 I'm Rusty Komori, and this is Beyond the Lines on Think Tech, Hawaii. I was the head coach of the Punahou Boys Varsity Tennis Team for 22 years, and we were fortunate to win 22 consecutive state championships. This show is based on my books, Beyond the Lines and Beyond the Game, and it's about leadership, character, and creating a superior culture of excellence. My special guest today is the president and CEO of our Boys and Girls Club of Hawaii. She is Patti Kauhane, and today we are going beyond youth programs. Hey, Patti, welcome to Beyond the Lines. Thank you, Rusty, Aloha, and I'm just so grateful for this opportunity. Patti, you have been such a great leader of our Boys and Girls Club, and I wanna first ask you if you can share a bit about your background. Oh, I'd be happy to. I'm native Hawaiian, and I was born in Honolulu, and my mom was a Canadian lady who had her senior high school year in Honolulu, met my dad, who was one of the original Waikiki Beach Boys, and they ended up getting married, had myself and my brother and sister, and they stayed together for a little while, and then they ended up, the marriage didn't work, so I ended up moving back to Canada with my mom and my siblings, and I grew up in Canada in the West Coast of British Columbia, and I had a wonderful upbringing. I had my formal education was in Canada, but we always had our family in Hawaii as well that we were able to have the best of both worlds growing up, and it was a wonderful way to grow up to really appreciate the cultures and the values from two different countries and multiple ethnicities, and it was just such a blessing to be able to grow up that way. My family's huge in Canada, it's huge in Hawaii, and it's just, they're a joy, and my life has been so blessed because of them. Patty, I absolutely love Canada. I love that Vancouver, Whistler area, oh my goodness, and Patty, what kind of jobs did you have before becoming president and CEO of Boys and Girls Club? So I went to school in Canada to become an accountant. I got my degree as a certified general accountant, and I also went to a technical school to get a business certification, so I always knew that working with numbers was my passion, and then I tried to marry it with the goals of having nonprofit work. So I've, at 35 years, I've worked in nonprofits in Canada. I worked for a wonderful organization that cared for very disabled children, physically, mentally disabled, they lived in homes, and so I was the controller for them for a long time. And then when we decided to relocate back to Hawaii in 2008, we moved here, and I immediately started working with Life Foundation. So there are the sort of the AIDS and HIV prevention organization, which I was so proud to work for. After that, I went to the Bishop Museum. I was a senior vice president and CFO for the Bishop Museum, and then I ended up at the Beautiful Boys and Girls Club. Well, Patty, wherever you have been, you've been making such a big positive impact in the communities, and I wanna ask you if you can share what the mission and vision of the Boys and Girls Club of Hawaii is. So at Boys and Girls Clubs of Hawaii, we strive to have all children, especially those who need us most, to reach their full potential as productive, caring, responsible citizens. And we're more than daycare. I think what most folks don't realize is yes, we're out of school time programs and we welcome the kids to our clubs after school and during school intersessions and summer, but what our goal is, is to keep them safe, of course. We match that with caring adult mentors and then positive youth development programs so that they not only can reach their full potential, but they realize their dreams. We wanna show them what's out there for them. Maybe you haven't thought about this and that you are not a circumstance. You are an absolute opportunity and we want to make sure that the kids understand how special they are and what they're capable of being. So it's so much more than keeping kids safe. It's all about having them self-actualize and reach their full potential. Now, Patty, I know that you have nine club branches and you guys serve over 15,000 youth. Can you tell me more about that? Absolutely. So we serve on Oahu and Kauai, the two islands, and our clubhouses are spread out on Oahu from Kailua through Honolulu, Ewa Beach, Nanakuli and all the way up to Waianae. Then on Kauai, we're at Kapa'a, Lihuei and West Kauai. And during the times the kids are at the clubs, they get the opportunity to not only bring their schoolwork to the club, so we make sure that they finish their homework first and then once they're finished their homework, we go into other development programs. So whether it's healthy living through cooking, through athletics, dance class, the STEAM programs that we have to sort of enhance their learning and sort of develop their passions. And as they get older, we start to look at career clusters and career explorations and post-secondary education. So we do all this in the clubhouse and then we take our services outside to the communities and we do outreach services. So we go to, there's some homeless shelters that we would go out to and we bring our older kids with us so that they can understand community service. We do things like beach cleanup, service projects, anything that we can to get out into the community and hopefully meet more children and invite them to come back to the clubhouses as well. Wow, that's absolutely wonderful to hear. I mean, it's so meaningful what you're doing. And Patty, can you share one or two impactful stories with me? Absolutely. Well, one of the exciting alumni that we have is Jake Shimabukura, so our ukulele virtuoso. He used to attend our Spalding Club in Honolulu and he is such an amazing alumni for us. He is proud of being that child who went through our programs and became this amazing man with such community service. And he's