About Hawaiʻi Community Journal
We are the journal for Hawaiʻi’s community.
Hawaiʻi Community Journal is Hawaiʻi’s place to explore solutions to our most pressing challenges. We are a public interest journal focused on helping people understand what responses are emerging, how they work in practice, and where they fall short so readers can decide for themselves how to engage.
We provide context, insight, and explanation that help people better understand the environmental and social systems shaping daily life in Hawaiʻi. Our work takes complexity seriously. We examine root causes, historical context, and the real-world responses communities are advancing, without pretending there are easy answers.
Our Mission
Our journal serves Hawaiʻi’s people and places by exploring the systems and solutions behind our most pressing issues.
Centering People and Places
We center people and places. Our reporting considers how decisions affect communities, ecosystems, and future generations. Grounded in care for community and ʻāina, we examine the systems that shape daily life, with attention to long term impacts, cultural context, and intergenerational responsibility.
Our journal embraces Hawaiʻi’s many communities. We bring together voices from across the islands, including those shaping decisions in government, business, and institutions, as well as residents, practitioners, culture bearers, and organizers rooted in place. By intentionally bridging perspectives inside decision making rooms and across neighborhoods and islands, we reflect Hawaiʻi as it was, is, and could be.
Our Roots: Overstory
Hawaiʻi Community Journal builds on the foundation of Overstory, Hawaiʻi’s first dedicated solutions journalism newsroom.
Overstory was founded through community listening and shaped by conversations with residents, practitioners, organizers and leaders about what information was missing, what felt unclear, and what would help people engage with the issues affecting their lives.
That work established an approach that:
- Centers Hawaiʻi’s people, cultures, and places
- Examines systems beyond symptoms
- Pairs challenges with credible responses and shared learning
- Builds trust through transparency, care and accountability
These principles continue to guide Hawaiʻi Community Journal today.
How We Work
We lead with our values. All content is guided by clear editorial standards grounded in our values, cultural respect, solutions journalism principles, and professional ethics. We take each piece through this filter before publishing.
- We center Hawaiʻi’s people and places.
- We are devoted to community benefit.
- We are informed by what came before us, but also innovate toward the future.
- We have integrity and behave with respect and authenticity.
- We are relational and have a shared responsibility for Hawaiʻi’s collective well-being.
We are collaborative. We work with journalists, guest and contributing editors, practitioners and community leaders, inviting insight from people working at critical junctions across Hawaiʻi.
We are focused on solutions. We examine how communities are responding to shared challenges and explore what is being tried, what’s working, what’s not, and what can be learned without advocacy or predetermined conclusions.
We are in service of an equitable and restorative Hawai‘i. Where:
- Native Hawaiians and kama‘āina can afford to stay and thrive here.
- ‘Ōlelo Hawai‘i and Hawaiian culture are flourishing.
- Hawai‘i’s land, water and air are healthy and have meaningful, reciprocal relationships with the people who call these islands home, and Native Hawaiian stewardship practices are abundant.
- All residents have equitable access to privileges and opportunities.
We publish information with nuance that encourages deep thinking and productive conversations. The types of pieces we publish include:
- Reporting on Hawaiʻi’s environmental and social systems and community responses
- Information and explainers that make complex issues more accessible
- Analysis connecting policy, practice, history and lived experience
- Short interviews and insights from people shaping decisions behind the scenes
- Collaborative pieces with strategic partners that broaden understanding and include expansive perspectives
We are independent, but also collaborative. We publish through a collaborative model, working with community partners, contributors and subject matter experts, while maintaining clear editorial independence. Collaboration expands whose knowledge is visible; independence ensures credibility, integrity, and trust.
Looking Ahead
When residents understand the systems shaping daily life, they have greater autonomy to shape the future of their communities.
Hawaiʻi Community Journal helps build this shared understanding so people can decide how to engage and come together to discuss challenges and differences constructively.
We look ahead to a Hawaiʻi where every community member can participate in decisions that affect their lives, because we believe in the capabilities of all people to create change.
About The Kūpaʻa Network
Hawaiʻi Community Journal is a program of The Kūpaʻa Network, a Hawaiʻi based nonprofit organization dedicated to increasing civic engagement and strengthening community resilience.