 This is Think Tech Hawaii, Community Matters here. Hey, welcome to Out and About on Think Tech Live, streaming network series broadcast from our downtown studio at Pioneer Plaza, the core of Honolulu. I'm your host, Winston Welch, and delighted you're joining us today where we're exploring a variety of topics, organization events, people who fuel them in our city, state, country, and world. And today we have a very special guest, which I'll get to in a moment, but just wanted to let you know any views or opinions expressed by me are strictly my own and not connected with any organization. That said, joining me in the studio today is Robert Gentry from the visitor Aloha Society of Hawaii, who's going to share with us about the society, its mission, history, and some of its stories, and also how we might get involved as volunteers. So with that, I'd like to welcome you to our show today. Thank you, Winston. It's a pleasure to be here. So tell me, I thought I would open with something that's just from the website, if I might, and talk about the VASH, or I guess we'll call it VASH Visitor Aloha Society of Hawaii. It says, while Hawaii remains one of the safest tourist destinations in the world, and our police and prosecutors do a fantastic job within the scope of available resources, we unfortunately will never prevent all crime against visitors. We must therefore ensure that each and every traumatized visitor receives timely assistance and experiences the true Aloha spirit of our people. VASH has demonstrated that committed and well-trained volunteers offer the most efficient and cost-effective way of delivering that service. The citizens of Hawaii are well aware of the enormous negative impact that crime has on our visitor industry, our state economy, and the future of our children and grandchildren. We're not only concerned, but want something done about it. Thousands of people are willing, given the opportunity to volunteer to reach out to these victims with caring Aloha. VASH provides them with that opportunity. It's simply a matter of Aloha, which is, after all, what most visitors come to Hawaii for in the first place. We, the people, our government, and visitor industry leaders cannot afford to disappoint them. So that is off the website. What would you add to that just immediately about the society? Well, I think that's a very good description of what the Visitor Aloha Society is all about. I would add that it's extremely important that whenever a visitor faces any kind of trauma, whether it be illness, death, or a robbery, or whatever, that they get the attention of a person who lives here in Honolulu, who cares about them, and wants to be sure that they leave here knowing that we care and want them back, and we want to send them with Aloha home. We kind of act. I kind of characterize this Winston-like. We're kind of like a friend of the family, in a sense, when you're here, especially if you've not been here before. You don't have contacts. You're alone. You can be scared. The situation you were in can be quite frightening. You need some emotional support and some guidance and just some help to get through the situation that you're in. And how does this even happen? How do you get contacted in the beginning? Is it through the police, or through a hotel, or how? All of that. We work very closely with the police department, the fire department, the hotel management staff, the hospitals even, and their social service people. We get referrals constantly from all of those places where the visitor may interact with the official Honolulu because of their situation. And that's when we get the call. OK, so typically maybe, let's say someone's car gets broken into and a police report is made. Would that fall under your purview, or is that not? Or that would not really? What would happen is that the police officer on the scene with the visitor, knowing that it's a visitor, would immediately notify us that he or she has a visitor victim and the police officer feels that we can be of help. So then we get that information right away. We get on the phone with the visitor. We assign a volunteer to work with that visitor throughout the rest of their time here while they get through that situation. OK, so it's just really a matter of course that you're automatically contacted when a visitor is involved. Well, the police officer has the discretion. OK, so if he sees someone's. But we have a great relationship with the HPD. And we help them, as they say. Because if they're doing that, the visitor is going to constantly go back to the police person or the police department for the kinds of things that aren't necessarily law enforcement oriented. And we can handle those things. Change a hotel, change an airline reservation, just help them with the machinations of getting through the trauma. Yeah, because fundamentally it's some sort of issue that's happened during their stay that could potentially or maybe just could ruin their vacation. And you're trying to take that situation and make a little bit of lemonade out of it. Oh yeah, they want to turn it around. Absolutely want to turn it around. Yeah, and you mentioned that you deal with other things as well, like in a very unfortunate instance that someone actually passes away on vacation. And I imagine that something like that has happened in the past or maybe somebody becomes seriously ill and they might be here alone or they might be just here with their spouse and they find themselves in the hospital. Would that be something where then you all would go to the hospitals and. Yes, yes, we do that all the time. I have a visitor I'm visiting at the hospital now who had to come off of a cruise ship because of a very serious infection and could not continue to travel and needed immediate attention. So, but it never been here before, frightened, anxious, not a US citizen, all of that kind of boiling up inside. And we come in comfort, we assure help with