In the 20th century, Samoans, native Hawaiians, and Tongans gravitated to the area to seek a different sort of refuge. They soon found direction from a new priestly caste—a cosmopolitan group of football coaches who crafted a micro-culture of football excellence at and around Kahuku High School.

Over the decades, Kahuku has developed hundreds of collegiate and pro players, including winners of several Super Bowl rings. Just since 1999, Kahuku has played in 12 of Hawai‘i’s 19 state championship games, winning eight times.

Along the way, football became the North Shore’s civic cement.

This is a sports story that began with a sugar plantation and a Mormon temple. As the Kahuku Sugar Plantation fired up its boilers in 1890 and The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) built a temple in nearby La`ie in 1919, the area attracted an array of proletarian wayfarers, including Samoans, Tongans, and Mormons from Utah’s Great Basin. Driven by different agendas, plantation managers, and Mormon elders saw sport as a way to shape those they recruited to work and worship. These newcomers to the North Shore and their descendants embraced sport and built an ethos of their own.

Today Samoans constitute the most disproportionately overrepresented ethnic group in the NFL. This trend dates to the Samoans who began playing football on the North Shore before World War II, decades before their brethren in American Samoa adopted the game. Many were Mormons who came when the LDS decided to consolidate its La`ie beachhead with the new temple. Thirty-five miles north of Honolulu, the once aboriginal fishing village of La`ie sits between Hau`ula and Kahuku.

Hundreds of Samoan converts came to build the temple, making La`ie a close approximation of a Samoan village. They adapted on their own terms in a church-owned, plantation town, retaining a culture of fa`a Samoa—in the way of Samoa. The temple, the first dedicated outside the continental United States, became a gathering place for the faith’s South Pacific converts. One can hardly overstate its importance—a temple is the only place where the ordinances required for salvation can be conducted and redemption sought for family members who died before completing the sacraments.

The North Shore’s Samoan community expanded after the U.S. Navy closed its base in American Samoa in 1951, sending another wave of migrants to refuge in La`ie. Youth from the town of La`ie came together at Kahuku High with their counterparts from Hau`ula, Kahuku, and the more northern shorelines where the Banzai Pipeline attracts some of the most intrepid surfers in the world.

Football quickly became entrenched at Kahuku High. During the 1940s, coaches Mits Fujishige, a Japanese American, and Art Stranske, a Canadian expat, led the school to its first titles. And, in 1945, Alopati “Al” Loloati, born in Samoa and bred in La`ie, debuted with the Washington Redskins, becoming, with little fanfare, the first Samoan in the NFL.

The Polynesian wave that would reconfigure collegiate and pro ball was still decades away. But back on the North Shore, Kahuku’s teams were becoming more and more successful. In 1956, Kahuku won a state title under coach Harold Silva, a Portuguese American, who infused the program with a tough, principled athletic code and showed the community that its boys could compete with anybody in Hawai‘i.

With the sons and grandsons of earlier Samoan immigrants at its core, Kahuku became the first mostly Samoan squad anywhere in the world. As the sugar industry declined along the northern coast, football gave generations of boys a way to find their place in the world.

A few years after Silva retired, native son Famika Anae returned and became the first Samoan head coach at any level of the game. Famika was the son of a Mormon from Western Samoa who had answered the call to build the temple. Both Famika and his half-brother—that Samoan NFL pioneer Al Lolotai—were the products of La`ie’s tough blend of religion, fa`a Samoa culture, and football discipline.

Famika’s father was initially skeptical of the game’s value. “Can you eat the football?” he asked. Famika eventually would have an answer when the game took him to Brigham Young University, where he played on an athletic scholarship. Famika returned to Kahuku in 1966, believing that excelling at the game was a way for local boys to go to college.

