Newsletters / Action Alerts:

Quarterly newsletter

Urgent Action Alerts; periodically mailed and faxed

E-mail list with regular news and action items

Pejcha Scholarship and Community Service Awards:

November 1993 - awarded first Pejcha Community Service Award

June 1994 - awarded first two $1000 scholarships to students of environmental sciences; second year of award program currently being drafted

1995 and 1996, awarded additional Pejcha Scholarships

Fund-raising / Grants / Discretionary Donations:

Ivan Pejcha seed grant - $50,000 in 1989 Individual donors - approximately 3.5% of donations over $500

Pikake Fund of Hawaii Community Foundation - $10,000 in 1991 for environmental PSA's and "Ten Simple Ways to Save Maui" poster, in association with Maui Epicenter

Environmental Support Center - Macintosh computer equipment and training subsidy valued at $4500, granted in 1992

Pejcha Award discretionary donations - $3500 gifts and matching grants 1993 - 1994

Kamaole Park Connection discretionary donations - approx. $2500, 1993 - 1994

Hewlett Packard - ink jet printer valued at $700; July 1994

American Power Conversion - office equipment valued at $600; November 1994

Starr Foundation - $5,000 to support Hana conservation efforts; December 1994

Atherton Family Foundation - $2,000 for "Designing Our Communities;" 1995

The Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation - $20,000 for "Designing Our Communities" project for 1995 - 1996

Angelica Foundation - $6,000 for Hana efforts and operations; 1995

McInerny Foundation - $4000 for "Designing Our Communities" video; 1996

Starr Foundation - $2,000 for general operations and South Maui open space preservation efforts; 1998

Ka Wailola Project - $32,500 grants for researching Maui water issues and educating public officials and the public

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Maui Tomorrow Today

Haleakala Times, March 2, 2005
by Roger Sussman

I'm not sure exactly which was the first time I had direct contact with Maui Tomorrow. It may have been when my fourteen-year-old stepdaughter, Anna, was visiting from California, and she needed to do a community service activity to fulfill a requirement for school credit. I arranged for her to help Maui Tomorrow's then- Executive Director, Richard Lafond, prepare mailings in their Pa'ia office, inform members about issues, notify them about hearings or ask for much-needed funds. I ended up helping, too.

Or it could have been when local realtor Mark Sheehan, who was president of Maui Tomorrow at that time, showed me a house for sale in Olinda. Discovering our mutual interest in intelligent, sustainable systems, he invited me to attend a special environmental planning conference which he was helping to produce at the Grand Wailea Resort.

In any case, both experiences were impressive. The Grand Wailea event featured an "eco dream team" consisting of many highly regarded environmental thinkers from around the country. They had been brought here by Ray Anderson, president of Interface, Inc., the world's largest manufacturer of carpet and flooring material, to educate and advise Anderson's executive staff gathered from around the world - well over a thousand people, as I recall.

Anderson had recently read The Ecology of Commerce by Paul Hawken, and it had transformed his thinking about how business might be conducted. He contacted Hawken, hired him immediately as a consultant, and asked him to gather together an all-star team to guide Interface into a new era of corporate responsibility.

As a gesture of wisdom and generosity, Anderson offered to share his amazing progressive think tank with Maui's and Hawai'i's environmentalist community, as well as with government officials from around the state. He set up an extra day of events, at his expense, to provide the benefit of his consultants' insights and leadership in addition to the multi-day conference for his staff. He also arranged for an eco-responsibility consultation for the Grand Wailea, for which they clearly were grateful. The smart policies that were put into effect as a result back then seem to remain in place today, to the resort's credit.

Maui Tomorrow was responsible for setting up the local networking aspects of the conference, which were very well received. I recall sitting next to the Mayor of Kauai. She was just as excited to be there as I was!

This was a memorable event, a model for exposing the public to new realizations and models of systems for sane living. To say it was an inspiration would be an understatement. Since those experiences several years ago, I have continued to be impressed by, and grateful for, the presence of Maui Tomorrow in our local decision-making process.

Ron Sturtz, currently president of Maui Tomorrow as well as a veteran attorney, and Lucienne de Naie, currently the organization's vice-president, recently told me a bit about the mission of Maui Tomorrow, its history, and some of the issues in which it's involved. The following are some of their responses to my questions...

