We are returning all of our resources to communities in Hawai‘i and the San Francisco Bay Area.
In the communities we call home, there is a tension between our history and our future and between the inherent possibilities of our people and the realities too many of them face.
Hawaiʻi
Communities across Hawai‘i share a deep and meaningful history, with a social compact of care and healing that fostered unbreakable connections to the land (‘āina) as the source of health and well-being, looking beyond the beauty of their islands to instead find a way to create balance and harmony with nature. Prior to Western contact, Native Hawaiians had developed unparalleled land stewardship practices, which enabled them to thrive independent of external resources, and they were among the most literate societies in the world.
In time, the commercialization of the Hawaiian islands—from extractive colonial agriculture to militarization and global tourism—upended centuries of this rich heritage.
As in the Bay Area, diverse and multiethnic communities across Hawai‘i now face significant social and economic disparities. These inequalities are felt most significantly in rural communities and across the islands of Kaua‘i, Maui, Molokaʻi, Lāna‘i, and Hawai‘i, where access is limited and resources are far more scarce. These communities must now grapple simultaneously with the highest cost of living in the United States and a shrinking workforce as residents leave the state in search of opportunities impossible to find at home.
San Francisco Bay Area
Long before it became a mecca for technology innovation, the San Francisco Bay Area was already a dynamic community that drew on its diversity to promote equality and justice across a wide range of social movements including civil rights, agricultural land use, and labor.
The Ohlone and Ramaytush stewarded the abundance of this land across millennia for their peoples, before colonizers stole their ancestral home. Later, Asian American, Black, and Latinx communities in the Bay Area demonstrated what’s possible when people organize and draw strength from the connections between many cultures.
Yet, despite this activist legacy and the foundation it laid for all, today communities of color in the Bay Area often face dramatic disparities in access to resources and outright exclusion from opportunities as a result of underfunding and displacement. The very industries that have capitalized on the region’s strengths and captured the world’s attention as innovators have also contributed to a rapid unraveling of the community’s bonds, creating a cascade of crises in housing, education, health care, and the environment.
A Just Future for All
These are the communities where we live and work, and despite their geographic differences, their challenges are all too similar. Our vision as a foundation compels us to partner with organizations and support initiatives that empower Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander communities to collectively dismantle systemic barriers and systems of power that stand in the way of a just, equitable future for everyone.