 My name is Ali Andrews and welcome back to the third installment of our new show, Energy Justice in Hawaii. Today we have the honor of talking to a community member and community leader spearheading a project in the energy justice realm. Her name is Dottie Kelly Paddock and she is the president of the Haula Community Association as well as the executive director of Huio Haula and we are going to hear from her today about a community resiliency hub community led project out in Haula. So Dottie, welcome, welcome today. Can you start by giving us a little bit of background, tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got involved in the work that you are doing. Okay, I'm an educator. I was in the field of disability studies for 40 years. And I lived in Haula for the last 30 years. So I always worked all the time and traveled a great deal and promised myself that when I retired, this is what I would do. I would work with the community. And so since about 2009, I've served on the neighborhood board and also worked very much with our Haula Community Association. Amazing. Well, that is an amazing background and I'm glad to hear that. Can you tell us a little bit about this community resiliency hub? And I think maybe back up a little bit for those on the line who do not know what a resiliency hub is. Could you tell us a little bit about what that is? And then maybe I'll ask you about how the idea started and how it worked. Well, a community resilience hub is many things to many people. The more I talk to people about a resilience hub, the more ideas I learn about what is being implemented in many parts of the country and the world. And I believe a resilience hub really needs to reflect first and foremost. The needs of the community that it serves. So that is why it's so very important to involve the community and every aspect of the planning for the resilience hub. On the Big Island, a resilience hub might be one thing. On Kauai, it might be another. And I've talked to people in all of those locations and many more. And I find that there are differences between every community. And that is OK. And that's to be expected. So our resilience hub in Ha'ula, Ha'ula is a very disadvantaged community in many ways. The homes are expected to not withstand a category one. At least 85% of our homes are expected to be destroyed in a category one. So we have been told for many years by the state and the city that when we have a major event that affects this island that we will be on our own for 30 days or more. And we are on one of the most at risk parts of Kamehameha Highway in the whole state with high erosion, sea level rise, extreme sea level rise, as well as landslides. Very old infrastructure. The bridges are 80 to 90 years old. So we know that Kamehameha Highway, our only way in and out of our communities, will most likely be shut down. And I'm concerned about that as well as the rest of the community. We know that we have to be self-sustaining at that point. So we know that our resilience hub will have to provide shelter first and foremost. We have no shelter in this whole area of Kuala Lua. That's about a 40-mile stretch between Waialua and Kani'oi. So we're right in sandwiched in between those two locations and not one shelter here. Why? It's because, well, these communities are very close to the water. And there's very little distance between the mountains and the ocean here. So most major buildings or schools are right along the ocean. Excuse me. And so we know that we need a shelter. But we also need power, water, food, medical services, and communication services. These will be our critical lifelines in an emergency. And we also want to be sure that we add a dialysis unit. There's not one dialysis unit on this side of the island. And many, many people will need that service or they will die. So it's pretty clear to us what the needs are. That's amazing. That's amazing to recognize and also scary to recognize the vulnerability of parts of our island. I'm curious, was there any event in particular that made you and your community members aware of this need for resilience or kind of a growing understanding of climate change and its effects? I'm curious the backstriping. I remember that like yesterday, really, it was a very powerful event. Actually, it was the tsunami in Japan in 2011. The earthquake made a tsunami. We all saw that tsunami on TV in 2011. And I was serving on the neighborhood board then for Kola Loa. And a person from our community got up and he said, I'm concerned. I saw the tsunami on TV. What is our plan in Ha'ula when we have a major disaster? What are we going to do? Do we have a plan? And I was fairly new to the neighborhood board. And all my colleagues representing other communities there said, well, we have our plan. Ha'ula will have to get their own plan. And we took that seriously as well. Oh gee, we're working on our own here within Kola Loa. So we decided we would get a plan. And I lassoed the gentleman in the room who asked that question. He was a retired colonel. And I said, you know, you could really help out. We're going to have to do this. And he did for many, many years. He worked with the community. We created something called our help team, Ha'ula emergency leadership preparedness team. And we have done a lot of things along the way. You know, we've gone through all kinds of trainings with Red Cross civil defense way back then. That's what it was called. University of Hawaii