Our ChangeMakers

Our Purpose

ChangeMakers Hawaiʻi is championing economic equity and justice by promoting economic development that engages communities, creates access to financial resources, and supports passion professions.

ChangeMakers Hawaiʻi offers programs designed to meet you where you are at, whether you’re an individual, business, or community group/ organization.

All of our programs are structured around three core pillars to match the stage of your journey, whether you’re in the learning, funding or building stage of development.

ChangeMakers Hawai‘i is catalyzing change and creating economic opportunities for Hawai‘i communities that traditional finance does not serve. We do this through our five core values.

Our Values

ChangeMakers Hawaiʻi incorporate market data from traditional sources with place-based knowledge.  ChangeMakers connects community stories and experiences with quantitative analysis to understand each place through a multi-capital framework that re-imagines value.

1.

Engaging Community Wisdom:

As a practice, ChangeMakers work with the community to map their unique ecosystem of resources, relationships, cultures, and power dynamics that are unique to them.  We identify and harness a multi-capital framework to multiply the community's strengths.

2.

Creating Ecosystem Impact:

ChangeMakers’ investments focus on supporting strengths and capacities of people, organizations, and natural environments. We invest in small businesses,  nonprofits, and service providers in the communities we are developing and the ecosystem impact. 

3.

Working from Strengths:

ChangeMakers utilizes participatory investing.  Participatory investing cedes decision-making power about funding— including the strategy and criteria behind those decisions—to the very communities that funders aim to serve.  Participatory investing increases participants’ sense of agency, power, and leadership.

4.

Sharing Power:

At ChangeMakers Hawaiʻi, we know change takes “acting boldly.”  We are imagining and creating new ecosystems of community power by challenging antiquated systems and engaging people in daring to act boldly.

5.

Acting Boldly: