 Hello, and welcome to Power Up Hawaii, where Hawaii comes together to walk towards a clean, renewable, and just energy future. I am your host, Raya Salter. I'm an energy attorney, clean energy advocate, and community outreach specialist. I'm also the principal attorney of Imagine Power LLC. Power Up Hawaii is about a clean, renewable, and just energy future. To us here on the show, that means talking to all of the players who need to be engaged in the conversation, including those who don't currently have a seat at the energy policy table. Why is this important? A clean and just energy future means that all customers of electricity have access to clean, affordable, safe, and reliable power. This means access to clean generation and big improvements in energy efficiency. Remember, the goal is a Hawaii energy system transformed, one that is no longer dependent on expensive fossil fuel imports, crippling poor customers, and holding back the state's economy. Why else is this important? As utilities invest in new clean and renewable energy assets, customers have increasing power to control their energy usage through new technology, including smart thermostats and smart meters. Now there are apps and computer programs that allow customers to control their appliances and interact with the utility to choose different rate schemes. In addition, high-speed internet access will increasingly be used not only for providing energy services, but providing health care, social services, and other necessities of daily life. Of course, this also includes entertainment as well in communications. As interactivity with the internet, our devices and each other becomes more and more intertwined. Here is another big reason why this is important. All customers will pay for these investments through their utility rates. This means that all customers, be they rich, poor, or business customers, need to be engaged in the decisions that happen now around energy. So this is me speaking a bit to why it's so important to talk to all the folks who need to be in the energy conversation and those who may not yet be in the energy conversation and how can we make sure that everyone's at the table. So today we will speak to Curtis Kropar, Executive Director of Hawaiian Hope. Hawaiian Hope is a technology-based, non-profit organization with the objective to expose the community to and increase their familiarity with technology. Hawaiian Hope has locations and operations in town and on the west side. Welcome, Curtis. Thank you. Thank you. So, Curtis, please, why don't you introduce yourself and tell us about Hawaiian Hope and what you do? Well, first things from you have me on the show. Hawaiian Hope, we are a technology-based, non-profit organization, as you said. Our main objective is to expose the community to the technology. And basically we're a bunch of geeks that hope to make a difference in the impact in the community. Why? Well, why is it important that poor and vulnerable populations have access to computers? And do you, in fact, focus on providing access to poor and vulnerable populations? Yes. We have a couple of different programs and projects that we focus mostly on low-income communities. We have a project in Wynnei right now that is our Internet Cafe. And it is a public access facility. We have a bunch of computers set up. People can come in, get online. Actually, I believe maybe we may even have a couple of photos of some of your operations and... Yeah. There's the Internet Cafe. It's in Wynnei. All right. Please continue. Go ahead and continue. Yeah. Well, this particular location is really important because there's a lot of people in the area that it's relatively low-income area. And we've got a lot of homeless. Actually, this center out there also doubles as a homeless outreach service. And we have a bunch of people that come in and they get online, check their email, do job applications. And even people who are not homeless, they come in and use the computers constantly to print out documents they have may have a computer at home but don't have printers and you know. Why is it important that poor and vulnerable populations have access to computers? Well, you know, every time we hear, every day, we hear somebody complaining about the homeless. Those people need to go get a job. And the bottom line is now that a lot of jobs doesn't matter the expertise or the menialness of it. They require computers to use. And you know, if you work in checkout at McDonald's, if you're working checkout at Zippy's, if you're, you know, you're punching buttons, you're doing something where you're interacting with technology. And now even to just apply for the jobs, you have to apply online. I was at, I was walking through one of the plazas, you know, it's the ice cream shop, right? Nice. Hey. People know how to do this. They can figure out how to do the ice cream, right? There's a big help wanted sign in the window and it's, I swear, it's three feet by three feet big. Help wanted. There's this little sticky note says apply online. It's an ice cream shop. Isn't that something, actually, I believe we have a picture of a career fair, but you guys have. Can you tell us a bit about that? Oh yeah. This is the workforce career fair. Actually, the next one's coming up February 1st. Oh, fantastic. Yeah. This is the job fair is at the Blaisdell. We go and we set up about 40 computers at these events so people can come in, update the resumes. They can, you know, same thing, make updates, check their email, apply for a lot of jobs. Because even though you're at the job fair, you're at the job fair with 2, 300 recruiters, a lot of them, they still, they hand you a business card and say, here's our website, go apply online. So, you know, so yeah, we provide the computers, we provide the technology and the setup where people come in and, you know, do that. Yeah. And so, you guys also donate, you give computers. Yes. You donate computers. Yes, we do. We give away a bunch of computers. This photo here is one of our donations to the VA. Actually, it's the veterans. Fantastic. Veterans who are formerly homeless and they've now got housing and in part of that program, we work with the VA and they come down and pick up computers