Inspiring Women
Who Make Hawai‘i
a Better Place

B randy Nālani McDougall believes poetry is far more than entertainment—it saves people. It saved her by providing an outlet for her to process and release past traumas, including sexual abuse and her father’s early death in a car accident.

McDougall is a poet, scholar, activist, mother, educator—the list goes on. And now, she’s been selected as Hawai‘i’s poet laureate. She succeeds the state’s first poet laureate, Kealoha, who held the title for the past decade. McDougall, who says poetry helps us to remember, understand, connect and release, writes commanding poems that push back on imperialism, militarism and colonialism. During her tenure, she plans to spearhead poetry readings and workshops at local
libraries and schools, including Hawaiian-language schools and special education programs. She also intends to work with community organizations across the Islands, including ones that support the transition out of incarceration. Her hope is to “change the idea that stories and poetry don’t matter, that they don’t have power, that they can’t change our world.”

Born and raised in Kula, Maui, McDougall, 46, is a “page poet,” focusing on words on a page as opposed to spoken words, and though she may be more on the quiet side, there’s no denying her impact. Like other Native Hawaiian activists—past and present—she conveys powerful messages. Her poems, teachings as an Indigenous studies professor at UH Mānoa and community work honor the ‘āina, and promote social and environmental justice and Hawaiian culture, language and history.

McDougall thinks about the people in Hawai‘i who have suppressed their stories for generations. “I think about how painful that must have been, not only for those communities, but for all of us who may have had the chance to learn from and connect with those stories,” she says.

Even during high school at Kamehameha, McDougall saw a lack of literature of, or by, people of color. So, she sought out the work of Kānaka Maoli and Pacific Islanders. This hunger for something that speaks to her life and her commitment to uncovering it has empowered her as a poet, she says. She reflects on past experiences in her poem “Tiny Rebellions,” part of her first collection titled The Salt-Wind, Ka Makani Pa‘akai. Her second collection, ‘Āina Hānau, Birth Land, will be released this summer, and is dedicated to her daughters.

“Our words are powerful, and therefore, we also need to reflect on, and understand, our kuleana in using them, to ensure that they always have our best intentions behind them, and that we understand that words also may have lives beyond us through the people they reach,” she says.

W e have marlin today, which is great for sashimi. We’re gonna have snappers like ‘ōpakapaka, and I just ordered Kona kampachi.” It’s just before New Year’s and Ashley Watts, owner of Local I‘a, is ticking off seafood that will be on the sashimi and poke platters customers have preordered. What’s not on her list are ‘ahi, hamachi and salmon—the usual suspects people in Hawai‘i associate with sashimi—so Watts doesn’t have many orders. “New Year’s is something that people want ‘ahi for, so it just goes in a circle,” she says. “But I have a feeling there’s a way to advertise and say, ‘If you want ‘ahi, please go somewhere else,’ without being a butthead about it.”

Year by year, Watts, 38, has been redirecting people’s tastes away from imports and an over-reliance on ‘ahi. Local I‘a is driven by sustainability: It sells seafood that locally based fishers catch in local waters. Almost all of it comes from small-boat day fishers; none is from trawlers or longliners, which can set thousands of hooks at a time. That doesn’t mean Watts doesn’t sell ‘ahi, just that when she does, it’s from trollers who catch the bigeye tuna and other deep-sea fish with poles trailing single hooks from the backs of their boats. And while she doesn’t always have ‘ahi, she never has imported fish like salmon or hamachi.

Business for a seafood purveyor who never knows whether she’ll have ‘ahi—or any species, unless it’s farm-raised like kampachi—hasn’t been easy. The part of Watts’ calling that led her to the ocean, that was easy. She grew up in the Florida Panhandle in a family of cattle ranchers, hunters and fishers; her grandfather grew most of the rest of what they ate. Her mother gave her long days at the beach looking for treasures, scooping up blue crabs in season, snorkeling for scallops in a nearby bay. When Watts started asking “why” questions, she got a microscope. It was natural that this sand-tousled child would become a marine scientist. A job as a longline fishing observer brought her to Hawai‘i, where she got an online master’s degree in engaging the community in marine conservation. That, she says, “was when I really realized what I was here to do. That’s when I decided I didn’t want to have a job where I wouldn’t be able to make that difference.”

