LEADERSHIP CORNER
Consuelo CPO improves quality of life for many

Interviewed by Susan Hooper
Advertiser Staff Writer

Cory Lum • The Honolulu Advertiser

Personal profile

• Self portrait: I am the proud father of a 1-month-old daughter, Gracie, and the grateful husband of my loving wife, Julie. My ancestors are from Sweden, Norway, and Scotland, and my home is in Hawai'i Kai. My world view was deeply shaped by my experiences of living in Japan as a child, coming of age in Hawai'i as a teenager, and experiencing both horrible poverty and tremendous generosity as a volunteer and philanthropist during my stays in Indonesia (one year), the Philippines (five years) and India (three years). Living in other cultures helped me learn to get along well with many different kinds of people and to appreciate the fabulous diversity of life on this planet.

• Favorite Web site or search engine: The University of Hawai'i-Manoa's Center on the Family's Data Center Web site. It has a tremendous amount of data on Hawai'i's children, families and communities drawn from all sorts of sources.

• Most remembered mentor: Dwight Clark founded Volunteers In Asia, a Stanford University-based cross-cultural learning program. After my sophomore year at Stanford, I volunteered with the Indonesian Department of Health in a remote city in that country. The experience changed my life and moved me onto a career path of public service and community development. Dwight is a humble man, a Quaker who taught me that if you can live simply and frugally and avoid rating yourself on how much money you make, your vocational choices expand exponentially and you are freed to do in life whatever it is that makes you the most alive and fulfilled, rather than that which makes you the most materially rich.

• Best part of the job: I have a great job at Consuelo Foundation, whose mission is to operate or support programs that improve the quality of life of disadvantaged children, women and families in Hawai'i and the Philippines. I manage our work in Hawai'i, where we work to reduce the incidence of child abuse, run several values-driven self-help housing projects in Wai'anae, and operate a financial assistance program for low-income working parents called the Ways to Work family loan program. The first "best" part of my job is helping to turn around children's lives by giving them hope again, either through making them safe from abuse, placing them in a safe neighborhood or linking them with a tutor that can help them make it through school. The second "best" is that fantastically dedicated and talented people are attracted to Consuelo Foundation, and I get to work with them. The third "best" is being able to give back to my own community in Hawai'i after so many years of being in Asia and in North America.

• Trademark expression: "Do the right thing."

• Best decision as a leader: When I was a program officer for the Ford Foundation in the Philippines in the early 1990s, I witnessed a rapid devolution of power and authority from central government to local government levels, and I saw a great opportunity to reward those local governments that effectively used that power to make a real difference in citizens' lives rather than simply lining the pockets of politicians. I brought together some of the finest people in the Philippines, and we developed a national awards program that selected, evaluated and celebrated the best local government initiatives. The program has served to inspire lots of public servants to be more innovative and more honest.

• Worst decision as a leader: Almost all of my worst decisions stem from taking on too much and then not doing what I said I'd do. In the foundation world, you can't do good work unless you focus on a few key problem areas — say child abuse or education reform — and keep at it until you've really helped to turn a corner on that problem.

• What I worry about most: That we're not doing enough to stop child abuse. Children are suffering in every one of our neighborhoods from beatings, sexual abuse and neglect. Yet they are our most precious resource. While Consuelo Foundation is trying to do its part to stop the generational cycle of abuse, we all need to do more.

• Most difficult challenge: Doing more with less. Endowed foundations have virtually all suffered major losses in the values of their corpus, with a concomitant reduction in the amount they can spend in the coming months. I address this problem by partnering with more organizations, such as the Department of Hawaiian Home Lands and American Savings Bank, or with other foundations, so we can each bring our resources to the table and weave together a way to keep good projects and programs moving forward.

Taking on... Marketing challenges

• It's fairly rare for nonprofits to start a business. But we have done exactly that in the past year or so. We have launched the Ways to Work family loan program, which provides critical small amounts of money and financial advice to low-income working parents. Most of the monies are used to purchase or repair a used car so that parents can get to work, manage childcare and have a wider array of employment opportunities. The loans are made through American Savings Bank, and we do the one-on-one work with the families.

• What I'm taking on is really a marketing challenge. How do you seek out those people who could most benefit from this assistance, the great majority of whom are single moms? How can we clarify for people that we're not a typical loan operation, and how can we reach those people who, due to having been turned down so often, may not have enough self-confidence to pick up the phone and call?

• We have done a couple of things that worked well. We put a free ad in every Honolulu city bus for a month and got a wonderful swamp of calls. We hosted a workshop on how to have a debt-free Christmas, in partnership with the Honolulu Community Action Program. We've been able to rapidly expand the numbers of families who know about us through these marketing efforts.