and they provide them to the vets at their new, at their new houses. That's fantastic. This photo here is, if you look at all that pile of stuff, that is 350 computers. And that is a single donation that came into us. And actually, that points out one of our key issues is physical space. We're like up to here with... You guys got tons of equipment and donations and so much. Well, that's fantastic. I'm so excited to hear about this work. So I want to speak a little bit to something that happened recently that I was privileged to be able to be a part of. So there's a terrific event that happened, Christmas Eve and Christmas Morning, which is where we met and I was a humble volunteer, which I appreciated very much. And it was an event called Home for the Holidays and I think we had, in the end, it was about 65 kids. About 65 kids were hosted who are facing housing insecurity, homeless living in shelters. And they came and they spent the night and had a lovely dinner. They spent the night and also had Christmas morning at this location with tons of gifts. It was a really wonderful event. And you set up a computer cafe for the kids. Could you tell us a bit about your involvement in Home for the Holidays? Well, I saw their event from last year. And as soon as I saw it, I just had to reach out and get involved with this because this is something that's very near to my heart. We've got a lot of kids out there that a lot of the homeless services are geared toward adults and people forget that there are children that are homeless. And a lot of times we're so focused on the adults and we're so focused on the fact that the adults issues, but the fact is there are plenty kids who are on the street on their own and they need some attention. So yeah, we got involved with this event and we set up a mini internet lab there. We had 12 computers set up. Same thing, the kids can come in, get online, do their Facebook, do their play games. Watch movies. We, in doing that, we also happened to monitor the amount of data, which surprised me. So when we do the job fairs, just as a comparison, when we do the job fairs, we go through about maybe four or five gig of data on 40 computers across the whole network. And at this event for Christmas, we burnt through 18 gig of data in less than 12 hours. Wow, on 12 computers. And it was pretty impressive. So yeah, the kids were having a blast there playing games and watching videos and it was fun. It was a lot of fun. The teens especially really enjoyed the computer center and you could just really see the young people getting a chance to really kind of relax and spend some time investigating the internet in peace. And I know that around three in the morning, I climbed onto one of those air mattresses and fell asleep. But I believe that you stayed up all night. Three, lightweight. Yeah, the kids, I think the last one finally went to sleep about five a.m. You know, about five a.m., the last one went to sleep. Well, I think one of the things, and I had wanted to share some videos, but one of the things that happened in the morning that I thought was so incredibly special was a really special gift from you to every single one of the children in attendance. Could you tell us a little bit about that? We wanted to really figure out how do we make the most impact for these kids? You know, not just something that's going to make them feel good for a few minutes or a day or so, but we want something to really, you know, show them first people are thinking about them, and two, is we want to give them something that's going to last, have an impact and give them opportunity. And so what we did was, and it wasn't just me, it was my crew, my volunteers, our volunteers. You know, we've got a bunch of people who work on projects like this all the time. And so, but what we did is we put together 60, 65 laptops, and every single child at the event got a laptop. So it was, it was, it was awesome. It was really awesome. Can I say, I just remembering, it was so special. The way, first of all, Nani Madeiros and her crew, they're just like Christmas heroes. Oh, yeah. It was the most lovely event. And she had so many gifts for the children. They had gift cards. I mean, they had everything that. The gift cards were a huge hit. Oh, yes. That was a huge hit. These kids got a true Christmas with really awesome gifts. And then the way she announced it with a surprise, you know, she was like, okay, guys, each and every one of you is going to get a laptop to take home. And just everyone started screaming. It was just the loveliest sort of Christmas morning thing for the young people. It was really nice and special. So I just, I just, I was glad to have met you and I'm glad we got to speak to that a bit. Sure. I know that there's a lot more that you guys do. Could you talk a little bit more about the services that you offer at these locations? I know you had the internet cafe in Waianae. You also, you operate also in town. We have our internet cafes in Waianae. It is, you know, full service, public access. We do photocopies and scanning and printing and all that stuff out there. And as far as you know, we're, we may be one of the only faxing services out like the entire coast. In town here, we have our tech center, which is right next to restaurant row. We're kind of across the street and that is our, well, it's our main donation center. Got it. It's our tech center. It's our inventory. It's my office and we appropriately call it the cave. We're in the basement of the building. There's no windows. There's no, uh, yeah, there's no sunlight. And most of the time the cell phones don't work because they built all these brand new buildings around us. So the phone service is like that. So it's not really an ideal location for a technology company. No. Well, you know, I think we are about to go to a short break. And when we come back, we can talk more about this location, more about what you do and how folks can help. Cool. Good afternoon. Howard Wiig, Code Green, ThinkTekHawaii.com. I appear on Mondays at 3 o'clock and my gig is energy efficiency doing more with less. So most cost effective way that we in Hawaii are going to achieve 100% clean energy by the year 2045. I look forward to