruno. And mahalo nui loa, much gratitude, to our sponsor at the Hawai'i Institute for Sustainable Community Food Systems at the University of Hawai'i, West Oahu.