Michelle Kaʻuhane, the Hawaiʻi Community Foundation’s senior vice president and chief impact officer, recently traveled to San Francisco to attend her final meeting as a member of the 12th District Community Advisory Council (CAC) for the Federal Reserve of San Francisco. The 12th District represents the nine Western-most states, including Hawaiʻi, Alaska, California and Washington, helping to manage economic conditions for the region. Michelle has served on the CAC since 2018 and has been able to share her knowledge of communities in Hawai‘i and her work with HCF with this regional group. We sat down with Michelle to get her thoughts as she wraps up her term with the council.
Q: Do you have a quick way to explain the Federal Reserve’s Community Advisory Council, and the work you did as a CAC member?
A: People often see the Federal Reserve as a branch of government and it’s not. It’s independent of the government. And the Federal Reserve has one tool. Its job is to control inflation and unemployment, and the only tool it uses is the interest rate. I find that fascinating.
Our role as Community Advisory Council members is to tell the stories of what we see happening in our communities on the ground and explain how those stories are either aligned or misaligned with the data, to give the Federal Reserve banks a fuller picture on the state of the U.S. economy when they’re making decisions.
Q: What kind of stories about Hawaiʻi have you been able to share with the Council?
A: Two stories in particular come to mind. I had the opportunity to take John C. Williams, who was at the time the president and CEO for the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, on a site visit, and so we took him to a Homestead community in Anahola on Kauaʻi to visit a solar farm that was co-developed between the utility company and the Homestead Association. He wanted to see micro-enterprise, community-based economic development and really wanted to get out to a neighbor island. And so I had the privilege of spending a day hosting him and showing him this success story of a small, local community leveraging its resources for the good of its own people.
Succeeding him as president is Mary C. Daly, an amazing woman who has brought a lens of diversity, equity and inclusion into the Fed system, and has been a champion for equity and what that means for our economy and the banking system.
When she first came on board, she created a podcast called Zip Code Economies, which drills down and talks to community leaders to ask, OK, what’s really happening? And so I did one of her first interviews talking about what it was like here in Hawaiʻi, and what we mean when we talk about ‘ohana. Your family isn’t just your immediate family, your parents and your children—it’s all the aunties and uncles in your neighborhood, this larger community.
I live in the Homestead of Kaupea, in Kapolei. This was my father's allotment. And, when I first moved, people asked me, why are you leaving ʻĀina Haina to go live in the Homestead? I love living here, and I think people's perception of this neighborhood as low-income housing is inaccurate. And I think that students and young people of Hawaiian ancestry need good examples to aspire to, that they can be anything that they want to be and see it in their neighborhoods that this is a supportive, valuable place to grow up and have your ‘ohana thrive. It’s so important, and so it was special to be able to share with such depth about it.
Q: People sometimes think of the Federal Reserve as being this impenetrable system, so it’s interesting that there is this direct conduit all the way through to community voice.
A: I do find the leadership to be very transparent and open to the ideas that are coming from community, and I'm a firm believer that those voices do resonate, and become part of the larger planning, in combination with the economic data. One of the big powers that the Federal Reserve has, and how they can help, is that they get to elevate the stories of what the solutions are. While they do have the one tool—of interest rates—they have a huge voice. They have convening power to bring folks together in a unique way.
Serving on the council gave a really nice front seat to witnessing the importance of sharing information to make better decisions—particularly with a group of professionals who really took community input to heart.
Q: You started your term in 2018. Thinking back, what were some of the big issues that the CAC was interested in surfacing and discussing?
A: In our meetings, we would consistently have a briefing on the macro economy: what’s going on in jobs, in unemployment, in the inflation rate, and so on. And, when I first started, things were looking really good on paper. The economy was stable; unemployment was very low. One of the things I had to help unpack was that, while the unemployment rate might be really low in Hawaiʻi, our cost of living is just not comparable to other states, and so you see things like hidden underemployment because families are working two and three jobs to make ends meet.
So, at the same time that reports were coming out saying that the economy is booming, in Hawaiʻi, nearly 50 percent of the population, one out of every two of us, is living paycheck to paycheck. And that’s the real, underlying story behind the macro-economic data.
Serving on the council has been an opportunity to share those kinds of insights, to identify where the data doesn’t match reality. Sometimes the lack of disaggregation of the data hides the stories of communities that are truly struggling, or truly doing well, that just get masked into one bundle of data.
Q: What were some Hawaiʻi bright spots you were able to share?
A: While I was serving, we were standing up our Social Impact Investment Fund at HCF. And so it was an opportunity for me to uplift and share both the work of investing in our local CDFIs [community development financial institutions] and then, in turn, how our local CDFIs were truly making a difference for families and small businesses that otherwise might have been left behind.
And, quite frankly, we did get to brag a little. I was really proud to sit with fellow council members to talk about the tremendous work being done by the team at Hawaiʻi Community Foundation, taking a lead role in helping state and county government distribute CARES Act dollars for our communities during the first year of COVID. That felt good.
Q: What do you see as the value of having Hawaiʻi representatives participating in national conversations like this?
A: Washington D.C. is quite frankly a place where Hawaiʻi’s voice needs elevation. We’re a tiny island state in the middle of the Pacific with four members in Congress who do their best to represent us. But there’s nothing like having a strong constituency, elevating the voices of our community on a larger stage.
In addition to my work with the Federal Reserve, I’ve also taken a seat on the board of Philanthropy Northwest, I serve on the national board of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in Philanthropy (AAPIP), with the goal of elevating the work that’s being done, not just by us, but by all of the partners that we work with. And, as I step off different boards, I always recommend other Hawaiʻi people be in those spaces, because I think it’s really helpful to have the diversity of the voices that come from Hawaiʻi. Because we do have strong voices, and strong community, and we can be a positive example and leading voice for equity on a global level.
This conversation took place in December 2022.