did training with us, their national training center there, as well as FEMA has been training. So we've had a lot of training. We've done risk analysis. We know what we need and we feel certain about these things. And along the way, I realized we needed to promote this and let everyone know. So we, through the neighborhood board, submitted a resolution that was passed unanimously in 2014 to request the city to provide us some funding for a feasibility study, possibly an EA and design of a structure bar as a shelter. And unanimously passed through our Kuala Lumpur neighborhood board. But and the funds were set aside in the budget, but the funds were never released. That's happened, happens a lot to us. The funds weren't released. And so we kept looking for money and support to get that to happen for many, many years, obviously. And when I heard Josh Standrow in a conference in 2018, talk about building resilience on the island and developing a resilience plan called OLA. I just grabbed him and I said, if you're going to do what you say you're going to do, then we want Ha'ula to be part of that. We are a small rural coastal community and we need your support. So, magically, he did invite me to come and participate in that process. And it was an amazing process that they put together at the city level. We participated in numerous meetings. Interestingly, I found myself in a small working group of 30, and I was the only person at the table who was from a small rural remote community. So I'm not very shy. So I told them upfront, I said, you're going to be hearing a lot from me in this meeting because I recognize I'm the only one at the table from a small remote community and rural community. And I'm going to have to speak for everybody from communities like mine. And so I did. And we were all asked to put proposals in. And our proposal was to have a resilience hub. By then I had learned the name that people were using. So instead of shelter, we decided to put in the terminology of resilience hub. And our plan, and now in the OLA plan, Action 15, there's to be a network of resilience hubs around the island of O'ahu. And the first one will be built in Ha'ula. That is amazing. What a journey from a single question that led into a series of events. And I think something that you touched on just a moment ago about whose voices are in the room and whose voices are leading the design of different physical facilities, as well as processes and how we value and what we protect. I think that's a theme throughout our conversations on this show in particular. I'm wondering if you can share a little bit more about like, what does that look like to be a community led effort? What, who is on the help task force group? And kind of what does that decision making about how to proceed? What does that look like? Can you tell us more? For sure. Our health team has about 10 different task force. One of them is on our resilience hub. And I actually lead that task force. And we've created a management team a few years ago, probably in 2017, where we at the time thought we had a state GIA to proceed with the EA and design and that fell through. So we ended up running into COVID with our next application. So we soon found that we got a lot of support from the community and from experts from all over the world. We are working with a design architect from New York. And he's been working with us pro bono for three years and a videographer and other people who jump on the team just to support and help us out. And that feels really good. But I know that we've got to get this done. We are working, of course, with the city and the state to put in what we call a FEMA grant, which is a new grant that FEMA has started. It's called Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities. It's exactly what we need. And FEMA will actually triple the local contribution for that grant. So if we can raise five million here in this state locally and commit that to this project, they triple that amount. They give us 15 million for this application. And of course, we put in the five and that would be 20 million. That might just do it. But what we've got to do is work really hard on this next application. We actually had an application this past year. But our state and city building codes were too low. We were actually on a FEMA blacklist. And that really was that we lost 30 points immediately just because that happened. And that was a real problem in getting funded. So we believe we'll do much better this year. And we are very, very helpful that we can raise our local match so that we can get the full amount from FEMA that we need to really do a good job of this. We have 25,000 people in Kuala Lumpur. This is not just for Hau'ula. It's for the whole district. And in order to shelter 2,000 people, we need a big facility. And you have to have people spread out. You can't put 2,000 people in one room, obviously. So you have to have several spaces that will accommodate them. Absolutely. That sounds like quite a challenging design problem. And that's amazing that you have been able to secure advice and support from outside entities. I'm wondering, I would love to know just from a personal perspective, I'm really curious about community design work. And I just started to get into the importance of what community input, what specific questions and considerations and new ideas that community members come up with that outside individuals, no matter how much training