Hub Coworking Hawaii

Hawai‘i's Best Coworking Space

Social Impact

Keiki and Plow Work Day Recap

Hub Coworking at Keiki and Plow
Hub Coworking welcome sign at Keiki and Plow

At the Hub, you might have heard our motto of “Do well, do good”. This saying stems from our mission to foster the success of our members. The second part, “do good” goes a little beyond the traditional business idea of cultivating a community of working professionals. “Do good” comes from the need to feed the soul, to gain a sense of belonging and purpose, to build community with those around us.

Hub Coworking Members working at Keiki and Plow.

To put actions to our words, we host work days where our coworking members are invited to get out of the office, and give back to the ‘aina (land). We’ve hosted work days out at the Kōkua Learning Farm with our friends at Kōkua Hawai‘i Foundation, and community cleanups with the Surfrider Foundation O‘ahu Chapter, as a way to provide our members the opportunity to network outside of their immediate circles, visit places they might not have seen before, and of course to help our surrounding community.

Most recently, we visited Keiki and Plow– a family run, organic farm in Hawaii Kai that offers families a hands-on farm experience. On Saturday, November 6, 2021. The team at Keiki & Plow hosted about 25 Hub Coworking members and friends.

Hub Members at Keiki and Plow
Hub Coworking members at 11/6 Keiki and Plow Workday.

Our members volunteered to help with various projects on the farm such as transferring soil to plant beds, planting herbs and flowers, clearing pathways, pulling crops of weeds and spreading mulch around crops.

Hub Coworking members at Keiki and Plow
Hub Coworking Members clear weeds during Keiki and Plow workday.

We were all split into separate groups to complete our tasks, and Hub members with keiki helped to plant flowers and vegetables in the garden. It was a fun-filled day, and it was so nice to see some of our members out in the open again. Mahalo to the members that were able to make it–we hope to host another work day sometime soon! For more information on our member events and to make sure you’re signed up for our next one, follow us on social media @hubcoworkinghi.

Hub Members in Keiki and Plow vegetable patch
Hub Coworking members with Keiki helped to plant vegetables.
Hub Coworking Members at Keiki and Plow
Keiki and Plow Garden
View of Hub Coworking Hawaii’s 11/6 workday at Keiki and Plow.

The Past Four Years at Hub Coworking Hawaii

Back on August 23rd, The Hub celebrated its 4th year of operation out of our Queen Street location. We are so honored to have made it this far as a coworking space, creative outlet and a gathering place. Together, we have grown through renovations, a rebrand, community volunteer opportunities and countless events–pau hanas, networking opportunities, movie premieres, crop swaps– just to name a few! We only hope that this growth continues long-term, and that we can provide the location, resources and opportunities for you and your business to, as we say, “do well and do good.” 

Before 2020, the Hub was a community resource for businesses needing a venue for their meetings and events. The Hub was and still is a gathering place for many of its own community members allowing the businesses in our own network to spotlight their products/services. While events have taken more of a back seat nowadays, we can’t help but to reminisce on some of the past events that we have had the pleasure of hosting. We hope to bring events back when we’re able to gather in a safe manner again.

