Following up on the release of The Human Infrastructure of Broadband: Looking Back, Looking Around, and Looking Ahead, we are providing examples of core, complementary, and coalition models for digital equity work. This series of organizational profiles delves deeply into how these programs work, the problems they are best suited to solve, the populations they are best suited to reach, and the support they need to succeed. Learn more about the Human Infrastructure of Broadband Project.

The Kūpuna Collective is a health-centered coalition that brings together a network of partners across the state of Hawai’i. Co-coordinated by the Hawai’i Public Health Institute (HIPHI) and the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa Center on Aging, the Kūpuna Collective aims to build partnerships, promote information sharing, leverage funds to scale innovation, provide technical assistance and infrastructure for grant opportunities and administrative support, and gather data to demonstrate collective impact. All of these activities enable the Collective to sustainably highlight critical issues for aging individuals in Hawai’i, or kūpuna.

Established as the Kūpuna Food Security Coalition, the Collective was originally rooted in helping reduce food insecurity for kūpuna following the disruption of food systems at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. As the coalition began to bring together community members, kūpuna-serving organizations, and all its partners to address food insecurity, it realized that older adults’ increased reliance on––and struggle to maintain––digital connection through the pandemic was a barrier to its work. Seeing a need for broader recognition of the intersectionality of older adults’ needs, the Kūpuna Collective was born.

The Kūpuna Collective currently boasts more than 470 individual members and 274 participating organizations. The Collective’s work is flexible, and the topics it addresses encompass a wide variety of needs by kūpuna that relate to the health and well-being of this population in Hawai’i. According to Lindsey Ilagan, program manager of kūpuna initiatives at HIPHI, one of the Kūpuna Collective’s most powerful assets is its position as an information-sharing network that boosts collaboration among kūpuna-serving organizations.

“Part of that work is convening this collaborative network of partners from across the state who elevate critical issues and mobilize community assets and try to come together to create innovative and creative solutions that support and empower older adults,” says Ilagan.

The Kūpuna Collective’s first forays into direct digital inclusion work were centered on outreach for the Federal Communications Commission’s Emergency Broadband Benefit Program, which became the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP), from the start of the pandemic until the ACP ended in 2024. The Collective also developed the Kūpuna Digital Inclusion Workgroup, which focused on getting older adults connected to broadband service and ensuring that they had access to devices. Early members included food pantry workers, community health workers, senior center managers, and housing company employees; for many participants, digital inclusion was not at the center of their work, but it was a necessary factor in reaching the populations they serve. As the Kūpuna Digital Inclusion Workgroup grew, it was folded into the larger work of the Kūpuna Collective, and digital inclusion has remained one of the priorities of the coalition ever since.

The Kūpuna Collective meets every month online via Zoom, with smaller groups meeting on an ad hoc basis specific to current needs, like coordinating advocacy around a piece of upcoming legislation, organizing support for emergencies such as disaster relief, or planning to take advantage of upcoming funding opportunities. The Collective continues to act as a liaison between kūpuna-specific stakeholders and the larger statewide effort around digital inclusion in the state of Hawai’i by keeping informed about programs new and old, providing updated digital inclusion resources, and breaking down digital inclusion research and expertise for its varied members.

In 2021, HIPHI and the Kūpuna Collective partnered with AARP to detail the landscape of digital inclusion resources available to kūpuna, developing the Hawai’i Digital Inclusion Roadmap: Improving Access to Technology for Hawai’i’s Kūpuna report. This resource, funded by AARP, catalogs the digital divide in Hawai’i for all age groups as well as for kūpuna, the barriers to adoption of broadband internet, enabling factors in reducing the digital divide for kūpuna, and recommendations on the state level, county level, and local or community partner level.

In addition, HIPHI and the Kūpuna Collective created the Kūpuna Digital Resource Directory, also funded by AARP, which helps older adults find digital navigation support near them. The directory provides an extensive list of organizations supporting kūpuna on the state, county, and local levels, discount programs that qualifying older adults can participate in, and digital skills classes they can sign up for, among many other opportunities. Initially developed alongside the roadmap in 2021, the Kūpuna Digital Resource Directory has been periodically updated since its creation to reflect changes in the digital inclusion landscape and the scope of opportunities available to kūpuna.

Using its position as an intermediary between statewide efforts and community organizations of all kinds, the Kūpuna Collective enables local organizations to apply for funding where they may not have had the capacity to do so on their own. Smaller and more trusted community-serving anchor institutions, using strong administrative support from the Collective, have more opportunities to tackle digital inclusion projects targeted for their kūpuna.

Partnerships that were developed through the Kūpuna Collective have further enhanced digital inclusion programming in the state of Hawai’i. For an organization like Pear Suite, which develops operating systems for community health workers, this meant connecting with other kūpuna-serving Collective members that now use Pear Suite’s software to track their work, manage their data, and help with their workflows. The organization, founded in 2021 and a member of the Kūpuna Collective for over two years, has found the coalition to be a great place for sharing its work, marketing its resources, and developing new relationships in the health worker and digital equity space.