they might have in a formal sense. They can never really recreate that knowledge that is held locally within community members, particularly around this idea of emergencies and coming together and resilience. Like, those are all things that depend on knowing the social context and also the physical context in which these things are built. I'm wondering if you can share a little bit about, like, I think I've heard that your design process is particularly community facing and engaging local members. And I'm sure that's been hard during COVID. But can you tell us a little bit about that design process itself? Yeah, you know, actually, we really started reaching out to the community since 2014 to get their ideas. We really accelerated that effort more recently. But when we first started, we went out to every community to their community association, sat down with them and talked about what could this be? You know, and they provided a lot of really good input. And even though that was many years ago, I collected that and I kept talking to those people who were most interested in that. We also took the information to our neighborhood board. And that really got the information out to a lot of people because the meetings are on Olalo. And so they're televised and more people can learn about that. So people constantly contacted us and gave input. People really were interested. And in November of 2020, we disseminated a lot of information that we were going to have a meeting and it was on Facebook and flyers. And we walked around the streets and shared this as well as with the neighborhood board again and encouraged people to please come or be involved virtually. You know, this virtual thing was kind of new for all of us doing this. But by that time, we had realized at our community center that we manage on behalf of the city and County of Honolulu that we needed to invest in big TV sets so we could do a lot of zooming and we've really gotten our money's worth. And that meeting really taxed the whole system because every meeting room in our community center had a big TV and we were able to zoom the people in who weren't comfortable, couldn't come for one reason or another. And so we had a total of about 100 community members and stakeholders. When I say stakeholder, I'm talking about people whose organizations are agencies that have promised that they want to be involved in this first hand, like Kahuku Medical Center up the road from us. They will have a clinic, a medical clinic and dialysis unit in this facility in this new resilience hub. And when we're community college, the other way down the road towards Connie, oh, they've also said they want to run a satellite program there to work with our community and provide them with a lot more services than we're getting now. So there are Verizon, for instance, has signed on and they will be putting a Verizon tower at the building. So there are many major companies or organizations that are coming on and are going to partner with us. And we're very excited about that. So the community is major in this whole design process. And people showed up. We had people for four days learning first hand from experts about our major, our most major and terrifying kind of disaster might be a tsunami or a hurricane. And hurricanes can both of those disasters can be terribly destructive. And so we wanted people to know what would happen, really. And so people learned about that first. And then they were asked to plan in what we call small talking circles. And we grouped people groups of, say, seven to ten in a talking circle who would with a facilitator to keep things rolling and going around that talking circle, being sure that everybody had an opportunity to participate fully. And that talking circle worked together for most of the morning of the two or four to four days. And then they came back as a group with a big layout and a plan for the whole site. So that and then they had a reporter from each group that would present to the larger group and tell us exactly what they wanted on the whole property. So it was not just the building, but also all the services and the types of support services like food, medical communication, water, power and and and how how we should, you know, look into the best technology possible for all of those things. Wow, that is an amazing design process that sounds like it would be really valuable to participate in as a community member. It sounds like there were lots of places to be heard and collaborate. And those small groups I really have found have been some of the most generative in terms of like people getting to make plans. It sounds like you got a lot out of that process. But yeah, there were there were a lot of people who were speaking from their heart, but also a lot of very technical people who, you know, had had very specific ideas about what was needed, what was necessary. And Ilya Asaroff, one of the facilitators the architect from New York was with us and he worked very hard on capturing everything that was said in all of those groups. And we now have an excellent report that has has put all of that on paper so that we have it to reflect on as we actually do the design of the facility. So we can be sure that not only the facility, but the grounds include all the aspects of the needs of the community. That is amazing. Yeah, that documentation and not only having space to make your voice heard, but know that it is being collected and will impact