Introduction to the Hawaii Food Systems Leadership Series
The Hawaii Food Systems Leadership Series (HFSLS) is an initiative that convenes leaders across Hawaii’s food system to share perspectives, experiences, and insights that inform action toward improving food security, resilience, access, health, and economic development throughout the state.
Why we’re doing this
Hawaii imports an estimated 85 - 90% of its food. This single statistic shapes nearly every conversation about resilience, health, and economic opportunity for the islands. However, the work of changing it is spread across hundreds of organizations, agencies, and communities that rarely sit at the same table. Manufacturers, farmers, cooperatives, food hubs, nonprofits, funders, and agencies are all solving a piece of the puzzle but very rarely get a holistic view of how they connect with each other within the broader food system.
The Hawaii Food Systems Leadership Series exists to close that gap. It’s an ongoing initiative that brings together the thoughts and insights from leaders across Hawaii’s food system. The kind of knowledge that's practical and informs real action toward food security, resilience, access, health, and economic development throughout the state for the sector.
What the series is
The HFSLS is a collection of written perspectives from people across every part of Hawaii’s food system at every scale. Each piece in the series brings forward a leader’s experience on a specific challenge or opportunity such as building a cooperative, scaling a local product line, navigating policy, designing a program, financing infrastructure, or convening a community.
A few things define how we approach the development of each article in the series:
Cross-sector design: Food security in Hawaii is not a farming, business, or policy problem alone; it’s all of them at once. This series deliberately moves across producers, processors, distributors, nonprofits, funders, and government so that readers see the whole system rather than just a piece of it.
Grounded in practice: Each contribution comes from lived experience and is meant to be useful when food system leaders are making strategic decisions.
Honest about the hard parts: The most valuable lessons come from what didn’t work at first and this series makes room for honesty regarding constraints, tradeoffs, and the realities of building something in Hawaii’s food system.
How this helps leaders across the sector
Many of the people driving change in Hawaii’s food system are operating at the edge of their organization’s capacity. Many of the capabilities that leaders need to develop didn’t exist five years ago and they’re now challenged with the task of solving problems that have no established solution. HFSLS is built to support leaders and fill in the gaps of underdeveloped solutions and unknown environments.
For leaders, this series offers three things:
Shared language: When a manufacturer, a cooperative, and an agency can describe the same challenge in the same terms, collaboration gets dramatically easier. This series helps build that common vocabulary across sectors and organizations that don’t always speak to one another.
Pattern recognition: The series will provide a reference point to readers so that they can adapt different solutions and approaches to problems rather than inventing a solution from scratch.
Connection: Each article has a leader and an organization representing its experiences. The series is meant to surface who is doing what, and to make visible the relationships and connections that move work in Hawaii’s food system move forward, become more visible, and make growth possible.
Strategic Insight: At the forefront of this series is strategic insights that help leaders make decisions regarding Hawaii’s food system. Each article addresses a problem or opportunity and provides strategic insights designed to help inform organizational strategy and development.
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