Hub Coworking Hawaii

Hawai‘i's Best Coworking Space

social impact

What We Stand For: Taking Climate Action Everyday

As part of the Impact Hub Global network, we have a shared vision for a better future for all. Recently, we made it official as a network to make sure we were accountable to our commitment. We’ve written before about our commitment to social impact, and about our commitment to sustainable development as guided by the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

 

sustainable development goals

Many in the network are deeply inspired by the current swell of climate action happening around the world, and thus global Impact Hub teams have committed to taking their climate action even further by committing to a new What We Stand For proclamation. This agreement gives guiding principles for how we can take climate action each day in our respective locations.

From the collective document, these are the commitments that network leaders have agreed to: 

  • Leveraging the power of our 16,000+ network of changemakers to showcase what is already being done, raise awareness and serve as inspiration for what can be done more.
  • Continue working towards less waste every day, and adding to our efforts of reducing our environmental footprint by having at least one #zerowaste day per month in our Impact Hubs, no matter what activities we are running.
  • We put the planet first by reflecting on how our operations are run, and whenever possible and available, we switch to more climate-friendly practices (reducing food waste, changing to renewable energy sources, avoid single-use plastic, etc.).
  • We share best practices and support each other in making those options available to others.
  • We commit to making conscious and environmental choices when traveling and always offsetting our carbon footprint when journeying to meet in person.

Dozens of other Impact Hub communities around the world committed to this including: Impact Hub Dresden, Yerevan, Hamburg, Budapest, Milano, Belgrade, Donostia, Torino, Prague, Brno, Ostrava, Bern, Tegucigalpa, Leipzig, Florence
Stuttgart, Bergen, Berlin, Trento, Bucharest, Amsterdam, Lisbon, San José, Phnom Penh, Málaga, Curitiba, Madrid, Ottawa, King’s Cross, and in the United States, Minneapolis-Saint Paul, Houston and Honolulu!

How can we implement some of these ideas in Honolulu?

Showcase What’s Being Done

We love to highlight our Member organizations and community groups that are striving for climate action, and by offering our space to those groups for events and membership, like Nicole Chatterson of Zero Waste Oahu, and other member organizations like Surfrider Oahu, Sustainable Coastlines Hawaii, and social impact organizations like Puuhonua o Waianae, Work Now Hawaii, ChangeWorks, FarmLink Hawaii, and more. We also host and promote events focused on climate action throughout the year.

Host a #zerowaste day per month

We are committed to reducing our waste in as many ways as possible. You may have seen the Bokashi bucket near the rubbish bins: this natural compost solution helps us reduce about 20 pounds of food waste each week. We have a collection of zero-waste solutions, like our kombucha, nitro coffee, and  beer on tap, along with reusable containers for meals and bags for shopping. We also require all event hosts to offer sustainable options (or use our kitchen items) for events. We have a strict policy about single use plastic water bottles, and they are not allowed at events. We are always seeking active solutions to reducing paper and other waste streams.

Put the planet first

Last year we swapped all lights for LED lights for lower energy use, and we have recently upgraded to ecobee thermostats making our temperature regulation more responsive, and thus more energy efficient.

Share best practices

We are active in the Impact Hub global community and seek to share our successes with our fellow members and support each other in making those options available to others.

Making conscious choices for travel

We do not yet have an active policy about this, but seems like now is the time to create it!

We are always open to suggestions from members and the community about how we can be a better local and global corporate citizen – so tell us – what commitments would you like us to take on to further our climate action?

Member Feature: Alex Teece of Dreamhouse Ewa Beach

Today we’re sharing a Member spotlight featuring one of our original members, Alex Teece. Alex is the founder of Dreamhouse ‘Ewa Beach, a public charter school focused on empowering homegrown leaders for our island community.

The mission of DreamHouse ‘Ewa Beach is to “[open] doors of opportunity through high expectations, consistent support, and a culture of achievement.” We chatted with Alex, the Chief Education Officer, to learn more about what he’s building and how his school hopes to bend the trajectories of our islands’ most disadvantaged children.

Andrea Bertoli (AB): Tell us more about the vision of the school? What does this charter school offer that’s different than the public schools available in Ewa Beach?

Alex Teece (AT): At the core of the vision is empowerment. We believe that children have incredible potential that can be unlocked through putting them in situations to develop positive practices and leadership skills. Our work is to build a culture and environment where developing unique, individual potential is a focus of every single day.