Famika, who led Kahuku until 1972, won two titles and brought Samoan players to the fore. During the summer, he conducted clinics in American Samoa with Lolotai. Famika appreciated how growing up in Samoa readied boys for football. “A Samoan boy starts hard physical labor even before he reaches school age,” Famika explained. “He must climb a coconut tree 100 feet tall, barefoot and carrying a machete, tear the coconuts loose and even cut away the fronds… By the time a boy is ready for high school football, his muscles often are as defined as those of a weightlifter.”

For training and bonding, Famika took his Kahuku players to a nearby island, Lanai, which the Dole Company ran as a plantation. They picked pineapples for six weeks each summer and returned with money in their pockets, in shape to play. He knew how much that money meant to boys whose families lived so humbly.

Upholding fa`a Samoa on the North Shore was demanding. “It is very hard on a Samoan kid who doesn’t do well, or what his father thinks is well,” Famika acknowledged. “He is felt to have disgraced the family.” A tongue-lashing and beating were often his punishment. “A loss,” Famika said, “reflects on the parents, the chiefs, and the race.” As their coach, he channeled his boys’ fear of failure into a relentless attacking style. “Samoans are very physical people,” he underscored. “They simply can’t stand losing—either in sports or in life.”

Sport meant battle and players readied themselves for games by performing the siva tau, a war dance. Their younger fans made Kamehameha Highway, the only way out of town, a gauntlet for opposing teams, pelting buses with gravel and coral stones from the shadows.

In the 1990s, Kahuku often reached the championship but repeatedly lost to Honolulu’s Saint Louis School. To be crowned king of Hawaiian football, the school had to dethrone Saint Louis and its legendary coach Cal Lee, which had dominated state football for two decades.

In 2000, Kahuku was coached by Sivaki Livai, who had played for the school after migrating from Tonga. Thousands traveled to Honolulu for Kahuku’s championship game with Saint Louis. After Kahuku delivered a historic victory, a caravan of buses, cars, and pickups snaked its way northward past cheering crowds gathered along the black-topped road. The buses stopped in each town so that players could perform a siva tau. Arriving home after midnight, they were greeted by supporters basking in a sense of fulfillment.

Since 2000, Kahuku football has maintained an almost unrivaled level of excellence. It’s become the story that many tell about their town to the world, a story about people who work hard and play harder, who lose but persevere, and in the end are heralded for their accomplishments. The flow of boys to college football has not slackened and many use football to gain an education and launch careers in and out of sport.

“I don’t think there’s a high school program in the United States that has benefited more from sport than Kahuku,” Dr. Allen Anae, son of the former Kahuku coach Famika Anae, argues. Eighty percent of its current student body participates in interscholastic sports. “Now we have parents thinking, if I support my kids’ football—and not only football but women’s sports—they can get a college education,” Anae observed. Maybe you can eat that football after all.

The post Why Samoans Are So Overrepresented in the NFL appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Our lives back then shaped who we are today: It was about how we conduct ourselves and how we care for others, rather than how much money we make. Trust and responsibility weren’t just virtues that we strived for; they were a way of life.

While the plantation days and plantation towns are now long gone, we built Kahauiki Village to try to rekindle the spirit of those times and the soul of those towns to help solve one of our most difficult issues: homelessness.

Whether you’re a successful executive or someone without a roof over your head, you still share the need for dignity and a sense of community. As a community of single-family dwellings and duplexes, each with their own kitchens and bathrooms for homeless families with children, Kahauiki Village aspires to have that as its core. With an outpouring of support from people throughout Oahu, we broke ground on July 7, 2017.

Upon completion on January 12, 2018, as we gathered to welcome Kahauiki Village’s first families, I noticed a mother holding her son nearby. Instinctively I reached out and asked him to “come to Uncle.” As I held the boy in my arms and looked into his eyes, I saw myself. And I saw my brothers and sisters, my mother and father, my friends and all the others who grew up in the plantation towns of yesteryear. Our homes may have seemed shabby even by local standards, but they were our castles and we lived in our communities with pride. We had hope and we had the opportunity to dream big.