the relationship with the travel industry or the insurance industry or whatever we need to do to help them work through that particular trauma. Oh, boy. So when you say we, is this all volunteer effort or is there paid staff? Well, we have a small paid staff, yes. But the volunteer effort are basically most of the people that interact with the visitor in trauma. Our paid staff does too. We all do that. But being a volunteer based organization from the philosophy that you want to put peer with peer. You want to put somebody in the life of that traumatized victim who was there because he or she wants to be there. Not because they're always paid to be there. It just brings validity and authenticity to the kind of work that we're doing. Yeah. And I'm sure I know that your executive director is a terrific lady and sets a really great tone for the organization. Absolutely. And I'm sure Rich, and just Galani Rich, and hopefully we'll be able to have her on the show as well one day and come back because I know we're not going to be able to discuss all the issues that we need to today. And she has just such a warmth of aloha. And she sets that permeating throughout the organization and to all of the volunteers then. But then you are able to carry that through then to your visitor charges. Oh, absolutely. It's a quality of leadership that's extremely important in this kind of work. Without it, it wouldn't work. And Jessica has it down very well. And I think we could say that in any organization that it's always set at the top. Of course. And we can see all kinds of examples from positive to negative in that. So you are one of how many volunteers would you say? Well, we've got, I think on the books now, we must have a few dozen volunteers that come from a range of backgrounds, cultures, ethnicities, language abilities. We have to have a fairly large number because the visitor population is quite diverse. Sure, right. We have a lot of foreigners coming here, maybe not fluent in English. So some of your volunteers are fluent in English. And we're always looking for volunteers. And it's easy to, well, it's not necessarily easy if you're not the right kind of person. But it's easy to get involved in the process. The website that we have has a little application on it that one can complete. And submit that and start the process. OK, and that's just for the Visder Aloha Society of Hawaii.org. Right, simple as that. Spell it all out. Right. So when you get a call, I saw on the website that there are somewhere, probably on GuideStar, you guys have 2100 calls in 2015 for assistance. That's a lot of calls for a volunteer organization. And you're looking at maybe 150, 175 a month that's coming in. So every day, it's probably a day in, day out type of thing. I'm guessing that's it's pretty consistent. No, it's hour to hour. It's hour to hour. Some of us, if we see a cruise ship arriving into the harbor, we think, OK. Here it comes. Maybe we've got to be ready now. Maybe not. But maybe we have to be ready now. Vash is just celebrating its 20th anniversary here in the island. And we have helped approximately 35,000 visitors. So it's a huge operation. 35,000 people in 20 years that have come here had some traumatic experience or emotionally difficult experience, health, death, robbery, or whatever it was. And you all have stepped in and really provided friendship and comfort, moral support to see them through that hard period. So it's a really special person that can do that. And do you all come from backgrounds of psychological backgrounds or that you have some sort of pastoral training? Or is it just that you're loving, giving people to begin with and you naturally are drawn to this type of work? Well, I think each particular volunteer brings his or her own special skill, philosophy, and experience to the organization. My background was in higher education and city government. And so I had a lot of experience dealing with crisis among young people individually and in groups and in my city work, the same thing. So it didn't bother me to walk into a situation that was filled with emotion and problem solving. Right, so because you've been doing that sort of professionally in different capacities and so just going in there and working with someone individually is what you are doing anyway for part of your work. Yeah, part of my nature too. It's part of my nature. I don't run away from trauma or challenge. I run to it more. And that doesn't mean that every case we have could be a TV series. No, there are some that are very humorous and little and whatever and we solve them in a half an hour. But there are some that go on for a long period of time. I'm sure that they do. And I wonder have you kept in contact with some of these people that over the years that you've helped out or? Yes. Oh, so it must be very gratifying to hear things after the fact. What's gratifying is to know that you played a very small portion of their life. You came into their life for helping one particular thing and their lives are now back to normal and they want to share that joy with you also in addition to sharing the trauma that they had to share with you when they were going through it. That's nice to hear then. So you get a little bit of a sense of coming back to normalcy and then being able to share in that knowing you got a part in that, a major part in that. And we'll continue this in just a second. So I want to say we're taking a short break. I'm Winston Welch and this is Out and About on Think Tech Live Streaming Network Series. And we're talking with Bob Gentry from the Visitor Aloha Society of Hawaii. We'll be back in a minute or so. So please stay tuned for more of the story. This is Think Tech Hawaii raising public awareness. We're back. We're live. I'm Winston Welch and this is Out and About on Think Tech Live Streaming Network Series talking with Robert Gentry, Bob Gentry from the Visitor Aloha Society of Hawaii. So thank you