A&B employee Gail Abrena-Agas appeared on Hawaii News Now to talk about A&B Pride, a new diversity and inclusion initiative, and our participation for the first time in the Pride Parade. A&B Pride was established by employees for employees as an engagement, resource and social group for LGBTQ+ employees, allies and supporters.
Check out the video link below:
GRANT AWARDED FOR SUGAR MUSEUM’S PROGRAMS AND PROJECTSPuunene, Maui, Hawaii – Alexander & Baldwin has awarded a $20,000 grant to the Sugar Museum. The grant will provide support for the museum’s core programs and projects. Museum Director Holly Buland said, “We are very grateful for this award. Alexander & Baldwin is committed to supporting local communities, allowing us to provide valuable services to the
people of Maui–and beyond.”
Education Program: Helps children learn about our sugar plantation heritage and how it helped shape our current society. Alexander & Baldwin has been supporting the transportation and operating costs for second-grade students since the inception of the program in 1990.
Marketing: Operating costs for promoting the Museum through advertising as well as printing the “Passport to the Past,” which offers discounted admission to four island museums.
Community Outreach: Delivers information to our neighborhoods through displays at festivals and other cultural events throughout the year. As a resource for the community, we provide cultural and community groups with loans of photographs and objects from our collection for their events, bulletin board space to promote their activities, and a venue for
community meetings.
About The Alexander & Baldwin Sugar Museum
The Alexander & Baldwin Sugar Museum is a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization dedicated to preserving and presenting the history and heritage of the sugar industry and the multi-ethnic plantation heritage it engendered. Created in 1980 as a
memorial to early sugar pioneers Samuel T. Alexander and Henry Perrine Baldwin, the Sugar Museum is the primary source for information on the history of sugar on Maui. Open daily, 9:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. For more information, go to www.sugarmuseum.com, find us on Facebook, or call 808-871-8058.
About Alexander & Baldwin, Inc.
Alexander & Baldwin, Inc. is Hawai’i’s premier commercial real estate company and the state’s foremost owner of grocery-anchored retail centers. A&B is a fully integrated real estate investment trust and owns, operates and manages approximately 3.8 million square feet of primarily retail and industrial space in Hawai’i, and is a major landowner in the state. A&B’s interests extend beyond commercial real estate into renewable energy and land stewardship. A&B is also a construction materials company and paving contractor in Hawai’i. Over its nearly 150-year history, A&B has evolved with the state’s economy and played a lead role in the development of the agricultural, transportation, tourism, construction and real estate industries.
The Rotary Club of Kahului and Alexander & Baldwin announced that more than $40,000 was raised for the 2019 Michael H. Lyons II Memorial Scholarship Palaka Celebration Fundraiser and Golf Ball Drop on Aug. 16 at the King Kamehameha Golf Club.
One highlight of the evening was, while the audience watched from the lanai, Sunshine Helicopters dropping 2,000 golf balls on to a practice green.
This year, the club honored Goodfellow Bros. for its philanthropy service to the community; Mercer K. “Chubby” Vicens for his long and tireless community and volunteer service; and Larry Laird for his extended contributions to the Maui Rotary clubs and youth of Maui.
The awards and certificates were presented by state Sen. Roz Baker, state Reps. Troy Hashimoto and Kyle Yamashita, and County Council Members Tasha Kama and Tamara Paltin. Entertainment was provided by Uncle George Kahumoku.
Net proceeds directly fund the Rotary Club of Kahului’s Michael H. Lyons II Scholarship Program, providing college scholarships for exceptional and deserving Maui youths.
Lyons, for whom the fund and the Palaka Award are named, was the epitome of a Rotarian and a prominent figure in the Maui community, according to a news release.
He served as president of the Rotary Club of Kahului and as governor of Rotary District 5000. Lyons died on March 26, 2004.
The Rotary Club of Kahului’s annual Palaka Award distinguishes outstanding long-term philanthropy and volunteer service to nonprofit organizations on Maui to community members who demonstrate their commitment to helping others by volunteering their time, talent and treasure to create positive change and stronger communities on Maui.
To make a donation to this scholarship fund, contact Gary Albitz at 281-9672 or [email protected].
In March 2018, A&B supported Special Olympics Hawaii’s capital campaign for their “Sports and Wellness Center” with a $20,000 grant. This facility, which will be built in Kapolei, will serve as Special Olympics Hawaii’s new headquarters and will play a critical role in improving the overall health and wellness of both their athletes and the local community.
A&B has a long history of partnership with Special Olympics Hawaii dating back to 1984. On Dec. 12, 2018, a group of A&B and Grace Pacific employees visited Special Olympics Hawaii’s office for a check presentation. The employees from A&B and GP expressed deep personal connections to Special Olympics and its mission, and it was a wonderful opportunity to meet with Special Olympics Hawaii staff, including Nancy Bottelo (President & CEO) and two of the athletes.