Photo courtesy of Aaron Yoshino.

That kind of upbringing was the inspiration for Kahauiki Village. At Kahauiki, we, the many stakeholders in the project, including contractors, supply houses, engineers, the state and city governments, and the homeless themselves, believe that a sense of community should be the starting point in addressing the day-to-day needs of those seeking comfort and shelter, and for providing long-term solutions for homelessness. This too can be a special place, fostering a sense of self-worth, self-reliance, and responsibility, where respect and civility are cherished values.

In imagining and designing Kahauiki Village, we created a community reminiscent of the plantation towns. We built a child care center and a preschool allowing parents to go to work. We built a convenience store operated by a trusted local market. We built a police rest station, a laundry facility, an onsite management and social services office, and community gardens for parents and children to grow their own vegetables. And as we complete our second and final phase, we will build a community recreation center and a playground. When we’re done, Kahauiki will house 54 percent of the homeless families on Oahu who currently are in transitional homes, according to projections by the Institute of Human Services.

It wasn’t easy getting Kahauiki Village off the ground. In the beginning, while we were still in the design stages of the project, we intended to do our diligence work under the radar. Our plan was to anticipate any obstacles and risks, design the village concept, and have a solid plan to pay for everything before we moved any further. Yet we also knew that all of this would be academic unless we removed the cost of the land from the equation. So with the support of the State Department of Land and Natural Resources, we petitioned the State’s Land Board for a dollar-a-year lease on an 11-acre surplus parcel at Keehi Lagoon. When our request was included on the docket for its scheduled hearing, the curtain was lifted. Our activities became public. Now we were open to public comment and media inquiries. There was no turning back.

Once Kahauiki Village went public, our path was clear: We had to stand together to see the project through to completion. In a close community like Hawai‘i, character and reputation are everything. Our state has long suffered fast talkers who bring in big ideas and leave behind nothing but lost dreams, bruised egos, and empty pockets. All talk and no follow-through—certainly we didn’t want to be tarred with the same brush, and so we committed to move forward together, at all costs.

We had started as a group of friends who wanted to build a housing project for homeless families, pro bono. But as our dream grew bigger, the time frame for execution grew shorter. Our project quickly became a design/build initiative, which means that we were designing and building the project at the same time.

Image courtesy of Duane Kurisu.

Gov. David Ige’s emergency proclamation in 2015, which allowed for building without permits to address the growing homeless population, included Kahauiki Village, its first non-government entity, as an exempt project. Armed with this untested executive order, we moved ahead, still uncertain of the development’s ultimate price tag. As the project’s leader, I accepted personal financial responsibility for building and completing Kahauiki Village and, as a result, I now felt the burden of the other participants’ reputations as well. It was a lonely and scary time.

But I soon realized that I was hardly alone. Every member of our founding team unselfishly invested inordinate amounts of energy and resources and enthusiastically bore a share of the burden. We were all in—together.

For me personally, it was a deeply emotional time. Life became a mix of great anxiety and tears of gratitude, as more and more people embraced our vision and joined our cause. Clearly, we were onto something. As the keeper of that vision and convener of stakeholders, I fought to overcome my fears of inadequacy, while following the compass of my heart to do the right thing regardless of cost. Together, unified in action, we found we trusted each other to the point where everyone could call their own shots. Miraculously, even as we worked independently on the many moving parts, we rarely stepped on each other’s toes.

But the “miracles” were just beginning, as many critical pieces began falling into place. From the beginning when we initially sat down to negotiate the terms of the ground lease with the city, we set up an informal partnership with key members of the city and county administration and continued to meet regularly to help navigate bureaucracy, interpret building code issues and state and city laws on the fly, and coordinate our responsibilities. This team enabled the design/build process to move so quickly that we sometimes had to ask the city to slow down! Still, as transparency and integrity became the hallmarks of this partnership, it seemed that nothing could slow us down for long.

