Strengthening Kaua'i's Capacity for
Collective Action
KPAA is Kaua’i’s backbone organization for collective impact. Since 2002, we provide trusted data, strengthen organizations, and facilitate collaborative action so our island’s diverse communities can solve complex challenges together.
One of three training sessions held in June for local community leaders on equity and impact-based community development.
You Spoke
We heard
Mahalo to everyone who shared visions and feedback for KPAA
Through dozens of informal meetings and conversations over coffee, as well as our recent Equity and Impact-Based Community Development Workshop, we heard that our islandwide community organizations and leaders are hungry for a regional development organization, which focuses on systems level rather than program level change.
Moving forward, we will focus on the collective impact model by serving as a backbone organization to Kaua’i’s diverse community nonprofits and initiatives. In this way, KPAA can better assist partners in advancing complex, community-wide goals, rather than directly managing programs.
Our Work
Core Action Areas
KPAA approaches systems level improvements for Kauai through a collective impact model in which it is a backbone organization, working through 3 mutually reinforcing fields of work:
01. Planning
Data, Storytelling & Kilo
We help the community understand itself. We gather, interpret and share the information that community leaders and organizations need to identify trends, understand community needs, measure progress, and make informed decisions.
02. Action
Services for Impact Organizations
We strengthen the people doing the work. With 600+ community organizations, nonprofits and initiatives across the island, we provide services to strengthen Kaua’i’s capacity, including community engagement, project management support, trainings and fiscal sponsorship.
03. Alliance
Facilitating Collective Impact
We build alliances to accomplish together what cannot be done alone. Collective impact is a structured way for multiple organizations, agencies, and community members to work together on complex social problems using a shared agenda.
A Backbone Organization
A backbone nonprofit acts as the coordinating hub for a network of organizations working toward shared goals, rather than delivering all services itself. It typically provides strategy, facilitation, data tracking, communication, community outreach, and funding coordination for the partnership.
A backbone organization helps partners stay aligned by:
- Setting or supporting the shared strategy.
- Organizing communication across partners.
- Tracking progress and shared measures.
- Supporting outreach, public will, and sometimes policy work.
- Helping mobilize resources for the collaborative effort.
What it does not do
- A backbone nonprofit is not usually the group that makes all the decisions or carries out programs itself.
- The backbone supports the network so partner organizations can accomplish their direct impact work more effectively.
Our Place-Based Approach
Kauaʻi is one island, but many communities, and the same is true for how we approach regional development issues. We see our work through a long-term, island scale perspective but our solutions are designed for efficient, local led and place-based changemaking. We do this by:
- Recognizing and building from the different strengths, relationships, culture, and knowledge of each of Kauaʻi’s unique regions rather than applying blanket solutions.
- Providing a safe and open forum where local residents, organizations, and stakeholders co-design priorities, actions, and measures of success.
Exemplifying Project
Keiki to Career
Keiki to Career began in 2012 as a working group of KPAA, composed of community leaders who wanted a better future for all Kaua’i youth. The mission of Keiki to Career is to unite our community so that our young people are healthy and thriving, academically successful, connected and contributing, and ready for college and career.
As with all KPAA projects, Keiki to Career is founded on the belief that greater progress can be made toward real and sustained social change when nonprofits, government agencies, businesses, and the community work together towards common goals.
Below, see how Keiki to Career illustrates our three Core Action Areas.
Islandwide Knowledge
Our Kauaʻi Youth Report is a snapshot of how Kauaʻi’s keiki are growing up healthy, safe and thriving from birth to adulthood. See the most recent report here.
Our Parent and Keiki Advisory Councils are groups of everyday residents who review, discuss and provide feedback on policy, projects and problems direct to the state departments responsible.
Local Support
We connect 20+ youth focused organizations to their audience through 25 Resource Kiosks across Kauaʻi. There we provide partners’ support information, and free supplies direct to community.
We connect our collaborating organizations to training opportunities to develop their strategic, organizational and impact capacity. In the last year this has included 70+ individuals receiving training from the Collective Impact Forum.
Strategic Collaboration
Our Maternal and Child Health Specialization Lead collaborates and connects the full network of family support services, providing invaluable resource navigation to the provider network, and where needed, directly to families in need.
Working with our education institution network KPAA hosted an Early Childhood Education facilitator to evidence the need and impact of the position to the County of Kauaʻi, successfully handing the role to the county in 2025.