Happy Holidays! A&B is bringing holiday cheer this season at our centers across the islands. We enjoy the opportunity to spread joy to the world, bringing families, neighbors, and the community together to make unforgettable memories. Here are some of the fun festivities we are sponsoring this holiday season!
The first weekend of December was packed with Christmas fun – especially December 1!
Twenty-seven A&B Windward residents marched in the Kaneohe Christmas Parade, handing out reusable bags and candy canes to thousands of paradegoers. At the same time, Lau Hala Shops in Kailua was hosting a tail-wagging Santa Paws event. Furry friends, both naughty and nice, snapped priceless photos on Santa’s lap to benefit the Hawaiian Humane Society. That same night, we underwrote the Christmas Tree Lighting Ceremony at Lanihau Center. Kailua-Kona residents flocked to the center to enjoy the lights and entertainment, and a special gift drive was held to benefit the Salvation Army.
Around the isles on December 5, holiday magic came alive!
At The Shops at Kukuiula on Kauai, we held a very special Chanukah Celebration on Wednesday, Dec. 5. The event took place at our weekly Culinary Market, and it included a very special “tiki torch” menorah lighting. In Kailua Town, we offered a free trolley service to the Castle Tree Lighting Ceremony from the Kailua Town Center parking garage. Sponsored by A&B, this 34th annual community event featured island musician Josh Tatofi, as well as a pre-ceremony concert by the Marine Forces Pacific Band. Then came the dazzling main event, the lighting of the tree, followed by photo ops with Santa and Mrs. Claus, keiki activities and refreshments.
At our centers on December 8 – a craft fair and two fun parades!
Lanihau Center is hosting their Pua Na Pua Holiday Craft Fair from 10 am – 4 pm. This very special art fair celebrates the contributions of both developmentally disabled (DD) and non-DD artists. The event will feature arts, crafts and artisanal items, live music, demos, a silent auction, and so much more. At the same time, Waianae Mall will be having their annual Christmas Parade and Ho‘olaule‘a from 10 am – 2 pm. The grand parade will be followed by festive fun at the mall with food and craft booths, entertainment, Santa, a photo booth, and other fun activities! Last but not least, over forty A&B employees and their family members will be marching in the annual Manoa Christmas Parade at 5 pm to represent Manoa Marketplace. Along the mile-long route, marchers will be decked out in holiday flair and spreading cheer throughout the valley.
On December 15 the keiki will play, with a special bash and even a snow day!
Dec. 15 is all about the keiki (and the keiki at heart)! The Shops at Kukuiula is hosting the 2nd Annual Keiki Holiday Bash from 2 – 6 pm. This family-friendly event will feature face painting, crafts, photos with Santa, local entertainment and a snowy surprise! At Waipio Shopping Center, there will be a very special performance from 4 – 5 pm. Kanoelani Elementary School students will be spreading cheer with their “Wrapped in Love” Holiday Performance. This adorable show is a bonus part of our special partnership with Mililani ‘Ike and Kanoelani Elementary schools this year. This holiday season, select merchants at two of our centers, Gateway at Mililani Mauka Center and Waipio Shopping Center, are carrying holiday gift bags decorated by students from the schools. The decorated holiday gift bags can be used for purchases or for holiday gift giving and are available for a minimum donation of $2, with all proceeds going directly to the schools. Plus, A&B and the centers will match the proceeds with an additional $1,000 donation for each school! Finally, we’re bringing a White Christmas to Pearl City! Pearl Highlands Center is hosting the 13th Annual “Snow Days in Hawaii Nei” event from 10 am – 3 pm. This free, family-friendly event will feature 40 tons of snow, as well as games & activities, giveaways, special merchant offers and even more holiday magic!
December 16 at Waianae Mall – come one, come all, to the Christmas Festival!
We are wrapping up the holiday festivities with a bow at the Waianae Mall. From 10 am – 2 pm, the Waianae Coast Christmas Festival will have over 50 booths of “Made on the Waianae Coast” products. This is the perfect place to get any last minute holiday shopping done, all while supporting local! There will also be ono food and live music for everyone to enjoy. We hope you can join us at some of our fun, festive events this holiday season!
ELEELE — “I’m glad I took my allergy pill this morning,” said Shelley Gerardo of Kukuiula Development Co. as she was showered with spackling, white powder and dust while tugging on the masking paper covering the windows of a Kauai Habitat for Humanity home in the Eleele Iluna neighborhood. “Yuck!”