  • Art@Hub Shows
    • The Hub has had the pleasure of having it’s space beautified by murals painted by local artists. Artists would create murals or installations on the common theme of “Community.” In exchange, the Hub would provide membership or residency for artists to continue their work or provide classes to the community. Each artist would also be featured in their own Art@Hub Show where they’d display their gallery of work. Local artists that have created murals or installations for the Hub are Lauren Hana Chai, Boz Schurr, Aimee Dukes, Shenae Tam, Bai Xin Chen, Ryan Higa, Aria Villafranca, and Lauren Trangmar.
  • Indie Lens Film Nights
    • In partnership with PBS Hawaii, we would transform our Main Event Space into a theater and feature independent documentary films focused on a variety of social issues. PBS Hawaii would even bring pizza, a popcorn machine and arare/mochi crunch. Some popular features were “Out of State” and “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?”
Indie Lens Film Screening of Bedlam
  • Climathon
      • In fall 2019, we hosted the first ever Honolulu Climathon. We hosted the Climathon Honolulu Hackathon with guest judges Chelsea Harder of Hawaiʻi Green Growth, June Matsumoto of Pacific Islands Institute, and Chris Barzman from Sustainable Tourism Association of Hawaii. We focused on sustainable tourism and guided our participants with the guiding question of: “How do we reduce the human impact of tourism in Honolulu?”
        Climathon 2019 Winners Team Get Zero Wasted
  • Wellness Wednesday
    • Awakened Mana has been hosting Wellness Wednesday events once a month at the Hub since our early Impact Hub Honolulu days. They are creators of conscious events and products. With a focus on movement, health, sustainability, growth and community, their events and products inspire reflection and an awakened consciousness. Popular events have consisted of Sound Healing Meditation, Kombucha Brewing Workshops and Light Alchemy. 
  • Weekly Member Luncheon
    • Formerly held every Wednesday in the community kitchen, our Member Luncheon was an opportunity for our members to connect with each other during the lunch hour. We’d provide pizza or food from local neighborhood restaurants (thank you, Thyda’s Tacos!) and break the ice for everyone.
  • Monthly Crop Swaps – Back on! 
    • This series of events was born from members sharing their abundance from their home gardens and crops. Our amazing members would bring in apple bananas, mangos, marrungay leaves (malunggay/moringa) and all kinds of herbs to share with others. We figured why not make this a monthly occurrence? This was also the perfect pairing with Long Spoon Farms to help with the monthly efforts as they were providing a similar community service in Kaimuki. 
Crop Swap meeting in our community kitchen

Another growth point of ours has been our membership. Our core group of members has changed over the years, as we steadily welcome freelancers, digital nomads, entrepreneurs, small business owners and non-profit organizations seeking a flexible workspace. Our variety of month to month membership options and offices allowed our members to use our space at their convenience and scale up when ready. When COVID-19 made its way to the Hawaiian Islands, we were just as worried as everyone else. Our memberships took a hit and some long standing office members had to vacate. Since then, we’ve reached a new demographic of remote workers, businesses seeking office space that didn’t require a long lease and workers wanting an alternative space to their home office (or dining tables). 

We’d love to recognize several of our previous members, that have scaled their businesses over the years:

After working with some incredible entrepreneurs/companies, we were inspired to make a greater impact in our community. Since 2017, we have created and joined forces with a variety of programs that have allowed us to provide many mentoring, coaching and networking opportunities for our members and the greater community.

Programs:

The Social Impact Incubator Program helps fill the opportunity gap for very early stage entrepreneurs – especially educators – in Hawaiʻi. SIIP is a six month program where participants gain access to content specialists, top-notch mentorship, weekly learning modules and up to $8,000 in capital to take their venture to the next level. We are currently working together with Teach for America Hawaii on the second cohort of entrepreneurs.

The Hawaii Freelancer’s Network is open to any small business, entrepreneur, freelancer or business leader, current or aspiring! Via monthly workshops at the Hub, HFN helps to connect members to the greater community and share valuable knowledge and insights. 

  • Women’s Personal Finance Group

Women’s Personal Finance workgroup was a casual bi-monthly meetup at the Hub for any woman that wants to learn more about finances, better understand their own financial habits and needs, and get more comfortable asking questions and learning about this big subject. 

Women’s Personal Finance Group Meeting

 

Ulupono Initiative is a Mission-Aligned Impact Partner

Ulupono Initiative has been an Impact Partner for Impact Hub HNL for two years, and we’re grateful for our ongoing partnership that supports our work and bridges our two organizations.

Ulupono is an impact investment firm located in Hawaii that is building a more self-sufficient and sustainable island.

Ulupono offers for-profit investments, non-profit investments (grants), and social investments aimed at helping for-profit and non-profit sectors ‘harness [the] good and inspire catalytic change for Hawaii.’ Overall, the focus areas include food and agriculture, renewable energy, and waste reduction within businesses and organizations across the islands.

