From Gathering to Growing – Building Together Through Healing Tides

At the St. Joseph Fund, we believe that healing begins with listening to and honoring the lived experiences of those closest to the issues. The Healing Tides: NHPI Leadership + Renewal Initiative (Healing Tides) exemplifies this value by continuing to evolve not through the common top-down model, but in strong partnership with Pacific Islander-led and -serving organizations.

Healing Tides is a space created with and for Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander communities. In a philanthropic landscape where NHPI voices have too often been overlooked, this initiative is intentionally different. It is shaped by the lived realities, cultural strengths, and leadership aspirations of NHPI communities. The initiative responds not just to gaps in funding but to a deeper need for connection, renewal, and belonging.

Strong communities begin with strong leaders. Healing Tides places NHPI leadership at the core of this work, not as a result, but as the foundation for long-term resilience and healing.

This past year, Healing Tides reached an exciting milestone with its third gathering. This year’s retreat was a celebration of community. Together, cohort members reflected on what they’ve built, what they’ve learned, and where they want to go next. Under our capacity-building focus, Healing Tides is first and foremost about individual, cultural, and collective healing.

This initiative supports leaders through a dedicated coaching team that brings not only professional expertise but lived experience and cultural understanding. The basis of the coaching is trust and relationship-building, creating space for reflection, accountability, and growth. By centering personal, cultural, and collective healing, the initiative helps cultivate the conditions where NHPI organizations can thrive and serve their communities with strength and sustainability.

Rather than relying on traditional evaluation metrics, SJF uses a different, more meaningful form of impact capture—storytelling and community ethnography—led by a cultural practitioner steeped in both ancestral wisdom and modern evaluation practices. This approach reflects our core value: that the real measure of success is not in numbers, but in the strengthening of trust, connection, and community leadership.

Healing Tides wasn’t built with a preset logic model. Rather, it was co-designed with community, and we consider ourselves merely facilitators rather than drivers. Throughout the journey, we have taken a backseat to enable community voices, not funder mandates, to lead.

The Healing Tides initiative is a living example of how authentic, equity-centered partnership can reshape not only outcomes but entire paradigms of philanthropy. As we continue our work, we remain grounded in our promise to build communities that are more whole, more healed, and more able to flourish, hope, love, and grow.