Gerardo, who brought her husband Darryl along to help, was one of more than 20 people from A&B Hawaii and its local subsidiaries who volunteered to help complete Kauai Habitat homes after presenting a check for $25,000 brought over from Oahu by A&B CEO Chris Benjamin.
The award was made through A&B’s Kokua Giving Program to help support flood-recovery efforts on Kauai.
“This is one of the most satisfying volunteer opportunities I’ve had the privilege of participating in,” Benjamin said.
Following the record-breaking rainfall that resulted in flooding and landslides around Kauai, A&B has been seeking ways to show its support for the impacted Kauai communities and residents.
“We saw the historic rainfall and damage, and wanted to help Kauai rebuild,” said Meredith Ching, A&B executive vice president and chair of the A&B Kokua Giving Program. “A&B is proud of our nearly 30-year partnership with Kauai Habitat.”
Radine and Jeffery Fabro were among the Kauai Habitat homeowners rolling up their sleeves in the warm Saturday morning that permeated with the feeling of the holidays as craft fairs, fundraisers and sporting playoffs tugged for attention.
“This home is for Chelyssa and Chanyce,” Radine said as she and Chanyce tugged at masking paper protecting the floor from overspray. “They’re getting close to moving in now.” The Fabros were readying the home for the arrival of the corps of volunteers that stemmed from A&B Hawaii and its local subsidiaries, including A&B Properties, Grace Pacific, Kukuiula and McBryde Resources. During the volunteer work day, the A&B volunteers worked on interior paint priming and construction of stairs and porches.
“We are grateful for A&B’s continued support of our efforts to provide affordable housing to Kauai residents,” said Peter Wiederoder, Kauai Habitat board president, who stopped in to add his elbow grease to the work effort before tending to other tasks that called for his attention.
Over the past 30 years, A&B and its affiliates have provided more than $100,000 in cash contributions to Kauai Habitat, and more than $156,000 to Habitat for Humanity affiliates throughout the state.
“A&B has operated on Kauai for more than a century, and we wanted to give back to the community that has supported us for so many years,” Ching said.
On Saturday, Sept. 15, Grace Pacific held their GP Ohana Festival at Royal Kunia Community Park. This event hadn’t been held in over 10 years, and its revival was due to GP’s commitment to recognizing and expressing its appreciation for its employees and their ohana.
Many of the longer tenured employees mentioned how Grace used to show their appreciation in the “traditional local way,” with a gathering. Thus, the GP Ohana Festival was reborn.
The event was a huge success — 760 employees and family members showed up for a day of fun and giving back to the community. The festivalgoers enjoyed live entertainment; raffle prizes; bouncy houses; a shave ice truck; baseball, volleyball, and Portuguese horseshoe (built by the GPRM Prestress) competitions; and a delicious meal prepared and served by management employees, including Pike Riegert, Bill Paik, and Chris Benjamin.
GP employees brought donations for the Hawaii Foodbank to support the community. In total, the GP Ohana Festival yielded 894 pounds of canned goods and dry items, as well as $2,354 in financial contributions for the Hawaii Foodbank.
The GP Ohana Festival was also held on Maui on Sept. 29, and Kona and Kauai will have their festivals soon as well. The GP Ohana Festival is a wonderful celebration that demonstrates how deeply GP appreciates and values its employees and their ohana, and we look forward to it being an annual tradition for years to come!
Carbon Lighthouse, which has been working with Alexander & Baldwin on increasing energy efficiency and reduce carbon emissions at four of its buildings, has raised $27 million in growth round funding, including a $3 million investment by Ulupono Initiative, the Hawaii-based impact investing firm founded by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and his wife, Pam.
The San Francisco-based company’s mission to reduce carbon emissions while increasing revenue for commercial property owners “made it extremely attractive to us to have an impact here in Hawaii,” Greg Gaug, Ulupono Initiative’s vice president of investments, told Pacific Business News.
Gaug noted that the three Oahu properties owned by Alexander & Baldwin (NYSE: ALEX) — Pearl Highlands Center, Kakaako Commerce Center and Manoa Marketplace — that have been working with Carbon Lighthouse have eliminated more than 20,000 barrels of oil throughout the life of the projects through energy efficiency solutions.
A&B expects it could save “up to seven figures over 10 years, depending on the property, so it’s a significant number,” said Kit Millan, vice president of asset management at A&B Properties.
Carbon Lighthouse, which opened a Honolulu office in January, was founded in 2010 with the goal of “stopping climate change,” CEO Brenden MIllstein told Pacific Business News. The company, which was a member of the Elemental Excelerator’s 2016 cohort, has analyzed and implemented efficiency solutions in some 500 buildings across the United States.
