(upbeat music)
Welcome to Conversations with the Winners.
Today, we're talking to Dr. Jane Chung-Do
and Ilima Ho-Lastimosa.
Jane and Ilima, are founders
of the Waimānalo Pono Research Hui.
Welcome and congratulations on your award.
Tell us about the group.
Aloha, I'm Ilima Ho-Lastimosa from Waimānalo, Hawaii.
And we are here representing the Waimānalo Pono Research Hui
a program that we founded in February of 2017.
Waimānalo Pono Research Hui is a group
of community members from Waimānalo,
which is a predominantly Native Hawaiian community
and community academic researchers
who are collaborating together
to bring culturally driven and community driven programs
to the community of Waimānalo.
Well, this is a community campus partnership.
Tell us a little bit more about the importance
of this partnership and how it relates to health equity.
Having the community understand how research works
was step one of our program.
And so I think it's a really good melding
or team that gives our people the opportunity
to be the spokesperson or the person in charge.
We're going to come back to that story.
And meanwhile, Jane,
tell us about this from the academia perspective.
Well, I began to work with aunt Ilima back in 2006.
I was a graduate student at that time
and I just fell in love
with what she was doing in the community,
really galvanizing and mobilizing the community
to take ownership of their health and control their lives
and restoring a lot of the Hawaiian practices
that were once lost.
And once I became faculty in 2011,
we continued to work together.
We started going for grants together.
And one of the trainings that we attended together
was the CBPR Partnership Academy at University of Michigan,
with Dr. Barbara Israel.
And that was something that launched
the Waimānalo Pono Research Hui,
and we started really thinking about,
how can we bring more community members
into these conversations so that they drive the research
and the programming that's happening in their community.
The community was already strong
and had a lot of, a long history of advocacy
and doing programming grassroots style.
But I think it really brought us together
in a collective way to have a collective voice.
So to me, it's not just about doing research or doing grants
or publishing, it's about these connections
and relationships we have.
So we've really become a family.
So I think when researchers think of,
community research or health equity in that way,
that they're personally invested, not just professionally
it really can transform the work that we do.
Let's talk a little bit more about that.
The Award for Health Equity is all about systems change
and Ilima, I'm going to start with you.
And what was the systems change?
The researchers have to do the proposition
to everyone that's present,
but only the community members are able to vote
whether we're going to participate and make a partnership
or we're saying aloha, with a smile on our face,
because we're not interested.
Jane, talk about the systems change
from your point of view.
Yeah, I mean, building off of what Ilima shared,
I think it's a lot about the empowerment, right?
To make sure that the community is aware of,
what does a PI mean, right?
What does a research budget look like?
How do you get grants?
What does it mean when you're an author on a publication?
And so a lot of that started with the education
that Ilima was talking about.
But also over time, these protocols that we created,
where the community has a voice
in what happens in their community.
Take us into the community with one of the projects
on one of the priorities.
Ilima, which one are you excited about?
I think we have to highlight the Waimānalo Limu Hui.
So like Jane mentioned, the three priorities
were 'ai pono, lā‘au lapa‘au and limu restoration.
So in everything we do
we already try to provide good food, good nutrition.
The pandemic has put us on a hiatus a little bit,
but we've had as much as 350 people at our beach
in Waimānalo doing renovation of the pond
and limu restoration.
It's been a crazy ride.
Jane, you wanna add to that story
and tell us a little bit more about it
from the researcher's perspective?
Seaweed is such an important part of the Hawaiian diet,
as medicine and as food,
but also food for the turtles and the sea life.
But we've seen a depletion of seaweed all over the islands
in Hawaii because of climate change,
because of environmental degradation.
And so her wish, her vision was that,
we would see limu back on the shores of Waimānalo.
So that really was part of the seed
that grew the conversations about what we can do.
And so it's really awesome to see how the elders
of the community who are important sources of wisdom,
bring back their knowledge and bring back their visions
and their experiences, and share that inter-generationally
throughout the community.
We know that gathering and community connectedness,
are such huge components of health,
especially Hawaiian health.
A lot of us feel that the pandemic was a negative,
but how Jane had mentioned about Luana wanting to see
a lot of limu across the beaches in Waimānalo.
May around Mother's day of last year, 2020,
now everything was shut down for many months prior to that.
We had a carpet literally on many places
throughout the island of limu.
And that was the want of the kūpuna.
And it was crazy.
The kūpuna couldn't believe it.
And so our wind name in Waimanalo is Limu-li-pu'upu'u.
So it's the essence, the smell that you could smell
from the ocean all the way up into the mountains.
And we had that for like four, maybe three weeks.
And my dad told me,
he thought he would never see that again in his life
and he could die happy.
I think that that was a very,
very important point to share.
Tell me a little bit about the power of empowerment
within a community.
What happens when community has a voice?
The data, the research that happens,
the data belongs to the community.
We don't need three years of planning.
We have an idea, we set the plan in motion,
we get everything A to Z planned out,
and then we just implement.
And that's health, that's power, that's empowerment.
Of course, if we are doing research
and we're saying we're trying to improve health,
the community should have a say
and should identify what we do, how we do it.
It just makes sense to me.
One of the biggest things that you should do
is understand communities know what they want.
What are some of the lessons learned?
Some of the important components
of having a successful partnership?
Ilima has a really good saying that everybody knows
You must be present to win.
And if you're not present, you're not there,
no amount of looking at peer-reviewed articles
or reading things about the community online
is going to prepare you.
You got to show up.
It is relationship building,
especially in a native community.
Whether you are Hawaiian or Samoan or Tongan or Māori
or Native American, it's all about the relationship.
Sharing food, sharing vision, sharing wisdom and vice versa.
And relationships not only with one another,
but also with our environment.
And I see this transformation happening
and really leading to empowerment of all.
Not just the community but also people in the university
who believe in this work.
Always with aloha.
And that is...
Aloha is profound.
It doesn't have a measure in the English language.
And it takes a lot of understanding to understand aloha,
but we try to instill in everyone,
to do everything always with aloha.
There's just a lot of questions.
I think fiscally and administratively
that serves as barriers to the work
that we do like food, right?
A lot of funders don't provide food or doesn't allow food.
And food is so central to the work that we do.
It brings people together and it's a cultural protocol.
So when we talk about really trying to promote health equity
in Native Hawaiian communities, I think we need land back.
And that's a huge indigenous issue across the globe.
It's not just Hawaii too.
We got to think seven generations.
We think thousand generations deep as indigenous people.
We're not thinking about today or tomorrow or last week.
We're thinking about our babies, babies, babies
that we ain't never going to see
and they're not even going to know what we look like,
or our names but they still gonna be here.
And that's true health for us, is longevity.
Jane and Ilima, thank you so much.
And on behalf of the Community-Campus Partnerships
for Health, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation,
congratulations on your award.
Thank you.
Mahalo.
Thank you for joining us for this conversation.
And you are invited to more conversations
with the 2020 winners of the RWJF Award for Health Equity.
And you can learn more about all of the winners
at RWJF.org
I'm Jacinta Gauda, and thank you for watching.