so prolific and so proud to say that he was a club member and there's a lot of things that he embodies now towards values and what he finds important. He attributes that to the club. So I'm always proud to say Jake's one of our kids. So we also have, I mean, there's so many and amazing stories, Rusty, but what comes to mind right now to me is this one teenage girl, she's been with us nine years and she comes from a single parent family. She's had a lot of struggles in her life, a lot of folks in her family struggled with drug abuse and she was very shy and very withdrawn when we first got her in the clubs and she just slowly started to build relationships. And you know this because I've read your books. You understand how important relationships are to children and building those relationships and building those trust means that they have a second home when they come to our clubs. And this particular girl, nine years later, she's now in her 10th grade and she is looking at what her future holds for her. We were able to take her and five other teens to California to do college trips. So they went and visited colleges, university, trade schools and they were able to explore what their options were. And for this particular teen, this is the first time not only being on an airplane but ever leaving the islands. And she did it with just our staff and her peers from the clubs and she had just an amazing life-changing time and she's returned, she's a whole new person. She sees the world in front of her. She sees hope and she's excited for her future. And to me, that's the story. That's what we do at Boys and Girls Club. I love hearing about the growth of students and just building their self-confidence and their self-esteem. And I like that Jake. I mean, everybody loves Jake. I know him for many years. He's such a great guy. We want more jakes in the world. We do. And Patty, tell me about how you're helping the youth with character and leadership development. So character and leadership development starts at an early age. It starts with being aware of your peers. So what we do is we teach the kids when they're in the club is, how important it is to be part of a group and to be responsible for their actions. So whether they're doing a STEAM project together, whether they're in the games room, playing ping pong or pool, our culture is that we welcome everybody. All children, all ethnicities, all capabilities, everybody's welcome in the clubs. And our expectation of our kids is that you carry that through into your activities. So they invite their friends, they invite new kids to come in and work with them, to play with them. And when you have multiple schools feeding into any clubhouse, it's a different feeling. They're starting to meet kids outside of their regular circles. So to me, that's where it starts, this ability to be aware of the needs of others. Then as they grow older, we start to train the slightly older kids to now become mentors for the younger kids. And that continues on all the way up through the teen ages. So, and during the summertime, the teens have the opportunity to work for our clubs as junior staff. And so they get to run some of the programs where they provide leadership and citizenship to the younger kids. And like I said, they'll go out and do service projects in our communities. Our clubhouses regularly do food distributions, which were super important during the pandemic especially. And those food distributions are for the whole community, not just for our families that go to the club. So the kids are there helping, they're giving out the food and they're understanding that there's a need there. And I myself, meaning the children are helping to fulfill that need. And that's a wonderful way to teach responsibility. Well, Patty, you have both of my books and you know I'm huge on character and leadership development. And I wanna ask you, what are some things that stood out to you in the books? Okay, so I'm gonna just show you one of your books here, Rusty, because this is what I've done to your books. I don't know if you can see that. There's post-it notes all through it. So both of your books to me, that's what I've done. I put little notes in there with taglines so that I can open it up quickly and remind myself. And I think one of the favorite things that from the first book, so from Beyond the Lines, my first read was understanding the formula, the four Ps, the people, purpose plus process equals performance. So what I love the most, Rusty, is that a lot of the concepts in your book are so common sense and they mean so much, but you've articulated them so well that I'm able to go, yes, that's what I do or that's what's important. And so I just bring your books everywhere. I've got notes in my phone to watch out for it. The second book, it was all about the hope because I was reading that as we were coming out of the pandemic. So to me, this is a world right now where we need hope so badly and to see you put this down long before the pandemic was ever here and to be able to understand how important hope is but also how to build that hope and through trust and through relationships. And it just hit so home to me because that's the foundation of everything we do. And you took all the things and all the values that means so much to me and so much to our organization and you articulated into these beautiful books and I just love them both so much. Well, I'm happy you love it. And I gotta keep things simple and clear because that's all what I do. I gotta have things simple and clear for me. You did. It was beautiful. And Patty, our friend, Dan Nishikawa, he's the executive vice president of First Hawaiian Bank. He did a generous book donation to Boys and Girls Club of Hawaii. What did that donation mean to you? Well, Dan Nishikawa is on our board, my corporate board of directors. He's a part of the executive committee and he is such a