When we determined that millions of dollars would be required to bring sewer and water services onto the property from nearby Sand Island, Mayor Kirk Caldwell agreed to step in and fund those connections.

Gov. Ige and Gen. Kenneth Hara mobilized the Hawai‘i National Guard to help with vertical construction of the homes.

We lowered costs and simplified construction by importing used emergency housing from Tohoku, Japan. With local materials and island design touches, these structures were then dramatically modified to achieve a Hawai‘i plantation-home feel.

Image courtesy of Duane Kurisu.

This meant changing the foundation from post and pier to concrete; changing the structure from a flat roof to a pitched roof that required trusses; installation of high-quality standing seam roofs to allow for solar panels to be secured with clips rather than having to puncture the roof; installation of metal framing and drywall to separate the rooms; insulation and a ceiling system in each home; changing the doors to meet code; building concrete landings; and putting in stoves and refrigerators and cabinet systems in the kitchen, and water closets, showers, and stand-alone sinks in the bathrooms.

Early on, businesses within walking distance of the development came forward to offer job training and employment to any adult from Kahauiki Village who needed work. Since the project is self-sustained by tenants who pay rent, every household must include at least one working adult.

In addition to facilitating employment with our new child care center and preschool, a regular city bus stop was installed right in front of Kahauiki Village. An elementary school is within walking distance.

InSynergy Engineering and PhotonWorks designed a power system so that Kahauiki Village can operate completely off the grid. Because electricity is included in each household’s rent, the photovoltaic system will help control the cost of power now and in the future.

Local agriculture leaders brought the Future Farmers of America to Kahauiki Village and are working together with the organization to build community gardens. Our goal is for every family to maintain a garden plot to grow their own vegetables.

Almost every day, new contributors—people from all walks of life—step forward to embrace our vision in some new way, helping to enhance the lives of those who call Kahauiki Village home. This is Hawai‘i at its best.

Image courtesy of Aaron Yoshino.

Everyone who has touched—and been touched by—Kahauiki Village, whether they built the homes, laid the pipes for the sprinkler system, planted grass and trees, or cleaned the floors, can feel proud. We started and finished Kahauiki Village in six months. Some 70 percent of the total cost of the project was funded by donations of cash, materials, and labor. And none of the core work of Kahauiki Village was done with construction contracts. It was all by commitment through handshake, something none of us have done before with this magnitude of work.

Families have quickly taken pride in and responsibility for the privilege of living in Kahauiki Village. There are 126 adults and children who currently live in Kahauiki who have formed a community association, which is taking initiatives with yard care, in coordinating adult escorts for children walking to school, and more.

Of course, Kahauiki Village isn’t a blanket solution. Elements like the home layouts, the working parent requirement, the child care center, and the preschool are applicable primarily to a community for homeless families with children. Homeless people affected by drug use and mental illness, for instance, as well as homeless youth, may need smaller quarters and shared kitchens, not to mention an extra investment in social services. Still, the lessons of Kahauiki Village—building community, removing the impediment of land acquisition costs, entering into public/private partnerships—can be essential tools for addressing the overall issue of homelessness.

It is our hope that others will use this template, which will certainly be easier to follow without the need for breaking new ground. Addressing homelessness is everyone’s responsibility, not just government’s. For our state to reach the heights we know are possible, we all need to rise together—the fortunate and the disenfranchised, the rich and the poor and the in-between, the power brokers and those who feel powerless. Sharing comes naturally to us in Hawai‘i. If we put our heads and hearts together and work toward a clear common goal, we can achieve almost anything.

Those of us who grew up on the plantations are indeed fortunate in our heritage. But then everyone who calls Hawai‘i home should be considered fortunate. That’s the spirit of this special place and its people. And that spirit is ours to share.

The post The Honolulu Homeless Project That Could Only Have Worked in Hawai‘i appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.