Poni o ʻIwa Puʻuhonua Foundation
Kealia · Kauaʻi
Poni o ʻIwa Puʻuhonua Foundation
Kealia · Kauaʻi
A Memorial Forest, a Food Forest, and a working community that supports them in the Kealia ahupuaʻa of Kauaʻi.
People don't want their name on a gravestone anymore, and they don't want their families walking through graveyards. They want their name on a tree, where their families can visit and honor them in a sacred Forest. That sacred Forest is the heart of it all, and it pays for everything else we are building.
The Foundation will plant two Forests on one grounds in the Kealia ahupuaʻa. The first is a Memorial Forest of living dedications: single trees, named family groves, benches beside the paths, and quiet shaded places set aside for remembering. The Forest holds names only; the Foundation conducts no interment of any kind. The place grows more beautiful every year the families return to it, and their dedications fund the construction and the operation of everything that follows.
The second is a Food Forest, farmed by the people who live on the grounds, feeding the community that tends it and sending its surplus to the tables of Kauaʻi. One Forest pays and one Forest feeds, and together they make the land work twice.
A gift here outlives its giver.
The tree keeps growing,
along with the good.
A chapel stands within the Memorial Forest: a simple sanctuary among the trees for services of remembrance, celebrations of life, and quiet reflection. Families gather there in every season, and the Forest holds the silence around it.
Kauaʻi has had no residential addiction treatment program since Hurricane ʻIniki destroyed the island's last one in 1992. The island built a treatment facility with public funds, and it stood for years without a residential operator; residents who need residential care still board an airplane to get it. The lesson is that a building is not a program. The Foundation begins with the program.
“The First Two Branches of the
Tree of Knowledge are
Personal Responsibility and
Accountability.”Poni Kamauʻu
Residents in recovery live and work as the community's workforce on the Delancey Street model, proven over fifty years: planting the groves, farming the Food Forest, and building the skills that stabilize their lives and empower their futures.
Twenty units house the staff the operation creates, forty adults and forty keiki, so the jobs the Foundation builds come with roofs on an island where its workers cannot otherwise afford to live.
“I ka wā ma mua, i ka wā ma hope.”Look to the past to prepare for the future. ʻŌlelo noʻeau
The kūpuna live on the grounds as its cultural anchors, carrying language, practice, and memory among the residents and the families whose names stand in the trees.
A full community, one hundred units, about 180 residents, on one shared grounds.
The Memorial Forest is the primary funding engine, and the answer to the obvious question.
Who is going to pay for it?
The Forest does.
Dedications finance construction and operations across a phased buildout, and the financial model projects self-sustaining operations by Year 5, with total development the model estimates at roughly $40 million, phased over ten years. The model further projects the recovery of invested capital, so that the Foundation can carry the same design to other islands and do this again.
E mau kahana ana.
Aʻole kūnana.
Embrace your shining moments.
Don't let them pass you by.Poni Kamauʻu
The Foundation carries the name and teachings of Poni Kamauʻu, Kumu Hula and Māmakakaua of the Royal Order of Kamehameha. Managing Director Kahu Lele Allen Huber was Poni's final student before his passing nearly two decades ago, and carries and practices Poni's teachings that are at the heart of the Foundation.
The Foundation is forming its founding circle now: the directors, advisors, and partners who will charter the entity, secure the land, and open the first groves. The Foundation is Hawaiian in its grounding: built to carry the culture forward as a living practice, in the name of a man who taught it all his life. Its doors are open to all, and no ancestry requirement applies to any village or any dedication in the Forest. We invite the people of Kauaʻi who build things that last to help build this one.
Kahu Lele Allen Huber, Managing Director
KahuLele.Allen@PonioIwa.org
808.635.5383