being with you. Aloha. Hello. My name is Crystal. Let me tell you my talk show. I'm all about health. It's healthy to talk about sex. It's healthy to talk about things that people don't talk about. It's healthy to discuss things that you think are unhealthy because you need to talk about it. So I welcome you to watch Quok Talk and engage in some provocative discussions on things that do relate to healthy issues and have a well-balanced attitude in life. Join me. Hi. And welcome back to Power Up Hawaii, where Hawaii comes together to talk about a clean and just energy future. Today we're talking about the importance of computer and technology access for everyone, including poor and vulnerable populations on Oahu. I'm here with Curtis from Hawaiian Hope. Thank you. Welcome back, Curtis. Thanks, Romy. So when we went to the break, we were talking a bit about your location and you guys, you have your internet cafe out in Hawaii and I, and that is something, fact services. It's like no one even needs a fax machine anymore except for that like unbelievably urgent like fax to, you know, sometimes doctor's offices, sometimes government agencies, important applications. And so I think people don't think about, you know, what does it mean if people can't access these things? So you have this out in Waianae and then you have your service center down in town. So what do you guys do in town? This is where you get your donations? Yeah, it's where we get our donations. Again, we call it the cave. It is floor to ceiling computer equipment. We have, and I am not exaggerating this in the slightest, we have probably over 1300 computers in stock. Wow. It's, it is an awesome problem to have. I mean, as a nonprofit organization, we appreciate every single donation that we get, but it does create a logistics issue because it comes in faster than we can get it out of the door. So we have a crew of volunteers who work on the stuff almost every single day. And the donations come in, you know, you had that one picture up that that was one donation. It's 350 computers. Yeah. And yeah, it's great. Right. You know, and the funny thing is the week before that we gave away 22 computers and I was thrilled because we had an extra like four square feet of space. And you know, Actually, I'm interested to know, you know, so folks give these computers. So you guys then, I mean, is it sometimes a real challenge? I would think sometimes it's old technology, you have to load certain types of software on it. Is it difficult or challenging to refurbish? Do you need to pay licenses, computer licenses for software? Yeah. The most common issue that we run into is the fact that a lot of people, they pull the hard drives out of the computers before they give them to us. Everybody's so concerned with the data security and stuff, which is, you know, rightfully. So the thing is, we do a full day, we do a full drive wipe. We full do it's, it's a one of our requirements. We do a full drive wipe when everything then comes in. So even if somebody says, well, we just wiped that, we're going to do it again anyway. We get maybe 50% of the equipment that comes in from the personal donations don't have a hard drive in. Those are expensive. It's not really expensive. We can get them for about $15 each. But when you got to buy a thousand of them, that adds up real quick. And then on the laptops, usually when they pull the drive out of the laptop, it's also attached to the drive caddy. And so you have to go buy the drive caddy as well. Right. So it's interesting, you're talking about sort of all these pieces of the computer and a lot of folks, myself included, don't know very much about the guts of the computer. So I hear, I understand that part of the work you do. I mean, you can come down and volunteer with us. Because yeah, no, that's part of what we do. Part of the work that you do is help train folks to understand these so that they can then get work doing this. Could you tell us a bit about that? Well, first we have no paid staff. And so that's a key thing that a lot of people, I'd like them to understand that. All of our, everything we get done is through our effort of our volunteers. And so we have some very, very dedicated people who come in faithfully. And they work on stuff. And with this process, we take people who are low-income or homeless or who have a tremendous amount of experience. And we teach them technology. They teach them our procedures. And we go through and we work on the computers, take it apart, clean it, you know, test everything, test the drive, test the RAM, test the machine, put it back together, install the operating system. So from soup to nuts, folks get the opportunity to learn how to acquire these skills. Yeah. Yeah. Is there, can you maybe give us an example of how somebody was able to benefit from this training? Geez, that's a... Or a couple of examples. Big list. You know, yeah. That's great. That's a big list. We have people who volunteer with us that even as experienced technicians, they come in and because we work with a different segment of the population that a lot of other IT shops do, we do things differently. One of the things that we do is we can prevent a machine from getting infected with spyware, adware, junk viruses, you know. The antivirus programs are great, but they usually clean up the mess afterwards, right? So they are like, oh, hey, by the way, you got infected. You want us to do something about that? Whereas we set the computers up in a method that locks the machine down and prevents the accident from happening to begin with. And the main reason for that is that a lot of our population that we're giving equipment to, if something goes wrong with it, then we're not going to have the money to go get it fixed. So it has to stay working, right? And the majority of problems with computers now are software configuration issues. It's not the physical hardware that dies. It's something that gets messed up in the configuration. And so that's one of the big things that we stress a lot with our training program is prevention, you know, prevent the issue. And so the same way in looking at the physical hardware, we teach them, you know, we teach our volunteers what to look at, take a