We had the opportunity to sit down with Murray Clay, President of Ulupono Initiative to talk about how our organizations align. Learn more about what Murray thinks about our entrepreneurial ecosystem, and why we need more of it.

Elemental Excelerator: Social & Environmental Impact Partner

Elemental Excelerator is a global climate-tech accelerator based in Hawaii that funds early- and mid-stage startups focused on impact across a wide variety of sectors to create measurable social and environmental impact. To date, they have supported 99 companies and 8 cohorts (#8 was just announced, and includes Member organization FarmLink Hawaii).

Each year their application process brings in some of the most innovative companies from around the world, and this year saw the most ever, at 800 startups. According to a recent article, 81% of those companies have technologies that lead directly to greenhouse gas reductions, and 67% indicated that their technologies have specific applications in low-income communities.

From its applicant pool, Elemental selects 15-20 companies annually to be part of their newest cohort. Companies chosen usually focus on solving systemic issues in agriculture, energy, water, mobility, and the circular economy.

Elemental has been an instrumental partner for Impact Hub, signing on as an official Impact Partner for both 2018 and 2019, and we are grateful for their support, guidance, and friendship over the years.

During our Wefunder campaign, the Elemental team talked about how the work they are doing aligns with work Impact Hub Honolulu is doing to build an interconnected Hawaii to support and grow entrepreneurs locally and beyond.

Making Impact Every Day: Our Commitment to Social Impact

Impact Hub locations around the world are focused on making an impact, and the Impact Hub network uses the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as a guiding framework for how we define impact. If you not familiar with the goals, check out our article here to learn why we think the SDGs are pretty awesome.

sustainable development goals

Our social impact focus areas here at Impact Hub HNL include sustainability and education, and we work hard to create events for the general public, opportunities for members, and recurring programming that allows our members and community to create impact and build awareness.

As a company focused on impact, we give back. Each of our large events has a direct financial benefit for organizations that we are committed to supporting:

  • Our Grand Opening, in January 2018, was a benefit for Aloha Harvest, and our most recent Bollywood Night was a benefit for Pu’uhonua O Waianae and the Aloha Lives Here campaign.
  • Each of our ImpactART Gallery openings supports a local organization of the artist’s choosing.
  • We teach others how to do well and do good. For our keiki marketplace, student entrepreneurs vote with their dollars to support a local non-profit. We also partner with organizations for coworking and event ImpactMaker scholarships for those doing good in the world.

We offer scholarships to increase access to innovation for everyone:

  • Last year we gave over $10,800 in ImpactMaker scholarships and we are projected to give at least $15,000 in 2019!
  • We started the ImpactSCHOLAR program in an effort to support local university and college students. We offer 5 unlimited memberships to every accredited college program in the state annually – that’s over $75,000/year in scholarships to grow entrepreneurship here in the islands. As we grow, we look forward to having students on neighboring islands and other communities join us in impact.

When our space made its Magnum P.I. debut before the holidays, we gave the proceeds back to our members and spent the rest on Holiday BBQ for Ka Po’e O Kaka’ako (KPOK, The People of Kaka’ako), the local houseless community in Kaka’ako. After the initial BBQ, we were so inspired by their community-building efforts, we started participating in weekly park clean-up efforts to beautify the area surrounding the Children’s Discovery Center and surrounding streets; many on our team volunteer regularly at the KPOK weekly neighborhood cleanups- and you can join too!

We are also home to a variety of sustainability-focused member organizations that make a huge difference in our local and global community, like Sustainable Coastlines Hawaii, Surfrider Foundation, Conservation International, Zero-Waste Oahu, Kanu Hawaii and more.

Providing inspiring spaces for collaboration between local social impact organizations is what we do at a basic level; making introductions, seeking out like-minded organizations and seeing what they do together lifts the whole community.

Here’s a highlight of some of the recent sustainability-focused programming and  events:

We also focus our efforts to support educators, students, and policymakers and empower the community with a range of business and personal educational opportunities.

