Posted on: Friday, April 20, 2001

Nonprofit Ohana Foundation cuts jobs, regroups

By John Duchemin
Advertiser Staff Writer

Honolulu nonprofit institution Ohana Foundation has laid off about eight of its 120 workers, citing production bottlenecks and delays in getting its educational DVD products ready for market.

Phil Bossert, the vice president in charge of developing Ohana Foundation's educational curriculum, also has resigned, foundation officials said yesterday.

The layoffs come as Ohana Foundation tries to produce about 250 educational DVDs, or digital video discs, for use in North American classrooms. The DVDs serve as educational videos, but are also equipped with links to relevant Internet sites.

Ohana's goal was to get its collection ready by the end of June, and then to begin mass-marketing the DVDs and their players to schools nationwide, said Alan Pollock, the foundation's director of marketing. But the foundation, which hired dozens of workers in Hawai'i in the past year, found it had over-hired for its curriculum-writing department; this created congestion and production delays, Pollock said.

"We found that if we had kept those people on board, there would have been a production bottleneck," he said.

The education division, in charge of developing DVD curriculum and training teachers to use it, will move to St. Louis to be closer to the target market of Mainland schools, Pollock said. Other foundation divisions, including a video production branch and a foreign language curriculum division, will remain in Hawai'i, and were largely unaffected by the layoffs, Pollock said.

"This is not a slowdown or anything, but rather an overall strategic reorganization," Pollock said. "For our other divisions, it's business as usual. We were just off-kilter in the education group, with more writers on our staff than we needed to accommodate the production flow."

Ohana Foundation was founded in 1998 by entrepreneur Annie Chan. It has used Hawai'i schools as a test market for its DVDs.