Title III Native Hawaiian Strengthening Institutions Renovation Grant Project
In 2014, Native Hawaiian Student Services received the first Title III renovation grant at UH Mānoa. The $3.384 million project endeavors to strengthen UH Mānoa’s curricular and co-curricular capacity to foster Native Hawaiian student success in support of building a Hawaiian place of learning at UH Mānoa by improving UH Mānoa classroom and student services facilities that support culturally-relevant, critical, and engaging research and praxis space. The first project on the grant was to create a new Hawaiian art space at the Kamakakūokalani Center for Hawaiian Studies that was completed in late 2017. The second project is the renovation of the new home for Native Hawaiian Student Services in the Queen Liliʻuokalani Student Services Building Room 113, which is currently in architectural and design stages, with a move-in date of May 2018.
Mānoa Access Initiative
The Mānoa Access Initiative (MAI) is a partnership between Native Hawaiian Student Services, the Office of Admissions, and the Student, Equity, Excellence & Diversity (SEED) Office, that began in Fall 2015. The partnership involves accepting a cohort of new freshmen each Fall semester who would have otherwise just missed the requirements to get into UH Mānoa, either with an S.A.T. score or high school G.P.A. just barely under the Admissions criteria. The Office of Admissions accepts these students but requires their participation in MAI, which involves taking an introductory Ethnic Studies course as a cohort. The class is taught by Dr. Willy Kauai, the Director of NHSS, with about a dozen different support staff from SEED and NHSS helping with the course and the student cohort through student affairs programming and mandatory labs once a week.
Makalapua Naʻauao
The Makalapua Naʻauao Scholarship was initiated through the Hui Hoʻopili ʻĀina partnership between the University of Hawaiʻi System and Kamehameha Schools in 2015. Conversations and planning in the Financial Aid & Persistence working group of the partnership resulted in the creation of the Makalapua Naʻauao Scholarship program, a new and innovative pilot project, that sought to investigate developing and best practices around financial aid for Native Hawaiian students. The project is from July 1, 2016 – June 30, 2020 with a total investment of over $5 million from Kamehameha Schools to support 150 scholarship recipients across 4 campuses. UH Mānoa Native Hawaiian Student Services was allocated about $2.85 million of the total project to support an original cohort of 64 students attending UH Mānoa. The student cohort was selected in 2015, with all funds dedicated to this single cohort and track them over time. One of the goals of the project is to better understand alternative strategies (such as a cohort-model, intrusive advising, etc.) embeded in a scholarship program to support Native Hawaiian student success.