again for being here with us today, Bob. I appreciate that and sharing with people about the very important mission of the Visitor Aloha Society of Hawaii. One of those sort of secret organizations that exist that just suddenly is there. It's like when you go to the hospital, you didn't even know that all these people existed, that these jobs existed. They just are miraculously there. So you're one of these miracle workers that comes in and just helps people through very difficult times. What is, so how did you find this organization? What drew you to this organization in the beginning? How did you stumble upon it or was it? Well, I stumbled upon it quite by chance, just seeing a piece in the paper about the organization and helping some visitors. I think there was highlighting a particular of young family who were involved in a light air crash here with some injuries, but not too serious. And I thought, well, this is something that I could certainly help with. So I got a note to Jessica and she said, yes, come on in, let's talk and the rest is history. And how long has that history been? I have been volunteering with the agency now for about 10 years. About 10 years, okay. So on average, how many times a month would you say you get a call? Is it, oh, can you come down and help us or meet so-and-so at Starbucks? That's a good question. It just, it really does depend on the month. I can go for a month without a call and I can go for a month with five or six or seven calls. It depends on what's happening with the visitor industry. And to me, it's not, the numbers aren't as important as the quality of service that we can provide the visitor. And it's good that we center on that because we are funded by the Hawaii Tourism Authority, primarily with some gifts, obviously, behind that as well. And any organization looks like you've got to have all these numbers to get your funding. And while that is important, with the Visitor Aloha Society, it's the quality of the interaction that's important. Why? Because in the visitor industry, word of mouth is extremely important. And if we have a visitor going back to Los Angeles, Madrid, Tokyo, whatever, saying that, yeah, we had a problem in Honolulu, but man, they really helped us out. We're going back. That does more than even a poor restaurant meal does damage. Yeah, right. So you're really part of the greater marketing for the visitor Aloha, visitor industry here in Hawaii. Well, I mean, if we are going to adopt Aloha as our purpose in our culture, and we do, we need to act on it. Yeah. And this organization acts on it. And this organization, it said it's about 20 years old. And so was it modeled after another organization or you connected with a larger international group? It came out of, as I understand it, I was not here when it was conceived here, but it came out of the Rotary Group. And it was born there by a couple of people and it was put together and grew and grew and grew. And here we are. Okay, so if I'm someone who's had an issue, I might've got to go to the police or maybe if something happened, I might go to the concierge or the hotel manager and or you might get a call from the hospital. As the years have gone by and you've had many probably really poignant experiences and been with people in times that most of us only might go through a couple of times in our lives, especially if you're thinking about situations in the hospital or that we'd rather not have, what are some of the most poignant experiences that you've had that have stuck with you or that people have come back with you and told you something later on that's been really meaningful for you significantly personally? The one thing that I think all of us here, Jessica and myself and other volunteers, the one thing that we hear is that if it wasn't for you, fill in the blank, I would not have gotten through that experience the way I did and I would not have healed the way I'm healing. Now that's not rocket science, it's just human to human caring and interaction plus a knowledge of the city and the state and where the resources are to help those people. And it is that simple. I mean, I remember a few years ago, I had a man and his wife and their adult daughter were vacationing here. The father died in this hotel room and they were obviously traumatized and in helping them, whenever we have a case like that, if I'm on it, I go to the hotel manager and say, I'm working with Mr. Jones and such and such, I want you to know that they had this trauma so and so died. When we went to this particular hotel and I just said that the same way and the hotel waived all of their charges and kept them in the hotel for several days while they were completing all of their necessary work to get the body where it was gonna go. And I just found that was such a wonderful expression of aloha from people that are just in the industry and we see that a lot. We see that a lot. People wanna step up, they wanna help. What can I do? How can I help this? A taxi driver that doesn't charge, you know? The airlines that make room for a passenger or help them in all kinds of ways. It's just kind of amazing to me how people really wanna assist one another. Well, and I think the mission statement that you just said, or it's on the website is that people are coming here for the experience of aloha. There's beautiful places where they can go everywhere in the world. And of course, one person's beauty is not another's. But I think we can all agree that Hawaii is amazingly beautiful. But it is the aloha spirit that they're coming here for. And they may find it in their ordinary course of driving around the islands or in their hotels or in the visitor industry. But you represent a really significant and meaningful part of that aloha experience. It's very fundamentally human when you're faced with a crisis or a situation like that. So I can imagine that you have really been and the other volunteers just a super resource. Like