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Announcing the Indie Lens Pop-Up Film Series!

We are excited to announce that again we will be hosting Indie Lens Pop-Up film series for 2019-2020. In partnership with PBS Hawaii, we will be hosting these films starting this month and onwards into May 2020. All of these film screenings are free and open to the public, and heavy pupu is provided to attendees! This is our second season hosting the film. Read more about the films we hosted for the 2018-2019 season.

The 2019 film series covers some of the most pertinent topics of our time, including race relations, homelessness and mental health, climate change, and consumerism, and we look forward to being a community partner for PBS Hawaii for this series. Dates and times for the following films are subject to change.

The Indie Lens Pop-Up series are film screenings that brings people together for community-driven conversations around documentaries from the award-winning PBS series, Independent Lens on PBS Hawaiʻi. Learn more about Indie Lens Pop Up in this short video here:

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The first film in the series is entitled The First Rainbow Coalition will be shown Wednesday, December 4, from 5:30PM-8:15PM. This powerful film looks at how, in 1969, the Chicago Black Panther Party began to form a multi-ethnic coalition with the Young Lords Organization and the Young Patriots.

Banding together in one of the most segregated cities in post-war America, the Rainbow Coalition changed the face of 1960s Chicago politics and created an organizing model for future activists and politicians.

Indie Lens Pop-Up Film: Bedlam

Wednesday, February 26 at 5:30 pm

Filmmaker and practicing psychiatrist, Ken Rosenberg visits ERs, jails, and homeless camps to examine our national mental health crisis. Rosenberg follows the poignant stories of people grappling with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and other chronic psychiatric conditions, whose silence and shame often worsen the suffering.

BEDLAM trailer from Upper East Films on Vimeo.

Indie Lens Pop-Up Film: Eating Up Easter

Wednesday, April 22 at 5:30 pm

Threatened by climate change and globalization, remote Easter Island provides a wake-up call for the rest of the world.  More than just a picture postcard of iconic stone statues, Rapa Nui, also known as Easter Island, is a microcosm of a planet in flux. Native Rapanui grapple with a booming tourism trade that rakes in money, but brings about a changing climate that threatens the fragile ecology on the island. Rapanui filmmaker Sergio Mata’u Rapu gives voice to his fellow islanders, who struggle to balance their strong cultural heritage with modern-day challenges.

Eating Up Easter (2018) | Official Trailer from Kartemquin Films on Vimeo.

Indie Lens Pop-Up Film: Recorder

Wednesday, May 20 at 5:30 pm

Marion Stokes secretly recorded television twenty-four hours a day for thirty years. It started in 1979 with the dawn of the twenty-four hour news cycle and ended when Marion passed away in 2012. In total, Marion recorded on 70,000 VHS tapes, capturing revolutions, lies, wars, triumphs, and catastrophes that tell us who we were and how television has shaped the world of today.

Event Spotlight: Hawaii Educators W-rite

Today we’re sharing an Event spotlight featuring Kristi Oda of Hawaii Educators W-rite, a group that meets here at Impact Hub HNL.

Andrea Bertoli (AB): Tell me more about Hawaii Educators W-rite.

Kristi Oda (KO): The W-rite group is an inspired community of educators who support each other: we do this by carving out time each month to gather in a creative space to reflect and write. This atmosphere and intention cultivate a rich atmosphere for sharing and growing among our peers and friends. These events do not have an agenda and are totally self-directed, which gives everyone the opportunity to informally connect and bring a vibrant energy to our role as educators in the community.

AB: What pulled you towards this type of activism/work?

KO: We want to help nourish the writers from Hawaii and give educators a platform from which they can share their unique voices.

The media has continually reported a narrative of broke teachers in broken schools. The public deserves to hear a wide variety of stories from educators doing the work across our state. There are many things Hawaii educators have found to work that simply need to be shared, spread, and adapted. This tells a richer story of education here in the state.

AB: What are some of the founding values behind your group (and the work)?

KO: So often we get caught up in daily life, so this is about the importance of taking time for self-care, specifically to reflect and design a new path in our work with the overall goal of fostering leadership, collaboration, wellness, and growing a healthy local network of supportive relationships. As educators, in addition to school responsibilities, we work on achieving certifications, degrees, creating curriculum, communicating with families, sharing our work in presentations, and receiving grants for future projects. Some educators need essential time and space in order to be empowered to find and share their stories & voices.

Networking educators from various school levels, communities, and roles, such as parent liaisons, administrators, classroom and non-classroom educators is important to work to break down barriers and dissolve tensions that threaten collaboration.

AB: How can people get involved if they are interested?

KO: If you are an educator in Hawaii, find us online or check out motivated HI educators on Twitter #808educate. If you aren’t an educator and like our work and want to partner, reach out anyway to connect and see how you can participate or support. And if you have friends that work as educators, please invite them to collaborate with us.

AB: Any upcoming events we can share with our audience?

KO: We have three more events happening in July: two online, one at Kāne’ohe Elementary, and an additional monthly meetup at Impact Hub on July 31.

