FISCAL SPONSORSHIP
Aloha Forest
A land stewardship and reforestation initiative restoring Indigenous agroforestry systems and watershed health in Hawaiʻi. The project centers Native Hawaiian ecological knowledge to rebuild food sovereignty, biodiversity, and climate resilience while strengthening intergenerational cultural practices tied to land management.
What is the Aloha Forest initiative?
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Aloha Forest is a community urban forestry coalition within the Hawaiian beaches subdivision, we are developing a framework to restore invasive forest surrounding our community, while fostering stewardship opportunities for our community to cultivate deeper relationships to aina, and demonstrate how urban food forest, and aloha aina (love of the land) can transform an unmanaged invasive forest into a thriving community subsistence resource for East Hawai’i communities.
Aloha Forest is a community urban forestry coalition within, we are developing a framework to empower communities to restore unmanaged lands and invasive forest.
We are a team of people who care, and are designing systems that foster stewardship opportunities for our community to cultivate deeper relationships to aina, and demonstrate how urban forestry and restoration, combined with aloha aina (love of the land) can make way for new ways of life in our island home.
Aloha forest is a platform that connects minded and like hearted people around the globe, and to further create community stakeholdership in urban food forest systems, by creating community spaces and harnessing collective impact of individual contribution, we are setting out to build relationships and restore thousands of acres of endangered forest in Hawai’i.
Aloha forest is a platform to harness collective impact of individuals across the planet to sponsor trees and help us transform invasive forest into a community subsistence urban food forest.
Empowering community, restoring native forest
Whether it's helping us create new planting zones or offsetting your carbon footprint, we value collective contribution. E kuahui like i ka hana (let us pitch in and work together).
Places like the southern slope of Haleakala currently account for around 3% of our native forest cover remaining, and is home to some of Hawaii’s last remaining mesic forest. Over the past 300 years Hawai’i has endured an onslaught of deforestation, through unsustainable land management practices, and now the introduction of invasive species.
Once known throughout China as Tahn Heung Sahn (The Sandalwood Mountains), Hawai’i was once known for its fragrance of sandalwood that would greet sailors long before they arrived at shore. Trade of precious native lumber would first begin in 1790 by American sea captain John Hendrick, following his first shipment of native Hawaiian sandalwood to China, this first trade of Hawaiian Hardwoods would open the floodgates of exporting native Hawaiian hardwoods in global trade, which would severely alter our native watersheds. 55 years later in 1845 the exotic hardwood industry would collapse due to the massive decline of available lumber.
Hawai’i would soon experience a major change in land management both in philosophy and economics, the Hawai’i sugar industry would be the next major industrial boom to emerge on our shores, at its heights 1 million acres Hawaiian lands that would have been watershed and intentionally planted food systems, would end up in mono crops sugar production, this would open up these lands and remove much of the genetic biology within those spaces.
2016 would mark the end of 150 years of sugar production, and now these unattended lands void of biodiversity would be the blank canvas for invasive tree canopy, invasive grasses, and eventually invasive pests that would consume much of the native endemic ecology.
Much of the lands and generationally intentionally planted food forest such as Ka Malu ulu o lele (shade of the ulu grove), would vanish and eventually be renamed to Lahaina (the merciless sun) a curse name to mark the West Maui lands in infamy, 2023 Lahaina Maui would be ground zero for event that would forever alter and change our communities; lack of watershed and the desertification of land, would spark Hawaii's deadliest fire that would engulf an entire township, with thousands of lives lost as a direct result of the climate crisis, when something of this magnitude happens we often look for answers to why things like this happen, maybe the answer lies within our values that put unsustainable agricultural practices above our land and people .
Now the question is how do we restore our neglected lands?
Aloha Forest is our solution.
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Our goal is to create a global restoration framework.
Implement our Aloha Forest system anywhere in the world.
Start restoring an ecosystem near you.
