Hawai'i 2011: State of the Community Report

Hawaii Business magazine put together a breakfast function at the Hawaii Prince Hotel on Wednesday, Jan. 26 titled "The Way We Live." The essential purpose of the event was to asses the quality of life indicators assessed in their State of the Community Report.

Dr. Sylvia Yuen from the UH Center on the Family in the College of Tropical Agriculture and Human Resources spoke with another colleague about the six main indicators of quality of life:
— Economy
— Education
— Health
— Housing
— Crime and Communities
— Environment

Economy:
Dr. Yuen highlighted Hawaii's per capita is currently $42,078 ($45,205 in the City and County of Honolulu; $31,978 in Big Island County; $37,521 in Maui County; and $36,093 in Kaua'i County). Disturbingly, the top five job with the most openings for Hawaii workers are:
1) waiters and waitresses
2) retail
3) cashiers
4) food prep (i.e. fast food)
5) teachers (elementary and special education)

With the exception of the teaching positions, the other four offer wages in the $20,000-$29,000 range. This wage is not enough to survive comfortably in Hawaii ("comfortably" meaning paying rent, getting enough to eat, using public transportation — no car) which requires approximately $60,000 per year in earnings.

Education:
Of 100 9th graders entering high school this year:
— 65 will graduate high school
— 30 will enter college
— 22 will stay after sophomore year
— 15 (check on this number) will graduate in six years

Only 7.3% of Kindergarten teachers report at least 75% of their students enter their classrooms prepared to learn. "Prepared" is also a but ambiguous but I gathered the bar was pretty low— knowing how to hold a book, knowing how a book works, recognizing numbers and counting to five, etc.

Health
Compared to the national averages, Hawaii is better than average in:
— life expectancy
— infant mortality
— cardiovascular disease
— cancer death rates
— diabetes death rates
— obesity
— smoking
but the trends for all these areas are going higher since 2000.

Housing
Hawaii is worse than the national average in:
— rental cost burden
— ownership cost burden
— home ownership
— overcrowded dwellings
— homelessness
No surprises there.

Crime and Communities
Hawaii is better than the national average in:
— violent crime
— neglect and domestic violence

but we are worse in:
— property crime (a result of ice epidemic?)
— idle youth (19.3% of youth 16-24 years not in school or employed)

Environment
Surface water advisory days are up 213% and solid waste generation is also up.
energy consumption is down and recycling is up.

Moving Forward, Dr. Yuen stressed that prevention is better than intervention and transformative is better than unidimensional.

We must stress:
— interconnectedness
— integrative approaches focused on communication, innovation, and partnerships

She offered a great quote from Emerson in challenging all the attending business people and community leaders:
"It is one of the beautiful compensations of this life that no one can sincerely try to help another without helping himself."

The event continued with a panel discussion featuring:
• Micah Kane— Kamehameha School trustee, former head of Dept. of Hawaiian Homelands
• Punky Playden-Cross: Hale Kipa, Hawaii Youth Services
• Liz Chun— Good Beginnings Alliance
• Susan Au Doyle— Aloha United Way

Micah Kane started off by discussing where Hawaii falls the farthest behind the rst of the nation— housing. Right off the bat he established some harsh truth: things are not going to get any better any time soon. It comes down to basic supply and demand issues and there is no silver bullet that will solve our housing problems. Challenges such as land costs, off-site infrastructure costs, labor costs, energy costs, and transportation challenges/costs will always work against us. To alleviate some of those challenges he had two recommendations:
1) build homes that minimize costs by going for higher density— less land, less energy, close to work
2) meet each other half way— choose one segment of housing (low income, moderate income) and go for it instead of trying to do everything for everybody, at least initially.
He stressed how when he was at DHHL that his job evolved from building homes to building homeowners. There became a big job training and social services component to getting someone to be a viable homeowner. (That's something to keep in mind as we move forward with Kuleana Micro-Lending.) To achieve those objectives he partnered with other agencies such as Salvation Army to maximize synergies.

Liz Chun then spoke about the idea of prevention of a lot of societal ills through early childhood education. Only 3% of state resources go to children age 0-5, yet that is when 85% of brain development occurs. As a result we get a large number of "gap kids" that result in higher high school drop-out rates, drug abuse, crime, teen pregnancy. For every once dollar invested in early childhood development the government saves $4.20 in return by not having to combat these other challenges. She challenged the business community to grow the work force and be a voice for children at Be My Voice Hawaii.

Punky Playden-Cross jumped right into blasting our current political system as not lending itself to good social policy because during times of economic stagnation and budget shortfalls the first area to be cut is social services, especially for troubled teens. He reiterated the point made by Liz Chun because his organizationnis the one that deals with these kids that have been underserved.

Ultimately, the underlying message to the entire audience is that our quality of life depends on the efforts of everybody to work together through the business community, the government, the non-profit sector, the education system. Everyone must find a way to do our part and help out in achieving these goals because inaction will only undermine our own quality of life as well in at least one of those areas, if not more.