She’s been at it about seven years. The slow process of developing trust and relationships with fishers was repeated with chefs and others, and went hand in hand with learning how to run a grassroots business. Watts started out buying catches from three or four fishers. Today she buys from a core of about 15, plus another 50 semiregulars, and wholesales to Farm Link Hawai‘i, Kahumana Organic Farms, and restaurants including Fête, Heyday, La Vie, Brick Fire Tavern and Mud Hen Water. Her 50 initial CSA—Community Supported Agriculture—subscriptions have quadrupled. She does catering, offering things like poke and gumbo, and sets up a weekly booth at the Sunday Mililani Farmers Market. On Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays she props a chalkboard menu of the day’s offerings outside Local I‘a’s kitchen in Kaimukī. And once a month she leads a class, in which she breaks down a whole fish and teaches people how to cook it.

“We are trying to change people’s behavior to eat what the ocean provides instead of having preconceived desires,” Watts says. “It’s shown me that it takes a community to make it through, and we have to help and support each other. And that’s what I’ve been trying to do.”

I t’s an exciting time to work in the climate sector, mainly because “It’s not its own sector anymore,” says Dawn Lippert, who has dedicated her career to fostering clean energy. “What’s critical right now is the idea that solving climate intersects with every industry. … Every job can be a climate job.” 

As CEO of Elemental Excelerator, a Honolulu nonprofit that funds tech companies and projects invested in climate repair, her message is clear: We—everyone, every industry—must commit to decarbonization. And not just for the sake of the Earth, but as a way to rectify social and environmental injustices that have impacted certain communities, such as Native Hawaiians, disproportionately.

Since the launch of Elemental Excelerator in 2009, the nonprofit has funded more than 150 technology companies in Hawai‘i and abroad. One of its latest success stories is a partnership it funded and facilitated between the Hawai‘i ‘Ulu Cooperative and Propagate that resulted in a $60 million federal grant to diversify and expand ‘ulu agroforestry production in the Islands, which will address food insecurity and help the local economy.

Through such initiatives, Lippert, 38, is committed to taking lessons learned locally and scaling them internationally, resolute in her belief that Hawai‘i’s innovative endeavors are models worth sharing beyond our Islands’ borders. “We want to be woven into the fabric of [global] transformation,” she says.

Lippert says the rest of the world also can learn from such local values as kuleana and working with a humble spirit, which she aims to instill in her own operations. “We can take the values of Hawai‘i and bring them elsewhere,” she says.

She is likewise passionate about diversity, equity and inclusion in the workplace, which means bringing more women into the industry. In 2010, she formed the local organization Women in Renewable Energy, or WiRE, with some “really extraordinary” women to enable more connectivity, relationships and professional development among women working toward local sustainability. WiRE now has more than 100 members.

One of the women Lippert asked to be on WiRE’s advisory board, Connie Lau, served as CEO of Hawaiian Electric Industries for 15 years. HEI was the founding corporate sponsor for Elemental Excelerator, and Lau also served on Elemental’s board. “Dawn has worked tirelessly to advance women as leaders in clean energy,” a traditionally male-dominated industry, by hiring mostly women to the Elemental Excelerator team, as well as looking specifically to fund startups headed by women, Lau says. Lau also nominated Lippert to be a Clean Energy Education and Empowerment ambassador, which recognizes role models for women seeking careers in clean energy. She was appointed to this role by the U.S. secretary of energy in October 2022.

Beyond widening the field for women, in 2021 Lippert co-founded the spinoff Earthshot Ventures, a for-profit venture capital company. “It’s also important to show you can raise capital for Hawai‘i” with a mix of local and foreign investors, which “creates dynamism,” she says.

