Puna Community Resilience & Capacity Building Support
Puna Community Resilience & Capacity Building Support was a collaboration between the County of Hawaiʻi, HACBED, and other community partners. The goal of the project was to provide tools and support to communities and community-based organizations so that they can build relationships and robust networks that take care of the people they serve, the facilities they use, and their broader communities. The project aimed to build community resilience by strengthening connections and growing partnerships between community organizations, with a focus on providing capacity building support and community resilience and asset mapping workshops
Summary of Project Objectives:
Capacity building support for food pantries in the Puna region to strengthen emergency food security:
- Convened a cohort of Food Pantries in Puna to build capacity and collaboration in the region. Participating food pantries included Bodacious Women of Puna, The Food Basket Hawai‘i, HI-AWARE Project, Hui Aloha O Puna Makai, Kalani Honua, Men of PAʻA, Neighborhood Place of Puna, Pāhoa Pantry & Soup Kitchen, and Sacred Heart Pāhoa
- Created a pantry distribution schedule for the Puna region in collaboration with Hawaiʻi Food Basket
- Through convening with partners, created a template that serves as the basis of a toolkit for food pantries in the region.
Asset mapping workshops to strengthen community collaboration in responding to challenges such as disaster preparedness and family homelessness:
- Strengthened relationships created through the Food Pantry Cohort and broaden to the wider Puna community.
- Built relationships among faith-based organizations through Interfaith Asset Mapping to identify assets to collaboratively end family homelessness.
- Used mapping and the related process as a tool for identifying community assets, increasing collaboration, and reducing redundancies to facilitate broader community resilience.
- Facilitated dialogue to develop clearer roles and responsibilities to ensure proper communication channels with a new administration to support an effective disaster response process.
A special mahalo to the following agencies and organizations that attended Food Pantry and Disaster Preparedness Workshops during 2016 and 2017, and shared their stories, knowledge, and love for Puna:
Bodacious Women of Puna · The Food Basket Hawai‘i · HI-AWARE Project · Hui Aloha O Puna Makai · Kalani Honua · Men of PAʻA · Neighborhood Place of Puna · Pāhoa Pantry & Soup Kitchen · Sacred Heart, Pāhoa
Links to Our Partners