While we can’t speak to what all public schools in Hawai‘i offer, what we offer is a smaller environment that focuses on leadership and identity development with a core curriculum that is grounded in inquiry and personal growth. Our learning philosophy centers around children making choices, studying those choices, their impacts, and altering their decisions, behaviors, and life based on learning new things every day.

AB: How does this fit into the bigger picture of Hawaii’s school system? 

AT: Our hope is that DreamHouse ‘Ewa Beach becomes an example of how leadership and identity development can unlock academic potential in an unprecedented way in public school. We believe that children who are grounded in who they are, and feel like they are in charge of their lives and the trajectory of their lives, can perform better in their classes and schools.

We are small and nimble, and offer an opportunity to try new things in our school; we have the capability to find what works, revise it, share it, and scale. This is where we fit into the larger system and hopefully will be able to share and spread innovative solutions for our islands’ school.

AB: How did you get involved in education? Has this always been your passion?

AT: I joined Teach For America right from college, in 2008. I joined the organization because of my interest in positively affecting the lives of others. I did not see myself as a teacher or an educator really, but over the years I have been able to blend education, business, leadership, and community service into one. This is not only a passion project of mine, but it is my job, my work, my responsibility, and really, it is my calling.

AB:  You’ve just opened your doors for the first year of 6th grade students! Congratulations! What’s enrollment like and what are you goals for attendance?

The founding 6th grade class of DreamHouse Ewa Beach is 100 seats. Our goal is to provide an opportunity to all families who are interested in our school, but per our charter, we only have 100 spaces allocated to us each year. We do keep an active waitlist, and we will let families know if and when they are next up on the list if another student/family decides not to attend.

AB: What are some of the big wins you had this year and what are the goals for 2020? What good things can we expect in the coming years from Dreamhouse?

AT: Our big wins including hiring all of our founding team, finding and renovating a facility to launch, and most importantly – welcome 100 families in our founding class. 2020 will be the first year a class promotes from one grade to the next, and we will add a 7th grade; essentially we double in staff, students, space, and supplies – it is a big growth for the first year!

And there are more good things coming:

  • An innovative partnership with Good Clean Food Hawai‘i (healthy food for the kids!)
  • STAFF POSITIONS OPEN! We will be growing and hiring, so please have a look at our website to consider joining the team!
  • Changing locations – year two will feature us moving to our new space over in the Kalaeloa region of Kapolei – this will be our long-term home.
  • Children creating and leading change in Hawai‘i! Keep an eye on the socials (Facebook + Instagram) to see our keiki growing into impactful leaders across our islands.

Watch our video below to see Alex and the Dreamhouse kids in action:

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.

A Message from our Cofounder, Nam Vu, about our Wefunder Campaign

Those who know me closely know that I have a deep seated desire to help people that came out of my search for the meaning in life during my contemplative days in high school. I’ve always looked for ways to leave this world better than I found it and have been involved in various service activities. After a while, adulthood set in and service took a back seat to creating a comfortable life with the goal of one day having enough comfort to be able to dedicate service as a full time endeavor.

Then came Impact Hub Honolulu. Being a part of Impact Hub Honolulu has provided me with the opportunity to be of service and at the same time build a sustainable and thriving business. It is that dream that I think many of us have but didn’t think could be possible. At Impact Hub we can do well while doing good. It is possible.

We want to spread this message far and wide and help everyone do well while doing good. We recognize that it is much more difficult to think about and act on your intentions to do good in the world when you are struggling with rent and bills. Our approach is to help everyone to do well so that we can all do good and change the world.

By providing a place where our members can focus on their work and leaving the facilities needs to us, by providing mentorship and learning opportunities to grow their practice, by providing opportunities to join us in doing good, we hope to enable our members to make their own social impact; to democratize the work of social impact and put in in the hands of everyone to do their small share.

To help us spread this message, our plan is to build a network of 11 Impact Hubs across Hawaii to create a network of social entrepreneurs in Hawaii who join the over 15,000 social entrepreneurs that are already in the Impact Hub network, the largest network of social entrepreneurs in the world.

Today we publicly launch our Wefunder campaign to raise funds for our expansion plans. This is an investment NOT a donation. You will receive your money back through a revenue share plus a return. There is an early bird special for the first $125,000 invested.

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.

Please take a look and share widely. Together we can make change.