Green Fee Workshops

Accessing Green Fee Funding: Community Capacity Building Workshops (June-August 2026)

The Hawaiʻi State Green Fee (Act 96) represents a historic first-year allocation of dedicated funding for environmental stewardship, climate and hazard mitigation, and sustainable tourism across the state. This two-part workshop series, building upon a capacity-building workshop offered in November 2025, is designed to help community-based organizations (CBOs) — particularly executive directors, organizational leads, and grants staff — understand how to prepare for and successfully apply for government Requests for Proposals (RFPs) tied to these new Green Fee budget allocations.

 

Hosted by Hawaiʻi Green Growth and Hawai’i Public Policy Advocates, and convened in partnership with the Care for ʻAina Now Coalition and the Governorʻs Green Fee Advisory Council, this series combines a statewide virtual training on pre-RFP Readiness with county-level in-person RFP application workshops to ensure that organizations across every island have equitable access to both knowledge and peer support as these funding opportunities become available for the first time.

Learn More About the Green Fee

Virtual Workshop Recording

The Virtual Webinar, Accessing Hawai’i Green Fee Funding: An RFP Readiness Workshop for Community Orgs & Nonprofits on June 24 aimed to increase organizational capacity in community-led organizations across Hawaiʻi's environmental sector so that CBOs can effectively prepare, write, and submit competitive proposals in response to upcoming release of Department-issued Green Fee RFPs. Access the recording above, and the  supporting resources below.

Frequently Asked Questions

Updated Regularly. If you have specific questions, please direct them to communications@hawaiigreengrowth.org.

On Aloha+ Goal Progress

  • What areas is Hawaii doing the best in on the Aloha Challenge, What area needs the most improvement, and how can members and supporters best assist?

    The 2025 Voluntary Local Review (VLR) provides the most up-to-date snapshot of these trends, highlighting both the “bright spots” like clean energy and the persistent gaps like waste reduction, while also identifying where targeted action and investment are most needed. For members and supporters the biggest way to support will be to engage in our sensemaking pillar where we will identify the gaps and work collectively to advance solutions. 


    Read the Hawaiʻi VLRs here!

  • The plan introduces "Action Ownership" — named leads for every agreed-upon action. That's a meaningful shift from HGG's historically facilitative role. How do you hold a named lead accountable without authority over them?

    This is the core tension of backbone organization work, and there's no clean answer. What we have is transparency — public system mapping and progress reporting — relational accountability through the Network Engagement Platform and Annual Event, and the Action Group charter process, which builds accountability in at the front end rather than trying to enforce it after the fact. HGG can't compel action, but we can make inaction visible within a Network where institutional reputation matters.

On Community Engagement

  • How can other like minded NGOs and nonprofits with a Hawaiʻi presence share/contribute to the plan and its intended benefits?

    We invite collaboration in many ways–– these are Hawaiiʻs goals, not Hawaii Green Growthʻs goals. We all have a kuleana to implement them. To support them holistically, join the Aloha+ Challenge by:

  • How can students and researchers get involved?

    We welcome students and academics to make sure they are signed up for our newsletter and action groups that intersect with your work/focus areas. For the newsletter, you can sign up here. For more information on the Action Groups, you can sign up here. More communications on next steps will be sent through our newsletter and groups regarding opportunities specifically for those in academia to help us advance insights and research, including the sensemaking initiative which will launch soon.

  • The plan sets a target of 51% of Network Members taking one documented action per year — but the current baseline is estimated at 15–20%, with over 500 members. That's a 2.5x–3x increase. What's the theory of change for getting there, specifically for the 300+ Goal Adopters who are currently minimally engaged?

    The re-engagement strategy for that long tail is still being built. The plan identifies the infrastructure — the Network Engagement Platform, the Hub, the Sustainability Systems Map — but those enable the strategy, they aren't the strategy itself. The more direct mechanism is creating low-barrier, high-relevance entry points: Goal Workdays, Action Group participation, and clear asks tied to what members are already working on. The Key Performance Indicators (KPI) will force us to either show progress or explain publicly why we're not hitting it. That accountability is intentional.

On Financing

  • You have mentioned an Aloha+ fund. Would this be an investment fund or a grant/donation fund, or a blended finance vehicle, and where do we anticipate the funding coming from?

    We have begun outreach with national level philanthropy as a starting point with the goal to bring in new resources to Hawaiʻi, and will continue to build out across sectors from there. Our goal is to ensure that these funding sources are additive to (not taking away from) existing sustainability funding pools for Hawaiʻi. We will explore opportunities to leverage existing sizable funding commitments, matching philanthropy to government funding, for example, via new revenue like Hawaii’s Green Fee.

On Hawaiian Values and Indigenous Knowledge

  • The plan invokes indigenous knowledge and values throughout — but the operational details, KPIs, governance structures, fiscal mechanisms, are largely drawn from Western collective impact and nonprofit frameworks. How do you reconcile that?

    This tension is worth sitting with rather than resolving too quickly. The Collective Impact model is named as the organizational framework because it accurately describes what HGG functionally does — it wasn't chosen as a values statement. The Mālama Implementation Tool is the most concrete example of indigenous-informed decision-making built into governance operations. The sensemaking process is designed to hold "what data shows vs. what lived experience reveals" as a structural question throughout the plan period. We'd rather be held to this question annually than claim it's settled.