Q&A: How We Think about CHANGE, with Justina Acevedo-Cross

The Hawaiʻi Community Foundation (HCF) created the CHANGE Framework in 2019 to better understand and address Hawai‘i’s most critical challenges. To ensure its accuracy and effectiveness, we gathered feedback from nonprofits and community partners statewide, refining the framework to reflect their insights. To learn more about that process, and about what we learned, we sat down with Justina Acevedo-Cross, our senior director of community strategy.

HCF: If you’re sharing with someone for the first time about the CHANGE Framework, how do you explain it?

Justina Acevedo-Cross: The simplest explanation is that the CHANGE Framework is a way for us as a community foundation to identify six main sectors that are important for Hawaiʻi people and places, to help focus and organize our own work and the work we do with our partners. But really, the big idea behind it is that, by gaining insight from a shared set of information, and by agreeing on some shared goals, we will have a better chance of success when we take collective action together to accomplish positive change in Hawaiʻi.

The CHANGE Framework is also helpful for making more visible and transparent what the Hawaiʻi Community Foundation’s top priorities are, where we’re looking to invest or make a difference in our Island communities. We have a newly updated 10-year strategic plan, and CHANGE is a great way to measure our progress milestones with that, going forward.

HCF: We launched the original version of the CHANGE Framework in 2019. What kind of work has been done since then that’s leading us now to relaunch CHANGE?

JAC: The original framework was a really good starting point, but we also knew from the beginning that we wanted to get a lot more community review and feedback in each of the six sectors. To make CHANGE as effective as possible requires robust engagement from communities across Hawaiʻi, from a whole range of stakeholders, partners, grantees, providing their various manaʻo and perspectives. To gather that input, we held multiple community convenings over the course of a few years, and have been incorporating the learnings into the CHANGE Framework. It was really a process of testing and evolving our thinking. Did we get this right? What is missing? And how should we move forward with making progress in each of these sectors?

HCF: What are some of the main things you’ve learned from listening to community?

JAC: One thing that popped up over and over again was just how intersectional all of the different sectors of CHANGE are. There’s so much overlap and interplay between, say, the economy and health and wellness and the natural environment and arts and culture. That can be a challenge, but it can also present opportunities for making a difference on multiple fronts at once. We really like the idea of leaning into intersectionality.

The other theme that has been reinforced is the importance of pursuing community-led solutions, of raising up leaders and change-makers within community, and making sure that those communities’ efforts are being properly resourced.

Traditionally, philanthropy has often acted like the expert driver in strategy. And that’s not the approach we’re taking here. It’s an in-partnership approach. It's really going to take many different solutions across many different parts of our ecosystem, including nonprofit, business, and government, to really make a change.

HCF: One of the things we’ve always said about the CHANGE Framework is that it doesn’t belong only to us, that it can be useful to anyone hoping to make a positive impact in Hawaiʻi. How do you expect HCF to use CHANGE, going forward?

JAC: I think the Hawaiʻi Community Foundation is valued because we have many tools in our toolbox. We’re a grantmaker, yes, but we can also be a convener, getting people talking to each other and seeing if there's common ground for action together. We can be a capacity and network builder in a sector, laying the groundwork for future solutions. We can be a data partner, driving better understanding about what the leading indicators mean and how to take shared action on them. These are all parts of a toolbox that we have available to us in our work as a partner to create a better Island home for all of us.

HCF: If you're someone who’d like to help make a difference by donating, what value could the CHANGE Framework offer in guiding your philanthropic approach?

JAC: Well, one of the things we’re learning through the CHANGE Framework is just how dynamic and highly complex the needs of community are, and how much of a boon it is to have access to funding that is flexible and nimble in response to those needs. If you have a long game in mind with your giving, if you're interested in more than just Band-Aid solutions, it can really help to approach your philanthropy with a larger, more holistic approach that can be more responsive to the evolving needs on the ground. The CHANGE Framework offers a way to make your funds go further, and be more effective, using the knowledge and the expertise that’s already embedded within Hawaiʻi’s communities. Our bet here is that will yield better results long term.

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