“The Trump administration has proposed to take that program, which is now 100 percent federally funded, and make it a program where states would have to kick in 25 percent of the cost—a cost shift of $100 million a year to Hawaiʻi,” the Hawaiʻi Community Foundation told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser.

“That’s a $100 million-plus hit on the state budget,” Johnson said. “Or it means cutting benefits or throwing people off of the program.”

Hawaiʻi’s geographic isolation makes it harder for nonprofit organizations to raise funds to make up the difference in federal cuts, said Micah Kane, the Hawaiʻi Community Foundation’s president and CEO.

“Philanthropy will not fill the gap,” he said.

Communities on the mainland, Kane said, “can lean on each other. We lean on somebody, we fall in the water. So we’ve got to lean-in”—borrowing a phrase coined by Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg to empower women in the workplace.

At the start of today’s conference—entitled “Advancing Nonprofit Excellence”—Kane is scheduled to announce plans to create a nonpartisan Hawaiʻi State Budget & Policy Center at the Hawaiʻi Appleseed Center for Law & Economic Justice to provide lawmakers, nonprofit organizations and others with objective data to help guide policy decisions.

It will be the 43rd such center around the country helped by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, Kane said, and will be funded, in part, by the Castle Foundation.