Challenges and Opportunities for Improving Food Security for Hawaiʻi Residents

The 2022 Hawaiʻi legislative session included extraordinary examples of the types of actions policymakers can take to rewrite the economic rulebook.

An analysis of Hawaiʻi’s pandemic-era rent relief and pre-litigation mediation program created through Act 57 (2021).

A guide to understanding the basics of the Hawaiʻi state budget and its importance to society.

How expanding the state Earned Income Tax Credit to make it refundable can boost the economy and provide opportunity to Hawaiʻi’s working families.

Tax credits can fine-tune the tax system to promote social welfare and encourage economic activity by delivering targeted tax relief.

Part three of the Good Health Depends on Decent Housing series highlights the disconnect between the state’s housing market and the needs of its residents.

Part two in the Good Health Depends on Decent Housing series shows how helping people who are currently experiencing homelessness with housing and other needs is not only life-changing, but also saves money.

Part 1 of a Good Health Depends on Decent Housing series of policy briefs shows how chronic stress from insecure housing produces cumulative effects that result in mental and physical health problems.

Policymakers have shaped an economy that relies far too much on extractive tourism that provides little to residents in return. To reverse these trends, we need a dramatic shift in our public policy. 

Improving Hawaiʻi’s data policy to better serve Native Hawaiians.

The State Government’s Crucial Role in Countering the Pandemic Recession.

40 Years of Rising Costs & Stagnant Wages.

In the context of COVID-19, correctional facilities are public health disasters waiting to happen.

Hawaiʻi’s post-COVID-19 economy should be one informed by an understanding that the old economic order had been failing many Hawaiʻi residents for decades.

Creating our state Earned Income Tax Credit was an important achievement. Now it’s time to make the state EITC refundable and permanent.

An overview of Hawaiʻi’s senior hunger safety net and how to strengthen it.

Patients, providers, and administrators alike agree that quality mental health care is hard to come by—there is a catastrophic dearth of services for low-income youth.

Looking back at the Great Recession, 2007–09.

Not only would a minimum wage increase help to improve the living standards of affected Hawaiʻi workers, but it would also strengthen local businesses, as low-wage workers plow almost every additional dollar of earnings back into the local economy.