machine apart and literally look at the components on the inside. So have there been trainees who have been able to take those skills and transition them into the workforce? Yeah, yeah. Yes, we have. We have, we had a few of people who do that. The one gentleman in particular, he's been homeless, living in his van for 10 years. And he started volunteering with us. And now, I mean, he's not employed full time, but he now helps other people with computer questions and computer, you know, tech things and cleaning the viruses up and things like that. So he's making some money. That's fantastic. Where before he had no income whatsoever, you know, I would like to maybe do a side thing about our Internet Cafe, one of our success stories out there. Please, yes. One of our the same thing, people who volunteer with us, a lot of nonprofit organizations, when you volunteer with them, you know, they try to find stuff for you to do, right? Oh, maybe here. Oh, you know, here to clean this or here to do that. Sometimes it can be a challenge. Yeah, you know, meaningful. Yeah, and the people who volunteer with us, though, our objective, especially when you're working at our Internet Cafe, is to teach you how to run a business. So, you know, it's a full business model. It's a full for-profit, you know, environment where it's a, you know, we're a retail operation. And so we're teaching all of our volunteers how to work the front desk. I mean, you saw the photos, how to work the front desk, how to answer the phone, how to greet the customer, how to keep track of who's coming in the front door, how often they're coming in the sales of chips and soda and rotate the inventory and to place the inventory and to do the data reports and everything, right? Everything about running a retail environment. One of our volunteers, she's been living in her tent with her family for seven years. She's the victim of one of those reverse mortgage scams end up living in her tent because of that. They scammed her out of the house. And, but she hasn't had a job in years. And so she came volunteer with us about a year and a half. She was volunteering with us. And then she went to go apply for a job with 7-Eleven. She's got a full-time job with 7-Eleven. She went through their training course and she was so excited. She'd come back, like, you know, for the first three days of the training course, she goes, hey, they do these daily reports just like what we do. I just, and it's the same type, you know, and she's so excited because she's going through this training program and she's already knows how to do this stuff, right? And she understands it. I mean, clearly understands it. And, but she's telling me all these processes, like how they do things. And she's like, it's just like what you taught us. And it's like, well, that's the point, you know. That's right. And that really is stunning. And again, I know that sometimes I believe there's such a direct connection to engaging folks, everybody with technology and our clean energy transformation and helping the economy through helping folks get work is just one of those examples. And to me, it's interesting and meaningful because we need the folks who, like you, know how to provide these services to work with others who have more of that energy focus so we can bring all these pieces together at some point. Now, this is so interesting. So the work that you do, say at this cafe, you've got this whole model of operations. I understand that you're looking to help other organizations and nonprofits be able to do the same thing in a way that can also provide some income streams for Hawaiian hope. Could you tell me about that? One of our different ways of doing things is that, yes, we do work directly with clients and consumers who need services, so our other side of, our huge side of what we do is we provide services to other nonprofit organizations. So a lot of nonprofit organizations, when you look at them, they don't have a budget to have an IT department. They don't have a budget to have an IT person on staff, but that doesn't diminish the fact that they still need those services, they still need to get the computers and the network and everything else up and running. And so a lot of nonprofit organizations, they will contract with us and we are their IT department. And so we can provide them the computers, we can provide them the network, we can go through, set up their network and their infrastructure and their backups and take care of a lot of stuff for them. And the cool thing, like I said earlier, we've got 1,000 plus computers in stock. They got a machine stops working, okay, here, grab another one, put this in, okay, keep going. So it helps out a lot. The other thing which I would like to just mention which a lot of people are not aware of is many grants that are out there for nonprofit organizations, they don't cover technology. If you look at a lot of the grants that are out there, I mean, the grant application will specifically say, we don't pay for computers, updates, websites. That's infrastructure and that's part of your operation costs. And we don't pay for operation costs. Well, yeah, but you still need to get this stuff done. It's important that folks don't get left behind in getting computer access. And it's exciting because the more you guys diversify in the services you provide, the more training that the folks who volunteer can get. So we only have maybe about half a minute left, but how can folks help you guys at Hawaiian Hope? Well, we are always looking for volunteers. And right now we are definitely looking for some fundraising activity. Like I said before, just a lot of the stuff that we do is grants don't cover them. We have no government grants, not whatsoever. And so a lot of that stuff isn't covered by the grants anyway. So we're always looking for cash infusions and helping out with people coming in and volunteering their services as well. Okay, well, that is fantastic. I wanna thank you again, Curtis, for coming and joining us and talking about the great work you do. And that wraps up another edition of Power of Hawaii where Hawaii comes together to talk about a clean and just energy future. I'm your host, Raya Salter, Mahalo, and Aloha.