KōCreate: Building Leadership for Hawaiʻi Island’s Future

In 2025, Vibrant Hawaiʻi launched KōCreate: Designing Homegrown Futures, a new initiative advancing community-led leadership and decision-making across Hawaiʻi Island. Supported by the Trust for Civic Life, KōCreate is grounded in the belief that residents already carry the insight, relationships, and lived experience needed to shape solutions for their own places. As CEO Janice Ikeda shared, “When community members are supported to organize and take action together, the solutions that emerge are relevant and rooted.”

Since September, 28 KōCreators have gathered monthly to build the skills and shared practices that help communities move from concern to coordinated action. The six-month learning journey emphasizes organizing, storytelling, systems thinking, and civic trust, all anchored in a place-based approach that centers local knowledge and strengthens long-term capacity.

Throughout the fall, cultural practitioners and field experts guided sessions on leadership, Indigenous innovation, project design, and collaborative action. These exchanges expanded how participants understand leadership and their role within it. As KōCreator Kahanu Alcoran reflected, “We may not have known the impact of what we stepped into, but confidence was built for those of us who felt we couldn’t make a difference.”

With this foundation in place, KōCreators will transition into demonstration projects in 2026 that apply their learning in real-world contexts. These efforts will focus on housing, economic opportunity, renewable energy, and community emergency preparedness, serving as early models for how locally led initiatives can increase civic engagement and shift conditions at the community level.

KōCreate’s long-term aim is clear: to grow connected, capable leadership across every region of Hawaiʻi Island so residents are equipped to organize, collaborate, and take collective action on the issues that matter most to them.

To learn more about KōCreate or explore partnership opportunities, visit vibranthawaii.org/kocreate or email contact@vibranthawaii.org.