Ron Sturtz: Maui Tomorrow is a local organization which offers practical solutions for issues of land use planning, community design, and responsible growth for Maui County.

Lucienne de Naie: The priorities right now are water and comprehensive planning, making "community" a design process. As for housing, where do people want to live? Where will they be comfortable living? Where can people afford to live? Where can we build housing that doesn't impact the things that we all love and enjoy here? It's like any family making a decision. We need to make a decision that's not just what's best for Dad, or any other individual member, but what's best for the whole family. It's very interesting. When you go back through our archives - I'm kind of the archivist for MT - we started in the late 1980's, we incorporated in 1989, and we made a big splash with our build-out scenario where the founding members of MT, one of whom was a professional planner, showed how many people would live on the island of Maui in ten years if we just followed the current zoning regulations that we had. This horrified people, because the low estimate was like 200-300,000 people, and the high estimate was way up there! This was at a time when Maui's population was around 65-70,000. So it was a wake-up call. We had these plans, and no one had ever done the math! So MT became famous for educating policy-makers, and educating the public, on a big-picture way to look at some of the issues that we do face.

Sturtz: Everything is connected. We all share the same island. We all have the same problems, and we need to deal with the same common solutions. I am focusing on water currently. We meet with the mayor regularly, and we meet with representatives of the community regularly. One of the biggest challenges we face, which impacts on all qualities of life, is the availability of water. We've been involved in litigations and hearings for the last several years regarding East Maui, helping to return water to the stream flows, to the taro farmers, and to the residents after 120 years of using it primarily for sugar cane. Those processes continue on. We're also now involved in West Maui, with the Iao Valley surface waters, the streams that serve West Maui and the people who live there. We're involved with hearings, again, to set appropriate stream flow standards so that the people who are wanting to farm there can do that, and so that the waters are equitably distributed.

de Naie: So resource management, although it's not listed in our title, just goes hand-in-hand with good planning.

Sturtz: What's interesting about MT's board is that we're a very eclectic group. We have Native Hawaiians, we have young people, we have seniors, we have urban dwellers, rural dwellers, developers, conservationists, lawyers, engineers, a very wide group.

de Naie: And almost everybody on our board is actually in a position of contributing to a number of other community organizations as well, so we have people who are not just about one issue; no, these are well-rounded people who are real respected members of our community.

Sturtz: What's interesting also is that we have a policy that we don't take positions on things unless we reach consensus, unless we all agree. If we're really split on something, that means to us that the community is really split on it, too. So, when we reach consensus, when everyone on our board agrees to take a certain course of action, we feel pretty comfortable that we're representing a broad-based community perspective in going forward. There is one common element among all others, and that is a real love for the 'aina, a real love for the land, and giving back to the 'aina, helping to preserve what's worth preserving.

de Naie: The islands of Maui County - Maui, Molokai'i, Lana'i, and Kaho'olawe - have a chance to be something that's not the same-old, same-old of Paradise Lost. I think that motivates all of us, and it motivates some of our public officials, too, so there's hope out there.

Sturtz: Some of the people we've been bringing in here as consultants have been coming from other resort destinations around the world, and it's really been helpful for us to learn how they dealt with - or are dealing with - or didn't deal with successfully - many of the things that we are dealing with as an extremely popular island destination. These same issues have been faced by many others.

Sturtz: The availability of fresh water is a worldwide problem. The kind of discussions we have at our board meetings about these islands are taking place all over the world right now. There is an ever-increasing shortage of fresh water available for the world's population. We have to, as a civilization, deal with these issues. We here can't solve the problems in foreign countries, but we can solve them here if we deal with it intelligently. There's an abundance of water on this island. It's just a question of how it gets distributed.

de Naie: And how it gets maintained in a sustainable way. There's an abundance of water if we treat it well. If we don't treat it well, if we take water and we mistreat it, if we contaminate it, if we pollute it, such has been the case here in a number of instances as the result of certain agricultural practices, then our water supply shrinks. There may be enough water for our needs right now, and even in our lifetime, but there may not be enough for the people who follow us.

Sturtz: Maui is a jewel, but we can't take it for granted. It requires constant diligence, constant attention, to help in keeping our jewel polished. We all have the same interest, which is a beautiful island.