We Love Hawaii is a family run NPO (Non-Profit-Organization). We are run wholly on donations from various sources, and our workers are all volunteers working for free. We partnered with a local health food store called Hawaiian Moons to supply groceries to families unemployed by the Coronavirus. The process to getting free groceries is simple: Families sign up through our website and we give them up to $100 of credit at Hawaiian moons to buy groceries. If they can't find transportation to the store, we can deliver the groceries to their door.
Our first donation was $500 from our other partner: MA Center. They are a global charity organization and their partnership allowed We Love Hawaii to affiliate with their non-profit status, which allowed us to skip months of awaiting approval. After we got started, friends and family were quick to help out. We got started with about $15,000, and later we opened a GoFundMe which brought in about $2,000. The MA Center later donated another $1,000. Throughout all of this, we gained about $13,000 from the donation button on our website. With this funding, we have been able to feed about 300 families (equivalent to about 6,000 meals) to families in Maui alone.
21st Century Skills: I applied a variety of 21st Century Skills to the We Love Hawaii food project. I had to use communication skills in order to change how I was talking depending on the person. I used interpersonal skills when working with my teammates in the form of other volunteers. Working with other people (especially family members) proved to be difficult at times because we had to work out disagreements and solve problems together. I feel that the most improved-upon 21st Century Skill was financial, economic, and business literacy. Throughout the project's process and my mentorship, I learned a lot about how a non-profit functions. My mentor helped me understand the processes of signing documents such as the 5013C which made our donations tax-deductible, or opening bank accounts, or communicating with managers at Hawaiian Moons. Lastly, I used civic literacy and engagement because this was a project that was based around community service and making a change for the better in my town of Kihei.