Some of the education-focused events we host include:

  • A free, monthly Freelancer & Entrepreneur event to help support small businesses;
  • A free, bi-monthly Women’s Finance event, to educate and empower women to learn more about business & personal finance;
  • We are a community partner with Hawaii Women in Filmmaking and PBS Hawaii for the Indie Lens Pop-Up Film Series, which highlights important social justice issues across the US;
  • Our annual Keiki Marketplace, which supports over 25 student entrepreneurs to develop sustainable businesses with social impact in mind.
  • Education policy events: we provide space free of charge for educators, parents, students, and administrators to discuss education policy that improves public education. We have hosted Hope Street Group, Teach For America, Hawaii KidsCAN,  and a new group of inspiring educators who support each other in writing real stories about education in Hawaii, WRITE with #Educate808

In these ways and many others, we demonstrate our commitment to the Sustainable Development Goals, and as a company we hope to inspire other individuals and organizations to continue to do well, and do good in our community. This mission of helping businesses do well and do good, will continue to guide our programming and offerings, and we look forward to growing our impact together.

Stories from the Raise: A Crowdfunding Showcase

Raising funds for your project, business, or launch is an exciting way to gather community support and bring in funds needed for your work. Crowdfunding allows everyone to support projects they love – promoting good work and democratizing investment for the 99%.

A few weeks ago we hosted a Crowdfunding Showcase to share some of the stories from local companies and organizations that have raised funds (or are currently raising funds) for their projects. There were brief presentations from the participating organizations, a panel discussion, and a time for Q&A.

Here are some takeaways from the presenters and their projects:

It takes a village, says Jim Murphy of Honolulu Habitat for Humanity.

Habitat for Humanity is a nonprofit housing developer committed to improving communities by increasing homeownership opportunities. They work with families and communities to build and repair homes and provides a zero interest mortgage. In addition, they work with the communities they serve to provide volunteer opportunities supporting the mission’s work. Their goal is to build 40 single family homes in the next 5 years. They have tried crowdfunding unsuccessfully in the past, and are looking forward to more strategic campaigns in the future. Jim said some of his crowdfunding efforts were ‘cautionary tales.’

Keep momentum going through the whole campaign. Plan ahead.

Mia Moore, is a local student that was just accepted into the Interlochen Arts Academy starting Fall 2019. This prestigious school has high tuition costs, and she’s raising funds on Go Fund Me to cover her school fees. She is currently at ~$4300 of her $28,000 goal.

Crowdfunding builds community, not just funds.

James Koshiba is volunteer co-founder of Hui Aloha and the Aloha Lives Here Campaign, which has been created to give Puuhonua O Waianae a permanent home. The campaign combines crowdfunding, major donors, and in-kind contributions to enable POW to acquire land and add permanent structures to what is already a model village community. Funding will also allow the village to test innovative technologies in housing, water, waste management, and agriculture. It will also enable the village to continue their outreach to other houseless communities, and provide lessons in modern-day village-building across Hawaii and beyond.

Innovate, but you don’t always have to reinvent the wheel.

David Aquino, is Blue Planet Foundation’s Creative Director, and has helped to grow their unique energy efficiency loan program called WeEfficiency. The program raises funds from the community for non-profits or schools to cover energy efficiency upgrades. These upgrades can be costly at the offset, but energy savings can be huge. With the money they save, they can pay back their donors and do more good work for their communities.

Don’t be afraid to get started.

Sarah “Mili” Milianta-Laffin is a 7th grade teacher at the STEM Lab at Ilima Intermediate in Ewa Beach, Campbell/Kapolei Complex. Prior to teaching in Ewa Beach, she taught for 11 years in Houston, Texas. Sarah is a DonorsChoose Ambassador, personally earning over $15,000 in supplies for her students from DonorsChoose since 2007. She talked about how amazing the program is, and how it makes it easy for her to fund the things she needs to make her classroom a great place for her students and student groups.

Give back to your supporters.

We also heard from Nam Vu, co-founder of Impact Hub and ‘chief geeky officer.’ Nam talked about our experience with Wefunder, and why we chose this program for our investment campaign. Nam says that, “We chose Wefunder because it aligns with our community building focus and enables our community to invest in our success was well as benefit from our success.”

Thanks to all of those that presented at the event!