caring, authentic man. And when he contacted me to let me know, introduce me to you, introduce me to your books. And he said that he was making a donation of these books to our leaders. And this again was as a time when we were coming out of the pandemic. And during the pandemic, we didn't shut down at all. We were open and operating. When all the schools were shut down, we were open. So my staff, they're at a place right now where they're exhausted and they needed inspiration. They needed something to say just like frontline workers, you know, bless you for doing everything that you've done. You just got to dig a little bit deeper because we still have so much more to do. And Dan understood that. So he brought your book to us and said, give these to your leaders, talk to them about it, read it through them. And then you offered to come to our staff training to sort of reinforce that. And my leaders are so grateful, Rusty. They're reading it through it. One of them took it to Costco with her. She was reading it while she was shopping and they send me emails that are like, this is amazing. This is exactly what we needed. So it was Dan was so smart and you are a blessing Rusty. And thank you for these gifts for my staff. They really truly needed it. Well, I'm happy that, you know, the book donations, it's making an immediate impact today on people. And, you know, books last forever. So it's going to impact generations of families to come. So hopefully we can improve the culture in our society. You know, bring back words and actions like honor, trust, integrity, respect. And Patty, I want to ask you if you can share a bit about your sports and fitness programs that you have. Sure. So we have sports through athletics, leagues. We start with football and then it goes to basketball and volleyball. We also have judo classes. We also do in some of the, some of the clubs they do swimming, most of it's ocean swimming but then we do watercraft as well with paddling and surfing and bodyboarding. We have dance classes. We have hula. We have yoga. It's like anything that you could think that would be physically, you know, beneficial to the kids we try and bring it into the club. So not every club offers every single program but throughout the organization we have everything. And during our league sports, I think to me that's the most special part of what we do because a lot of children, they are not athletically inclined or maybe they don't have the experience with athletics and they quite often don't make the teams in school. And so what we do is we allow all children to play. If you have an interest and you have a passion then you get to play and that's all there is to it. And what we found, if they start early enough they start to build their skills basketball, football, volleyball so that by the time they get to their junior year they're actually now making the cut for the school teams as well. So that's giving them so much to look forward to and a sense of accomplishment. Yeah, just for them to be exposed to a variety of sports and to have fun because if they're having fun they're going to keep improving with that. And Patty, I want to ask you if you can share more about your programs about arts and culture. Absolutely. So for me, being a native Hawaiian female CEO when I was first hired I let my board know that I feel Boys and Girls Club's formula is amazing but what we have the opportunity to do in Hawaii is to take this national initiative and marry it with our beautiful culture here in Hawaii. So what we have is Hula. We have ukulele classes. We have cultural Hawaiian cultural lessons. We also have our kids taking Japanese lessons with a partner school in Japan. We have another one of our employees was teaching Korean to one of our classes or one of the clubs. We try to incorporate anything that we can in terms of the kids different ethnicities so that they also feel like they have a home. And we quite often have international days in the clubs where we encourage the kids to dress up in whatever their, you know, family's costume is bring their food to the club and share with the kids. Everything that we can do like that to encourage being proud of who they are and creating a sense of space for them to feel safe and to be proud. That's what we try and do. Even things like looking after our INA, we have what we call Aloha INA programs where they're not only benefiting from a STEM teaching but also it's a cultural based learning as well. It's incredible how many programs you have and all that you do. And Patty, tell me about how you're helping the youth with education and career development. Yeah, so education, we like I said, we do homework help. That's the first thing that they do when they come to the clubs is everybody has to spend an hour doing homework. And if they tell us they don't have homework then we let them go to the library and pick out a book and we expect them to do some reading. So we carry the learning, the teachers in our world we couldn't get by without them, but they need help. So that's what our job is to augment what our wonderful teachers are doing. Then we take it the next step farther and we understand that I think the last data I heard was that for every one counselor in the schools there's 400 children assigned to that one counselor. So there's no way that that one counselor could meet with all the kids to talk about career development, post-secondary education. So we've incorporated that into our programs and we're partnering with MSW, BSW interns from local universities to help them with the social emotional wellness aspect. Because if they can't feel well about themselves and not having their basic needs looked after then how can they think about education and work? We're partnering with trade unions to have the first year trade certification happen in the clubs during a child's senior year of high school. So help to help get them started if