Maui Grassroots Collective is advocacy for housing, healthcare, and community.
Maui Grassroots Collective is guided by a Steering Committee, made up of members of its founding organizations: Holomua Outreach, Maui Housing Hui, Maui Medic Healers Hui, and Maui Rapid Response.
MGC provides Fiscal Sponsorship support to community organizations and projects.
Bridging our organizing, shared administration and infrastructure strengthens our core. MGC amplifies our voice and grows our readiness to mobilize into community.
Those projects include:
Holomua Outreach is a grassroots organization created to support and uplift our houseless community within the hamakua ahupuaʻa of Maui Nui A Kama. Our efforts are currently focused on Holomua Road from Hana Highway to Old Maui High.
Holomua Outreach's mission is to provide basic needs care such as food, water, hygiene supplies, first aid supplies, and as much support as is needed for the houseless community.
Through consistent outreach, we have inspired a sense of community. We hope to empower individuals to find a sense of purpose, to create safe space, and to mālama ʻāina.
The Maui Housing Hui began as a group of renters in late 2022 under a different name. We volunteered our time to learn about renters rights and spread what we have learned to all the renters of Maui. We began identifying the weaknesses in renter protections and seeking feedback from renters on what protections they hoped to see from leadership.
Maui Rapid Response (MRR) is an ahupaʻa inspired frontline mutual aid network mobilizing resources, people, and action to meet the emergent needs of Maui’s most vulnerable communities. We link ‘ohana to essential resources, support networks, and collective action as stewards of the first written human rights act, Kānāwai Māmalahoe. Established in 2019 and a founding organization of Maui Grassroots Collective.
In sisterhood with the Mauna Medic Healers Hui, the Maui Medic Healers Hui mobilized immediately in response to the devastating Lahaina fires in August 2023. We are a Kānaka Maoli-led team that provides grassroots, community-driven services and empowers the people. We offer a variety of services as we strive to create spaces for healing in times of struggle, disaster, and trauma.
Meet Our Board
This leadership is foundational to how we move in our community.
Hop Hopkins
Hop (he/him) is a social movement strategist and scholar who has spearheaded social justice campaigns for over 25 years. Currently, he is the Executive Director of Local Contexts. Local Contexts is a global initiative that supports Indigenous communities with tools that can reassert cultural authority in heritage collections and data.
For the past decade, Hop has focused his movement work on building a multiracial united front at the intersections of land, Indigenous sovereignty, reparations, and Black liberation. He earned his master’s Degree in Urban Sustainability at Antioch University, Los Angeles, where he also served as a Climate Justice Fellow and adjunct professor. He serves on the board of the Advisory Board for the California-based Environmental Leadership initiative and is a board trustee for the Midland School. Additionally, he has served on the boards of the Community Coalition for Environmental Justice, Western States Center, People’s College of Law, and on the Los Angeles Food Policy Council’s Leadership Circle.
Hop and his wife of twenty-three years homeschooled their daughters on an semi-rural micro-farm inhabited by their Australian Cattle Dogs, chickens, honey bees, fruit trees, and multiple compost piles.
President
Vero Mendoza
Veronica Jachowski is the co-founder and executive director of Roots Reborn, an immigrant serving grassroots organization on Maui. As a proud daughter of immigrant parents from Mexico, raised by a community of immigrants in Santa Ana, Califas, and shaped by 15 formative years in Chicago, she has lived many of the same barriers Roots seeks to transform.
Her work at Roots Reborn is not just responding to emergencies, but addressing the structural conditions that make immigrant families so vulnerable in the first place by connecting the dots across systems and creating new pathways to access where none existed before.
As a mother to a mixed Mestizo-Hawaiian ʻohana, she stays grounded in relationships, shared struggle, and the belief that those living the issues are also the ones best positioned to lead the solutions.
Secretary
Treasurer
Sheryl ‘Alamea
Santec, Principal, Business Center Practice Leader, Water
Kawika Hoke
Kawika Hoke is a filmmaker and media advocate dedicated to strengthening Hawaii’s creative and public broadcasting industries. He also serves as Director of Creative Development at Laulima Public Broadcasting & Content (LPB&C). His expertise in media production and strategic marketing makes him a valuable voice in community-driven initiatives.
Board Member
Okaliʻi Kaūilaokalani Kawaʻakoa
Okaliʻi Kawaʻakoa comes from the town of Haiku in the ahupuaʻa of Hamakualoa. In his free time he likes to spend time with his sisters and dogs and perpetuate the practices of diving and throwing net with his cousins.
Board Member
Hōkū Pavao
Hōkū Pavao is a Maui-born performing artist, director, teaching artist, and storyteller whose work lives at the intersection of theatre, community, and healing. With over 13 years of experience in arts education and nonprofit leadership, she has led artistic teams, developed culturally grounded programming, and created spaces where local stories and collective identity can thrive.
Hōkū is the Co-Founder of Archive for Health, Arts, and Spirit (AHAS), where she helps guide work centered on the transformative relationship between creativity, health, and collective well-being, and the Founder of Collective Pilina Theatre, a collective theatre company dedicated to celebrating and amplifying local voices through original productions, community storytelling, and interdisciplinary arts practice.
Previously, she served as Assistant Artistic Director at Maui Academy of Performing Arts for over a decade and as Hoʻokahua Programs Coordinator at Maui Arts & Cultural Center, where she developed trauma-informed, culturally responsive arts programming to support healing and resilience following the Lahaina wildfires.
Through all of her work, she remains devoted to honoring place, people, and the stories that weave us together.
Board Member
“The only way to survive is by taking care of one another.”