“Fund us like you want us to win…Fund us like you’ve already decided which side you’re on.”
—Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson
I’m at a conference called Grantmakers for Effective Organizations in Boston. The sessions have been packed and thought-provoking. This afternoon, a moderator introduced Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson’s talk on “What Winning Looks Like…” as “Raising Hell 101.” Later, Ash-Lee told us: “Don’t believe in solidarity. Do it.”
Her session, and the one before it with Ambar Cristina Hanson, frame what I’m taking away from this beautiful place. In the era we are in now, we need something more disciplined and useful than anger or good intentions. We need the willingness to act together when the times demand more of us.
Ambar spoke about disaster response and what it means to work at the speed of trust. She was one of the key organizers in Minnesota when communities were under direct threat through raids, detentions, racial profiling, and federal occupation. Her disaster was different from the kinds we’ve experienced in Hawaiʻi, but the deeper pattern was recognizable.
“Take a deep breath,” she said, as she told us not just the uwe wale nō, but also the deeper strategy: how people organized, moved quickly, saved lives, worked across communities, moved millions of dollars to urgent and emergent priorities, and what made that possible. She told us the whole story.
There is something true about crisis, whether it comes from weather, fire, flood, displacement, or government agents: community moves first. People call, organize, feed, protect, translate, shelter, accompany, dig deep, and make a way where official systems are too slow, too narrow, or too dangerous.
That is not a new lesson for Hawaiʻi. It is a mirror.
We have experienced this recently, and recently, and recently—fighting for ʻāina, responding to floods and fires, enduring our economy, protecting mauna, surviving daily. Here, we know that community is infrastructure. ʻĀina is infrastructure. Belonging is infrastructure.
The people who know the place, the families, the histories, the back roads, the streams, the winds, those clouds, the kūpuna, the uncles with trucks, the aunties with keys, the braddahs with machines, the practitioners with protocol, the neighbors who show up without being asked—this is part of how we survive and how we re-member community.
At this conference, hearing people like Ambar and Ash-Lee, I am reminded that in our way of surviving and re-membering, we are not alone. That gives me hope.
Sometimes philanthropy talks about resilience as if it is a quality that communities magically possess, rather than a practice people build through care, struggle, culture, and necessity. Communities should not have to experience many of the inequities and injustices that make us “resilient” in the first place.
I wish we did not have to have
so much grit. (So much ‘eha.)
So much “fuck you.” (So much anger.)
So much “we gettum.” (So much resignation.)
So much independence. (So much isolation.)
However, I also believe we have grown not just despite injustice, but because we have had to meet it.
In Hawaiʻi, resilience is not simply the ability to endure harm. It is the work of staying connected to our people and places in ways that make another future possible. It does not come without sacrifice. But creating safe spaces, responding and surviving together, changing outcomes, and caring for our neighbors—that is solidarity in action. It’s ea.
Ash-Lee is a lifetime organizer and former Co-Executive Director of the Highlander Research and Education Center, a nearly century-old movement school in Tennessee rooted in popular education, cultural work, and grassroots leadership. Aunty Pua spent meaningful time there, and she often shared how that experience helped shape her Building the Beloved Community curriculum. Hearing this wonderful person speak reminded me of how Aunty Pua maintained pono through her ‘oiai‘o. She wasn’t afraid to tell the truth.
You can feel the thread: people gathered in circle, learning from their own lives, finding language for what they already know, and building the courage to act together. Aunty’s work was never just about gathering people for one nice talk story. It intentional, everything. It was about re-membering who we are so we can do what is ours to do.
Ash-Lee spoke about Highlander being firebombed by a white nationalist in 2019. Their buildings burned, and still, that same day, they kept organizing.
Of their work, and the sector in general, she said:
“We did what we couldn’t afford NOT to do…We take risks, absorb the cost to do the work no one will do, where no one else will go, that no one will fund…
If you want people to have more power, self-determined futures, and to dismantle structures, then you have to fund differently.”
What would it take to meaningfully invest before crisis, not just after? What would it mean to support the backbone—the relationships, staff care, operating costs, safety, communications, organizing, legal help, healing, and rest—that makes movement possible? What if we got our bureaucracy out of the way and figured out how to move like wai, like waiwai?
Earlier sessions at GEO circled this too. Direct cash was not only about money; it was about power and breathing room for community. “How does an individual feel they have the power to change their neighborhood?” Capacity building was not only about organizational improvement; it was about leader wellbeing, healing, and peer support. “Leaders are human, not just roles.” …and more.
That feels important for Hawaiʻi too.
So many of our community efforts may not fit neatly into institutional ideas of readiness. They may be small, relational, place-based, stretched thin, or held together by bondo and duct tape and people whose kuleana far exceeds a job description. But they also hold the trust, cultural grounding, and community knowledge that become essential when things fall apart.
This does not mean we romanticize struggle. It asks us to be honest about it. How do we bring equity to that struggle? How do we de-center money while still supporting our people to live, well? How do we balance the seesaw so we can reach pono?
These are the questions I am carrying home.
Solidarity is not only agreement, empathy, or showing up after something terrible has happened. Solidarity is the daily practice of shaping reality together. It is throwing down with what we bring to the potluck, and being honest about what is missing from the pākaukau.
Community is connected to source. Funders have resources. We should not confuse the two. But if we are going to meet what is coming, we need both, in their right place.
Ambar told us that we need to prepare for disaster, because if we aren’t already experiencing it, we will soon. This is not living in fear. It is living in awareness. It is putting hands down, planting food, amending the soil, fixing our systems, caring for our people, and strengthening what actually holds us.
This trip reminds me that what we practice at home—community, ʻāina, belonging, kuleana, ea—is exactly what we need now. It is also something we can recognize in others building beloved community in their own places.
Maybe raising hell, making good trouble is not separate from aloha. Maybe it is what aloha requires in a time like this: to prepare, to protect, to fund, to show up, to (en)act.
Not just to believe in solidarity, but to do it.
Solidarity is a verb.
Photo taken 6/2/26 in Boston.