‘Elepaio Social Services featured in KHON2’s Empowered Hawaiʻi Series

As climate change intensifies the storms and natural disasters threatening Hawaiʻi, an uncomfortable question hangs over island life: how prepared are we really?

Sitting in the middle of the Pacific, Hawaiʻi imports roughly 95 percent of its food, and at any given moment, the islands hold only a few days of fresh supply.

In this episode of Empowered, we travel to the Waiʻanae Coast, one of the most isolated and vulnerable communities on Oʻahu, to meet the people working to make sure that when disaster strikes, no one goes without. We begin at the Waiʻanae Coast Comprehensive Health Center with Alicia Higa, Chief Health Equity Officer and Executive Director of ʻElepaio Social Services.

Higa shows us the community's Pre-Covery Pods, emergency food caches pre-positioned to feed the coast in the critical days after a disaster, when outside help can be slow to arrive. But her vision reaches well beyond bottled water and freeze-dried meals. Drawing on a childhood memory of riding out Hurricane ʻIwa, Higa shares her plan for a community resilience hub and a food sovereignty movement built on a simple idea: the surest way to feed Waiʻanae is to grow more food right here at home.

We also hear from Jesse Mikasobe-Keali‘inohomoku, Indigenous Food System Manager at ʻElepaio Social Services. Mikasobe-Keali‘inohomoku is helping families plant canoe crops like kalo and ʻulu in their own backyards, guided by the wisdom of kupuna and the rhythm of the seasons. By propagating native plants, sharing the stories behind them, and connecting neighbors through community trade, his work turns food security into something rooted, cultural and lasting.

From emergency pods to backyard gardens, this episode of Empowered shows how the Waiʻanae Coast is building a more resilient, self-reliant future, one seed and one neighbor at a time.