that's the pathway they wanna go. And then again, looking at college exploration, understanding clearly what does your grade have to be in order to enter that college? What's it gonna cost? Are we prepared to apply for scholarship? And having all of those reality checks come onto the table and then show them that guess what, we can cross every one of those hurdles as long as you are willing to put the time and the effort into it then we're gonna be there to help you. I love hearing how you guys are helping so many of them and really guiding them to, you know for all of these things, these details that they really need in their lives for the near future and for the long-term future. And Patty, how can people volunteer to help and what kind of projects do these volunteers do? So volunteers are a critical piece of what we do and we see volunteers that come in for a specific project. So sometimes they're to help to paint a clubhouse to make a repair or do some landscaping. And then we have regular volunteers who are part of our actual programs. So we have chefs that come in and do healthy cooking with the kids. We have ukulele players come in. Not only do we have the players come in but we have a gentleman who actually makes ukulele for the kids and provides it to them free of charge. We have violin teachers. We offer violin programs through our Nanakuli, our Kapa'a lihui and Spalding clubs in Honolulu. They're learning how to be cellists and violinists. We've got kupuna that come in and do reading programs. We have homework help volunteers. I mean, every part of what we do incorporates volunteers. And anybody who is interested in being a part of that, they simply need to go to our website. They can send us an email and then we'll be happy to discuss with them what their passions are and how we can incorporate them into our Boys and Girls Club family. And Patty, if people want to donate, how can they donate? You can go to our website, which is bgch.com and there's a donate button right there. You can click on that and just give us your information if there's a specific clubhouse that you'd like to support or just wherever we feel the need is greatest, we're so grateful for every single dollar that we can receive. What we want everyone to know is we charge only $25 a year for our kids to be members of our clubs. It costs us $1,600 to serve that same child every year. So all of this difference is about $6 million right now is what we have to raise through contributions and grants in order to keep our club doors open. So every dollar is appreciated. Oh, thanks for providing that clarity right there. I mean, that's people they don't really know. I mean, I didn't know what the cost is for a person, but then what the actual cost is for your organization. And Patty, what are some of the biggest challenges that you're dealing with? So right now, coming out of the pandemic, we actually just did a needs survey with our families and there's a lot of food insecurity that's still very, very concerning in all of our communities. And we do our best to feed the kids when they come to the clubs after school. If we're not able to give them a meal, we always try to at least give them a healthy snack, but there are families that are struggling and for some of our kids who are getting breakfast and lunch at school, if they don't come to the club and have something in the afternoon, sometimes that will be the last food that they will get until they have breakfast again in the next morning. So food is a really big challenge for us to be able to give to the kids. And you know, Rusty, that when we're hungry, that's all we can think about is we're hungry. So you can't expect kids to do well in education and athletics if they're hungry. So we need to feed these guys. The next thing is there is an increase in stress through the pandemic, emotional wellness and making sure that the kids understand that we're here for them and that we have resources if they need someone to talk to. That's a big challenge right now. And then staffing, you know, I mean, you hear about this all through the world right now. It's such a really tight labor market and we're really struggling to find folks to come and work for us. So I'm encouraging anybody who's out there who really loves the sound of our mission and wants to come and help kids to realize their potential, come and visit us because we're looking for good people to work with our children. Yeah, I hope so. It's such a need and it's so impactful what you're doing. And Patty, I wanna ask you one more question before we wrap up. What gives you fulfillment? So to me, I was raised that in order to find joy, you have to give joy to others. And I also read that in your book, Do Rusty and that really hit home. And that is honestly the simple answer is I get fulfillment out of helping others. And to me, it's a circle that comes back to you and there's just nothing better than that. And I get to live that every day through my job. So how lucky am I? I agree with you, Patty. And Patty, you are a great leader and I want everybody to support you and your entire organization. And I wanna thank you for taking time to join me on the show today. Thank you, Rusty. And thank you for your books and thank you for being an amazing human being as well. I appreciate you. Thank you, Patty. And thank you for watching Beyond the Lines on Think Tech Hawaii. For more information, please visit rustycomory.com and my books are available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble. I hope that Patty and I will inspire you to create your own superior culture of excellence and to find your greatness and help others find theirs. Aloha. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please like us and click the subscribe button on YouTube and the follow button on Vimeo. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn and donate to us at thinktechhawaii.com. Mahalo.