Pear Suite has been involved in its own digital navigation programming with the Hawai’i State Public Library System, training digital navigators and deploying them to five library sites in Oahu and maintaining a digital navigation hotline across the entire state for remote support. This program, which began in mid-2022 and was extended until the end of 2024, included one-on-one sessions with community members—largely older adults—covering topics spanning ACP sign-up support, device basic training, digital skills enhancement and device application use, and anything the participant might need. According to Pear Suite Senior Program Manager David Mamae, the organization was hired in part due to its local staff and relationships in the communities it serves. Pear Suite’s trained digital navigators speak a variety of languages, including English, Mandarin, Cantonese, Tagalog, Korean, and Spanish.

Although the program was slated to end in 2024, Mamae emphasizes that a coalition like the Kūpuna Collective ensures that the lessons learned from Pear Suite’s collaboration with the Hawai’i State Public Library System can continue to be shared with organizations doing similar work.

“If we’re not doing this work directly anymore, we still have that expertise, that knowledge, that wisdom,” says Mamae. “If somebody is struggling with capacity, how can we support their efforts, whether it’s providing ancillary support or whatever [support] might look like?”

The Kūpuna Collective has cemented its place in the state of Hawai’i’s public-health ecosystem and digital inclusion community and maintains a strong foundation in Hawai’i for kūpuna-serving work of all kinds.

“In public health, we recognize that all of these different social drivers of health inequity intersect with each other,” says Ilagan. “We see digital inclusion as inherently connected with all these other drivers of health, including food access, health care access, home- and community-based services, and whatever else.”

What We Can Learn

Large-Scale Advocates Can Work Toward Small-Scale Solutions

By providing a consistent space for stakeholders to convene around digital inclusion through regular meetings, the Kūpuna Collective encourages collaboration across the state on digital inclusion programming. Members like Pear Suite emphasize the value of having a place like the Collective where organizations can share information, trade practices, and develop program ideas.

The Kūpuna Collective recognizes the importance of elevating hyper-local community organizations that are well established and trusted by the populations they serve. Being able to support these organizations that have preexisting relationships with the most vulnerable and digitally disconnected populations is a critical part of the Collective’s mission. By doing this, incorporating new digital inclusion programming into local community anchor institutions that are already doing the work of serving their communities becomes a natural process. Yet without a broader ecosystem to connect with one another, those anchor institutions might miss out on lessons learned from other organizations like them.

“When you’re so deep into the work, you don’t have the opportunity to kind of come up and see, like, the breadth of work that’s happening across communities,” says Ilagan. “That’s a huge benefit of this intentional space for folks to come together because there are meaningful conversations across partners who have, like, really valuable findings and things to share with each other that wouldn’t otherwise connect.”

Ilagan stresses that partnering the strength of the Kūpuna Collective and its digital inclusion expertise with community host sites—whether that means a local library, senior center, or other kūpuna-serving organization location––to develop digital inclusion programs and outreach is incredibly effective in reaching the hardest-to-reach kūpuna. These kinds of connections, like that between Pear Suite and the Hawai’i State Public Library System, often happen through the Collective.

“We can’t just have any person come into the community and expect people to show up without that relationship being there and without having a community champion helping to facilitate,” she says.

Offering Administrative Support Builds More Capacity for Community Work

The Kūpuna Collective’s position as a coalition run by expansive research and public-health institutions like HIPHI and the Center on Aging allows the Collective to advocate for community organizations and their programs where they may not have the staff to do so themselves. The Center on Aging helps the Kūpuna Collective work with data experts and collect information from Collective members to tell a compelling story about kūpuna-serving work being done in the state of Hawai’i, as well as illustrate how funders can get involved. HIPHI provides members with a backbone organization that can help them apply for funding and serve as a bridge between smaller organizations and large-scale funding programs.

“As a fiscal intermediary, we’re able to kind of … absorb some of those administrative tasks that would otherwise be a barrier for them to participate, especially with federal programs,” says Ilagan. “There’s just such a high barrier to entry.”

Not all community anchor institutions have the capacity to demonstrate their impact and handle the administration that comes with participation in some funding programs, like federal and state broadband initiatives. The Kūpuna Collective steps in to ensure that its members have equitable access to these opportunities.

“We’re able to provide all of that administrative oversight and operational oversight, to do the reporting, the billing, the tracking of your deliverables,” says Ilagan. “[We] provide technical assistance to our partners out in the community and then liaise with our state partners so that they can get the funds out in a more effective way.”

In order to show the impact of the Collective and its members, the coalition developed a public-facing dashboard that displays how much funding its members have raised, what kinds of organizations participate, and where in the state their work takes place.