  • July 17 #808educate Twitter chat on Social Media for Educators
  • July 20 808Unconference where educators create topics on the spot and participate in sessions about shared interests (bit.ly/808uncon)
  • July 31 W-rite session at Impact Hub HNL + guest author -retired principal Jan Iwase (6:30pm-8:00pm)

Thanks, Kristi, for taking the time to share your event with us! 

 

HNL SOUP Hosts a ‘Solutions Showcase’ for Local Businesses

HNL SOUP is a micro-granting dinner that supports local ideas, projects, organizations, and businesses via crowdfunding of community dollars. In mid-September, HNL SOUP and Impact Hub HNL hosted the HNL SOUP ‘Solutions Showcase’ to feature the progress of three previous HNL SOUP winners.

HNL Soup Solutions Showcase participants and Impact Hub HNL team.

What is HNL Soup?

HNL SOUP is a program brought to Honolulu by Samantha Ruiz, who was inspired after learning about the SOUP model in Detroit, Michigan. HNL SOUP is a part of a global network of community crowdfunding events. She says, “We hope that HNL SOUP changes the way people engage with the democratic process and increases our community’s creativity and collaboration.”

Samantha Ruiz, the founder of HNL Soup

 

The premise is simple: each attendee donates $15 for a bowl of soup and bread from local chefs. The group then listens to the three project pitch about their organization and the work they do in the community. After listening to all three pitches, the audience votes on the winner: the project that receives the majority of votes wins the community chest.

HNL Soup Solutions Showcase

At the ‘Solutions Showcase’, community members learned how three former projects – HNL Tool Library, WerkArts, and WorkNet – utilized their community micro-grants to get their business off the ground, and how they could benefit from ongoing community support.

During the ‘Solutions Showcase’, HNL heard how community funds were instrumental for getting HNL Tool Library off the ground, and how the support from the community (both moral support and physical donations) inspired founder Elia Bruno.

WerkArts shared a similar story: learning that the community loved their bamboo bike idea helped them feel like they were on the right path with their company. Founders Krystle Marcellus and Barret Werk hope to get some of the parts fabricated outside of the U.S. to double their output over the next year. HNL also heard from Ruby Menon and Chas Williams of WorkNet, a non-profit that helps former inmates reintegrate into society with jobs, skills building, and housing.

The winner of the ‘Solutions Showcase’ was HNL Tool Library, which seeks to expand membership, build their inventory of available tools, continue to offer workshops, and expand into a self-sustaining non-profit.

We’ll be hosting another HNL SOUP in the future, so stay tuned for updates about when the next micro-granting dinner will be!

Zero-Waste Living Tips for a Plastic Free July

Impact Hub HNL is committed to making impact and building community. Each of the 102 Impact Hubs worldwide is committed to turning the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) into reality. Plastic Free July addresses Goals 6 and 14 and we are proud to do our part in limiting use of single use plastics in our space, programs, and events.

Luckily, Hawaii is – in many ways – at the forefront of sustainable action. Not only did our plastic bag ban just go into effect in July, Hawaii has been one of the leaders in trying to ban styrofoam (polystyrene) and plastic straws for years. While it’s awesome to see so much action on the city and state level, it’s really important to understand the important role individuals have to play when it comes to reducing our consumption of single-use plastics.

This month is Plastic Free July and there is no time like the present to start taking action towards living a more plastic-free life, and our Hub team wants to help you reduce your impact this month (and every month!).

Here are some favorite tips from the Hub team about how to reduce plastic waste at work and at home:

  • Skip bottled water: Use a water filter (reverse osmosis, fridge filter, or even a Brita) to improve the taste and health of your tap water. At Impact Hub HNL we have filtered water on the fridge. Not only does bottled water have low ratings when it comes to safety and taste, Americans throw away about 38 billion plastic water bottles each year (that’s after accounting for recycling!).
  • BYO Cup & Mug: When you go to your favorite coffee shop, bring your own to-go mug. Not only does this keep your coffee warmer longer, it ensures that you’re not wasting the cup, the sleeve, and the lid for each cup you buy. At Impact Hub HNL, we have a huge collection of mugs and cups to use, so whether you’re drinking our free organic coffee & tea or getting it from the neighborhood cafes, we encourage you to use the mugs we have on the shelves. We also have kombucha and nitro cold-brew coffee on tap so you can sip sustainably all day long.
  • Skip the Straws: Unfortunately the straw ban just got kicked out of committee at the Hawaii Legislature, but the expanding ‘Straws Suck’ movement is gaining traction. Straws are unnecessary and often become waste littering our awesome beaches, so as much as possible, ask for NO straws at your next pau hana or lunch date. Remembering to say ‘no straw please’ is a conscious action that feels really good!

None of these options – avoiding plastic water bottles or banning straws – are necessarily going to solve our collective plastics pollution problem. But it helps! And knowing that each day you can make a conscious choice as a consumer to vote with your dollars and your actions to avoid single use plastic helps send a message to restaurants, shops, and yes, even government!