Looking out a floor-to-ceiling window of Elemental Excelerator’s 12^th floor Downtown office, we see the mountains, the ocean and every building in between, including the Hawai‘i State Capitol. Lippert, who grew up in Seattle and started coming to Hawai‘i for work in grad school, points to the “totally unprecedented alignment” over the past few months between local and federal government and the private sector to address climate issues. This includes the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the CHIPS and Science Act and the Inflation Reduction Act, along with Gov. Josh Green’s clear climate focus (he proposed spending $100 million of the state’s budget on addressing climate change).

“That’s the context in which we’re working,” she says. “Because we’re an island, everything is already related,” and on a scale this small, it’s much quicker to show impacts across sectors. “It’s an incredible opportunity for Hawai‘i.”

P uanani Burgess begins with “guts on the table.” She says, “Hawaiians understand your deepest thinking comes from below your belly button, your na‘au.” Or, in English, “guts.” “I’m always trying to get people to go to the place of their gut and tell stories from there.” In her sessions, the stories start with names. “The nametag name is not enough. When you tell the story of your name, you tell the story about your family, what they hoped for you, you tell the story about your culture.” The second story is of your community, or of belonging; and the third, of your gift, or hope. As a facilitator, it helps her read the room. “I’m trying to understand who’s here and how are they showing up, from where their depth is and where their hope is,” she says. And as a group, it helps build “respect and appreciation for the way other people see things and how they come to see it that way.”

For the first 27 years of her life, she was Christabelle Yoshie. She was born in Wai‘anae in 1947 to a Hawaiian mother and Japanese father, and at that time, “a marriage between those races, at least for the Japanese side of it, was not comfortable,” she says. “So, my mother’s strategy in order to make me a part of my father’s family, was to name her child after her husband, Christopher Yoshiyuki Sonoda. And then she added Puanani,” so that it would be there if “that’s who you choose to be.” The first time Burgess used Puanani as her first name was on a job application for the Polynesian Cultural Center, so “they would know I was Polynesian,” she says with a laugh.

In addition to multiple names, Burgess has many titles: Zen Buddhist priest, poet, community leader, activist, aunty. (These days, she says, “Aunty Pua is my role. Every society needs elders. Aunty is an earned place.”) About 50 years ago, she worked to stop the military bombing of Kaho‘olawe and became an advocate for the Native Hawaiian community in other struggles. But a turning point came in the ’80s, during the West Beach (Ko Olina) conflict between the developers and community members. In the mediation facilitated by Tenshin Tanouye Roshi at the Chozen-ji temple in Kalihi, she went from seeing the Japanese-national owners of the development “as an enemy to be defeated at all costs,” to “watching the role of culture in the mediation and how that culture allows you to come to the middle where both exist, not necessarily in harmony, but respectfully,” she says. As a result of the conversations, funds were committed to community-based economic development and infrastructure, leading to initiatives including a mental health center and aquaculture project in Wai‘anae. Soon after the experience, Burgess began her training as a Buddhist priest, and has since spent her life deepening understanding and empathy in groups and developing processes she calls “building the beloved community.” She has brought this practice to countries from Romania to South Africa and across Hawai‘i’s institutions, from University of Hawai‘i campuses to the state Women’s Community Correctional Center.

“In building the beloved community, empathy is the core experience I wish people to have,” Burgess says. “A lot of people interpret empathy to mean that we are in agreement. But empathy really has nothing to do with agreement. I’m not looking for you to agree with me. I’m looking to understand so that even as we disagree, I can still respect you.”

Burgess’ work has been integrated into the first-year orientation at UH West O‘ahu, as well as a team dynamics course for students and professional development program for teachers. Katrina Abes, who helped bring Burgess’ processes to the campus, says, “When we’re working in groups or even in a classroom, we have this implied understanding that we know how to work in them. But we don’t have that skill building in how to work through conflict. So, using Aunty Pua’s framework, we begin to better understand how we work with others by understanding how we are ourselves.”