A Kauai and a Hana-based nonprofit are using grants from Newman’s Own Foundation to promote indigenous food justice by keeping Hawaiian youth connected to the traditions, regenerative farming techniques and culture of their communities.
Given the federal cuts to programs that support diversity, equity, inclusion, accessibility initiatives and sustainability, NOF’s support has been essential for West Kauai’s Iwikua organization and Hana-based Ma ka Hana ka ‘Ike, whose work revolves around food sovereignty. They have found that the ability for people to produce, distribute and consume their own food in a both culturally appropriate and sustainable way keeps Hawaii’s more isolated populations fed and its youth engaged with the land.
All proceeds of the Newman’s Own brand, made popular by its salad dressings and actor founder, fund NOF’s awards, including its Indigenous Food Justice grants, which in 2024 provided $2.7 million to tribes and nonprofits that are “advancing Indigenous food justice for children,” according to its website.
Grants specifically made for advancing Indigenous communities, much less food sovereignty, are rare, according to Jackie Blackbird, NOF’s Indigenous communities officer.
Blackbird, of the Aaniiih and Nakoda tribes from Montana, also said that less than 1% of the nation’s philanthropic dollars goes toward Indigenous communities and organizations.
Providing those opportunities is necessary, she said, not only to ensure that Indigenous people are empowered to “define their own food systems,” but to create them in the first place.
“Oftentimes we find that providing grants for staff pay or benefits is critically important because if you don’t have anyone in the community managing these initiatives, they don’t live on, and that cultural knowledge, those traditions — whether it be gardening or harvesting a buffalo — it just doesn’t happen,” Blackbird said.
In November, Iwikua’s founder, Josh Mori, received $30,000 from the Newman’s Own Foundation, and since then has been able to invest the support across the organization’s agricultural initiatives at Waimea High School and Kawaikini New Century Public Charter School, where he hopes to “get people interested in eating food that’s grown on their own land.”
“You don’t have to have a lo‘i kalo or have this big growing area to fulfill your kuleana,” Mori said. “You don’t have to have 100 acres or be a boss to own a food system.”
The organization, Mori said, is “rooted in community wellness and traditional knowledge,” and bases its services — including its minimarket of Iwikua-grown produce, small fitness center and agricultural education — off the ahupuaa, or traditional land division system, which is divided into uka (upland), kula (habitable land) and kai (ocean).
Mori, a Ph.D. candidate at Montana State University’s Department of Indigenous Rural Health, leads the farming program Na Mahi Ho‘oko A‘e at Waimea High School, where freshmen biology classes are traded in for farming lessons, and students learn the Hawaiian names for each biological process while growing everything from kalo to microgreens, onions, papayas, oranges and ulu, depending on the season. Annually, they grow and harvest about 20,000 pounds of produce from their 1-acre plot.
The school’s farm is also home to the island’s largest aquaponics farm where students grow seven varieties of lettuce that are then sold at vendors in the area and at Iwikua’s minimarket.
At Kawaikini, second graders are using aquaponics to grow uala, banana, tomato and basil, Mori said.
By having Kauai’s youth understand their relationship to land, water and food, Mori said they innately learn to advocate for themselves. It’s “a way to look at sustainability, it’s a way to teach sovereignty by necessity.”
“(Activism) doesn’t have to be so ku‘e (resistant), it can just be, ‘Hey, we’re growing this,’” Mori said. “There’s so many teaching opportunities about how to be an ohana, how to work within a family, how to work with other people through getting your hands in the land and going into the community.”
On Maui, Lipoa Kahaleuahi, executive director of Ma ka Hana ka ‘Ike, said cultural practices and knowledge are innately within her students and apprentices who enroll in the nonprofit to learn vocational trades and traditional Hawaiian food practices, farming and culinary experiences.
Ma ka Hana ka ‘Ike, which Kahaleuahi translated to “in working and doing, one learns,” gives high school students and early graduates the opportunity to explore careers in construction, culinary arts and agriculture while also learning personal values of resilience and work ethic.
“Our youth are our caretakers of tomorrow,” Kahaleuahi said. “How do we build them to be those caretakers of our land, of our resources, of our people, of our place?”
The organization is based in Hana, an isolated community on the island’s east coast, with more than two-thirds of its population of Native Hawaiian ancestry.
In addition to its Hana Build building and construction program and Kahu ‘Ai Pono culinary arts pathway, the nonprofit runs on- campus gardens at Hana High and Elementary School and offers volunteer and community days at its 10-acre Mahele Farm, which donates a weekly harvest of greens, herbs and root vegetables to kupuna in the neighborhood and Hana’s public school students.
But now they’re taking it one step further.
Kahaleuahi said the organization is using the Newman’s Own Foundation grant to kick-start its Ma ka Hana ka ‘Olelo Hawai‘i initiative, which offers all of its programming to youth enrolled at Hana School’s kula kaiapuni, or immersion school.
Already, more than half of the student population at Hana School is enrolled in the school’s olelo Hawaii program, she said.
“The revitalization of our language here tied with our continued connection to our land, to our water, it allows us to work on sustaining ourselves and encouraging our community to relive those practices that are still meaningful today,” Kahaleuahi said. “We recognize that growing fresh local food is Hawaiian, and the words and how we can do that, coupled with the language — that is innately Hawaiian.”
Since receiving the grant in October, Kahaleuahi said, the organization has engaged 184 olelo Hawaii- speaking youth in agricultural activities, 83 in gardening classes, and distributed 6,451 healthy snacks and meals made by its culinary program to Hana’s public school students.
Blackbird said in her role of communicating with Native Hawaiians in Hawaii and Native American tribes on the mainland, she feels empowered by the cultural solidarity between Indigenous people across the nation; however, there’s also a common struggle, as organizations “have to continue to build their case on why (food justice and food sovereignty) is important.”
Across the nation, Indigenous youth face food insecurity, she said. Growing up on the Beltnap Indian Reservation in Montana, she remembers when her brother was shocked when he found out that fresh fruit did not come from a can.
Now, she said, the active push to ensure food security and food sovereignty for Indigenous populations can be a unifying step forward.
“It relates back to how do our people rebuild those relationships with the land? How do we have those knowledge keepers share what’s important and infuse the language into that?” Blackbird said. “It also promotes that self- determination, so it’s regaining that control back, that food production and distribution and consumption that can go back to reclaiming traditional food-ways for people.”