the design equally important. That's amazing. The other exciting thing about that is we did reach out to youth as well, because we we feel we know that this building will be a building for a hundred years. It's really for our children and their children. And so we wanted youth involved in this effort so they could one think about their generation and the needs of their generation as well as know that this is coming. And remember when it does come, I was part of this and that was important. We we have a few more minutes with you, Dottie. If we have any listeners who want to ask Dottie a question, you can type really quickly to questions at thinktechkawaii.com. Otherwise, I get to ask all the questions, which is also fun. Dottie, I'm curious. You've mentioned a little bit about where you guys are at in the process now. It sounds like you have a design and you need to be applying for the potential funding. Can you give us a little bit of an update on next steps and then also if you could share with us if there's any way that if our listeners have been inspired by what you are telling us, is there any way we can support you in your amazing work? Well, yes, you could support us a lot. First of all, we since we have almost a year with our next application goes in on the FEMA schedule is a January. We want to make really good use of the time now. And one thing that has happened is the property where the resilience hub will be built is owned by the State Department of Land and Natural Resources. They've given us a right of entry as of last September. And the community was permitted to work on the land to remove invasive species. So this community has really come out with a lot of volunteers to do that. And it's amazing what a community can do. And they have cleared all of the low lands. And we are now looking at some need for more technical instruction on the higher lands. We want to be sure that we do this right. We don't want to remove too much from the hillsides. And we want to be sure that we're not creating more of a problem than a help. So we need some technical assistance from arborists, perhaps are people who are from botanical gardens to help us because we are wanting to remove most of the invasive species there. Things that are in the way. And we also plan long range to have agroforestry on this five acres. So not only the building, but we want to grow our own food there and have a food hub for the communities here and and encourage people to eat and fresh local foods and grow as much as possible themselves. So we also want to get the the environmental assessment and design work done. So we are encouraging the city to release some of the funding that they have already set aside for this process and go ahead and help us get this EA, the environmental assessment, done. And some of the design work is also necessary to do that. We would like to use the most of the time so that we are ready. And in our next application, we can say that these steps have been taken and we're this far along and it will make it a much stronger application. And I hope that we can do that. There was a partial environmental assessment done because this was a site where the city was going to put our new local fire station. But they ended up moving it to a new site, a different site. So we have the beginnings of an environmental assessment and we believe we can build on that and we would really like help to do that. That's amazing, Dolly. I'm sorry that I left you. My internet is trouble this evening, but I'm I'm back and I'm sorry. Did you share with folks who are listening how they can get involved? Like if there's a website or a there is a website and you can go to our website. It's a brand new website, actually. It's called Huey H-U-I-O Haula. So H-U-I-O-H-A-U-U-L-A.org. So go there. There is a way that you can send me a message if you want to make a contribution, a money contribution. That's great. If you're if you know Mayor Balgiardi, you could talk to him and ask him to help us release that money. So there are all kinds of things you could do if you're an expert in any of these areas of environmental design, or help us look at the site and figure out where we go next as a community because we've committed one hundred and twenty thousand dollars worth of work to be done there and we want to finish that up. We've done a lot and but we could do some more, I think. And so we need some expert advice on the best steps to take from this point on. Amazing. Thank you for sharing that, Dabi. That sounds like an amazing opportunity to get involved. And thank you so much for joining us today on energy justice in Hawaii. Your work is so important, not just bringing resiliency to disadvantaged areas of our state, as well as bringing the community voice into that design process to make sure that project is the most effective one possible. Thank you so much. And I'm looking forward to keeping an eye out for when the resiliency hub starts construction. That sounds exciting in the future. Well, thank you very much for this opportunity to talk. I I'm I looked up your organization online and I'm excited about what you're doing. And I really want to learn what you're doing in Moa Ka'i and and and find out more about what what kinds of services and and when not all you can share as well. So we we all thank you for this opportunity. Yeah, thanks, Dabi. All right, we'll have you back on in in in a little bit to hear more about your progress. OK, thank you.