The mission of CREA-HI is to promote, magnify, advance, and perpetuate aloha-based evaluation approaches through cultural lenses that value and bring focus to equity and justice in the diversity that is Hawai‘i.
To do this, we will weave and share stories, tools and practices that affirm and draw from a Native Hawaiian worldview.
mission
vision
We are CREA-HI—a community, a constellation, a movement of individuals and organizations that serve our Hawai‘i communities. We seek to enhance and promote culturally-centered evaluation methodologies, approaches, and ways of being that focus on the centrality of our relationships, stories, and our ancestral knowing grounded in the island context of Hawai‘i nei.
CREA-HI supports practitioners and communities who have a desire or need to share their stories and work with the broader world, through the practice of program evaluation. With holistic Native Hawaiian ways of valuing, being and interacting as our primary lens, we seek a humble responsiveness that invites all cultures to learn and share in reciprocity. In Hawai‘i we have many unique cultures and communities—our diversity is our strength. As integral parts of myriad stories, we can come together to weave strong communities.
While acknowledging that even the most well-intentioned practices of evaluation have, at times past, caused harm to our communities, we commit to a shared process of decolonization, healing, and reciprocity. We seek deep, transformative processes in our work. We will build and uplift ways of understanding and validating the deep impacts of our work that draw from our ancestor’s ways of knowing and modern practices.
However, our natal cultures also interact with modern paradigms such as poverty, colonization, and a currency-based value system that often dominates our way of life. We cannot seek restoration without addressing these realities. We look to the spaces between, the intersectionality of our lives and histories in order to balance lenses new and old. From this balance we can innovate collective narratives of abundance and address disparities.
We acknowledge each person, family, organization and community within their own unique genealogies and stories, and how their histories and interactions with various systems has affected their wellbeing. We seek to pivot on shared positive values in order to create safe spaces for our future to emerge. We acknowledge all who came before us, seen and unseen, who make this work possible. By uplifting best practices amongst our own people, we find and become our own experts.
We invite you to join us.
Native Hawaiian Data Sovereignty Statement
As Native Hawaiians, we have the sovereign right to govern the collection, ownership, and application of data from and about us and to use these data to honor and activate our self-determination. In exercising data sovereignty, our kuleana or responsibility is the well-being of our lāhui or nation and the perpetuation of our culture, knowledge, ways of doing, being, and knowing. Those interpreting and applying the data must ensure individuals, ʻohana, and kaiāulu or community from whom the data are collected are provided an opportunity to participate in the process (e.g., analyses, review of findings, or editing) and to benefit from it.
– Culturally Responsive Evaluation and Assessment-Hawaiʻi