you said, you're marrying aloha with knowledge of how to connect people into the resources that they need here. So this is a really worthwhile and valuable organization. So I... And we mustn't forget that we're out here in the middle of the Pacific, too. We are one of the most isolated visitor spots on the planet. And that has a lot of impact on a visitor, no matter whether they're having a good time or a bad time. They know they're out here in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. So you mean as in the sense of isolation, is that they're feeling very far from wherever they're from? Yes, exactly. So psychologically, it may be more important here than say in Kansas City. No question. Oh, I think there's no question about that. Something that I wouldn't have thought of because this is our home. And so we know we're in the middle of the Pacific. So, yeah, that's really good. So tell me about some of the... That why you're supporting this group or do you support other groups as well? And you're a personal background. And you said you came from educational background and that you were involved in city work. Can you tell me about that? Sure. I was the mayor of my city in California, Laguna Beach, California, which is a resort town about halfway between LA and San Diego. And I did that role for 12 years while I was with the University of California as an associate dean of students. So I was just oriented to this kind of help, problem solving, supportive. It's just in my nature. It's in my DNA, as far as I can tell. And that draws me to this kind of activity. And yes, I'm involved in other things here in Honolulu. But they're all good and I enjoy them. A couple of boards, I'm on a couple of boards and that's fun and interesting, but it's all helping. To me, it's all helping. It's not a business oriented thing. I'm not good at that. I'm better at the human interaction and the human relations and the service oriented kind of activity. So you were dean and mayor at the same time. Yes, I was. I hope they were both paid. Yes, as mayor of the city of Laguna Beach, I earned $300 a month. Wow, so they were breaking the bank. Those jobs around the country are basically volunteer. That must have been really excellent training ground for you for a job like this because you've got a whole city where you've got potential issues. And I think about the tragedy in Las Vegas, what we had with that and how does even a city begin to cope with that? You have a small staff of people and I hope forbid that anything ever happened like that here, but did you offer support for Las Vegas in that episode? Did people from here fly over there or do you know if there was some concerted action for people to converge for various organizations like that? I understand there were some Red Cross volunteers that came from Honolulu to Las Vegas, but that's all that I do know. But I have been through that. We had an arson set fire in my city when I was in office that destroyed 450 homes, totally destroyed 450 homes. Well, that took a lot of putting back together and problem solving and getting folks in to be supportive and helpful. So when you go through those kinds of things, you don't get callous to it, but you realize that what needs to be delivered oftentimes is human to human contact and caring, which again is aloha. Well, it's aloha and we don't give lip service to it here. This is real. This is an organization that aloha is at its fundamental. We define it. You define it. You're the human expression of this for people who are coming to our islands to experience aloha. And I can't think of a better organization that I wanted to highlight to show just this amazing spirit that you represent, you're interested, you're interesting, you're a role model for me, you're a role model for everybody that you know, I'm sure that says, wow, this is a great guy doing great work in different organizations. And I suppose you would wholeheartedly encourage anyone who is interested to volunteer at the Visor aloha Society of the Way if they felt so inclined to help people and to help people in need that are, well, we'll call them what do we call not strangers, but friends that we haven't met yet. That's exactly right. Yeah, and then like you said, you get to maybe here later, not probably not all the time, but sometimes you get very gratifying letter saying, dear Bob, I just want to let you know how much you meant to me at that time. And I can't imagine that anything gives you a greater pleasure in life than when you're able to open that and read that. Well, what it does is it validates the work of the organization. That's right. And so it validates that and it says, okay, we need to continue because we are being told that we're doing the kind of work that needs to be done. And while we know that, it's always good to have it reflected back. And with that, I think that you have given us a great overview of the Visder Aloha Society. I'm sorry that we're out of time, but I hope you'll come back again. We can do a different show on different topics or perhaps again on the Visder Aloha Society of Hawaii. We're happy to. Okay, so we are out of time. Unfortunately, we've had a great visit here. I'm Winston Welch. This is out and about on Think Tech streaming network series. We've been talking with Robert Bob Gentry of the Visder Aloha Society of Hawaii. And it has been our great pleasure to have you here, Bob, and learn about this great organization. Thanks to our broadcast engineer, Ray Sengaling, our floor manager, Robert McLean, and to J. Fidel, our executive producer. Thanks for tuning in. We'll, yeah, now I welcome your feedback. I'll see you here every other Monday at three or so. I'll say we'll start at three o'clock. We'll start on time. And then catch us on the internet at any time. Welcome any of your comments or suggestions for shows on organizations, people, and events that you find interesting. Thanks, everyone, Aloha.