“On the data side, it’s being able to demonstrate collective impact: What does this mean for our state?” says Ilagan. “And on the flip side of that is… What is the cost of inaction?”

What We Can Learn

Competition and Cooperation for Funding

Members of a coalition like the Kūpuna Collective can help one another apply for funding, but that can also mean competing for funds. As members of the Collective, organizations collaborate with one another in myriad ways, including helping one another to attain further funding for their work. However, there is only so much funding to go around, and in a group of like-minded organizations that are all in need of support, competition is bound to take place. If one organization receives a grant, it’s likely that there are other Collective members who applied and did not receive funds.

“There’s only so much food on the table, so to speak,” says David Mamae. “If we’re doing great work, but also want to support other orgs doing great work, we don’t want any one org to monopolize all the funding that is there.”

The challenge in this group dynamic, according to Mamae, is to figure out how to build all members’ expertise and give each an opportunity to shine.

Need for Ongoing Dedicated Funding

A lack of dedicated funding for the Kūpuna Collective raises questions about the sustainability of its work in the long term. Administrated by long-term community-serving organizations like HIPHI and the University of Hawai’i System, the Kūpuna Collective is in place to be able to serve older adults in the state of Hawai’i for a long time.

The Kūpuna Collective has received funding from state government and philanthropic organizations to do its ACP outreach and Digital Roadmap/Resource work, with HIPHI as its fiscal administrator. Yet there is no specific funding that goes toward the long-term maintenance of the Kūpuna Collective itself.

This brings benefits and risks. Without being required by a grantor to fulfill certain goals, the Kūpuna Collective’s team is free to organize its meetings and digital inclusion initiatives entirely based on community needs and to the intersectional benefit of its broader health goals. Instead of focusing on grant priorities, the Kūpuna Collective is able to focus on its members and what they identify as priority issues.

At the same time, if the current team at HIPHI faces organizational changes or other interruptions, a lack of dedicated funding for the Collective would threaten its work and the network that it has established over its lifetime.

The team at HIPHI is looking forward to acquiring those dedicated funds in order to keep up regular surveillance of the state of digital inclusion among older adults in the state of Hawai’i.

“The Kūpuna Collective shows what can be done when a funding mechanism or any type of sustainability mechanism is more community-centered and is a little bit more ethical and driven by community members,” says Ilagan.

Looking Ahead

The Kūpuna Collective prioritizes maintaining an ecosystem for individuals and organizations serving older adults to feel heard and supported in their work. It is there that the Collective finds its greatest strengths: coalitions can uplift the smallest of community anchor institutions and democratize opportunity and awareness. Having the backing of large institutions––like HIPHI and the University of Hawai’i System––enables the Kūpuna Collective to be an effective liaison between all stakeholders serving older adults in the state of Hawai’i, while the intersectionality of its work allows flexibility in its mission.

“Part of our goal of the Collective is to change mindsets around aging away from ageist narratives that frame kūpuna as these passive consumers of benefits or folks that are vulnerable and need assistance,” says Ilagan. “We try to change that narrative into something a little bit more empowering. Through digital inclusion, we see a huge opportunity there.”

The Kūpuna Collective’s specific focus on public-health outcomes for older adults in the state of Hawai’i enables it to be a strong intermediary between government, philanthropic organizations, community anchor institutions, and individuals who come to learn how they can support kūpuna. While funding challenges remain, and maintaining a coalition’s long-term capacity is a challenge, the Kūpuna Collective has consistently demonstrated its impact and the need for its support for kūpuna.

Above all, the Kūpuna Collective hopes to ensure that all kūpuna are given the agency they deserve.

“Your kūpuna are your elderly, your seniors,” says Mamae. “But there is also this sort of reverence towards them, because they came before us and because they have a lot of knowledge and wisdom. And we should be taking care of them.”

Written by: Grace Tepper

More in this Series:

• At the Denver Public Library, People Skills are the Most Important Quality When Choosing Digital Navigators
• The Mercedes Library Exemplifies a Vital Effort to Promote Digital Independence
• How Everyone On Navigates Change to Deliver Digital Equity
• Free Geek, Devices, and Digital Equity
• Mass General Brigham Understands that Digital Equity Supports Health Equity
• Northwest Center Engages Community, Advances Digital Skills
• The Cuyahoga Metropolitan Housing Authority Leans Into Collaboration
• North Carolina Community College System Brings the Classroom to the Learners
• Digital Connect Makes Digital Navigation Approachable
• Black Churches 4 Digital Equity: Community Anchors and Committed Advocates
• Seattle's Equity-Based Approach
• The Kūpuna Collective: A Public Health Coalition Advancing Digital Equity
• What We Know About the Human Infrastructure of Broadband
• The Human Infrastructure of Broadband: Looking Back, Looking Around, and Looking Ahead

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