Working for a fixed monthly fee of 20 cents per square foot, the company deploys sensors around a building that measure energy use, particularly for lighting and air conditioning and ventilation. Then they use that data in real time to make a building’s “existing equipment work better.”
“Think of it as getting your car tuned up, but every five or 10 minutes and automatically,” Millstein said.
The company has other clients in Hawaii that it declines to reveal, but A&B is the largest. Millstein said Carbon Lighthouse is also close to signing some new clients in the Islands.
“Hawaii, in particular, is a very exciting market for us,” he said. “Primarily because so much of the electricity from the grid comes from oil … [and] the financials in Hawaii tend to be about three times as good as they are on the Mainland.”
Clients on the Mainland typically see a return on investment of 100 percent, but Millstein said the ROI for Hawaii is estimated to be about 300 percent.
“The prices are high, and also the climate lends itself well to our technical solution,” he said.
Millstein said it might be typical in Hawaii to save $1 per square foot on energy, a financial benefit that is split three ways, with the landlord and tenant each taking 40 cents per square foot and Carbon Lighthouse taking 20 cents. The company also guarantees the building will see savings on energy bills.
“If we’re charging $100,000 a year, we’ll guarantee savings of $250,000 and if savings are less than what you guarantee, then we write a check back to the client to make up the difference,” Millstein said. “That has happened three out of the past 150 or so buildings — about 2 percent of the time we need to write a check, but on average we’re delivering about 10 percent more savings than we predicted, across the board.”
A&B started talking to Carbon Lighthouse more than a year ago, then early last year started with the energy efficiency analyses and implemented the capital program at the Kakaako Commerce Center in mid 2017. Pearl Highlands was second, Millan said.
“We did the analysis, and we just recently completed the capital program,” Millan said. “We don’t have results, but we’re pretty optimistic about what those savings will be.”
Manoa Marketplace is starting the capital project, and an A&B office building on Kahului is starting the analysis.
Millan said the savings could be passed on to tenants.
“We’re very optimistic the tenants will experience significant savings,” he said.
Meanwhile, Millstein said Ulupono Initiative is the largest investor from Hawaii in the current funding round. The lead investor is China’s GRC Sinogreen Fund, and individual investors include JB Straubel, the chief technology officer at Tesla Motors, Steve Girsky, a former top executive at General Motors, and executives from the Bristol Group and Brookfield Asset Management.
For Ulupono Initiative, the $3 million investment was a higher amount than typical investments. Ulupono has invested $5 million in the Honolulu Seawater Air Conditioning project, and has invested anywhere from $1 million to $3 million in several sustainable farming projects in the Islands.
“It’s on the higher end of what we typically do,” Gaug said. “It shows the confidence and expectations we have in Carbon Lighthouse and the impact they can have here in Hawaii.”
More than 150 volunteers on Saturday, August 18, 2018 joined The Trust for Public Land at Ka‘ala Farm in Waianae on Oahu’s Leeward Shore to take part in a communal land restoration effort. The participants— including conservation donors and volunteers from 13 local companies — helped steward Kaala Farm by opening loi and planting kalo, while keiki enjoyed cultural activities such as pounding poi and making healthy ulu pancakes. Named A Day on the Land, the venture emphasizes community connections to and restoration of Hawaii’s important cultural lands, and volunteers ranged in age from four to 74 years old.
Volunteers came from Hawaiian Electric, Hawaii Gas, Hawaiian Airlines, Alaska Airlines, Alexander and Baldwin, Central Pacific Bank, Edmund C. Olson Trust, G70, James Campbell Company LLC, Pulama Lanai, Title Guaranty, Makai Ocean Engineering, and Dentons US LLP.
For over 40 years, The Trust for Public Land has been conserving land for people across Hawaii, protecting 34 sites across the islands for community benefit. It says it helps local communities safeguard natural, cultural, recreational, and agricultural lands for all to enjoy – including places like Kaala Farm, a nonprofit it assisted in 2003 by helping secure lands that provided access to their community operations.
A&B has sponsored Trust for Public Land’s event “A Day on the Land” since its inception.
http://www.kitv.com/story/38914042/thirteen-local-companies-give-back-at-kaala-farm
Thirty years ago, Alexander & Baldwin provided start-up funding for Hawaii Nature Center’s Iao Valley facility on Maui. Earlier this year, we strengthened our roots on Maui with a $30,000 capital commitment for much-needed repairs and educational program enhancements. This grant brings the company’s total giving to HNC to well over $300,000 for Maui and Oahu programs.
A&B converts to a real estate investment trust (REIT) and undertakes a comprehensive rebranding effort to provide clarity to its stakeholders. Adopts the new tagline “Partners for Hawai‘i” to reflect not only our focus on Hawai‘i, but our intent to work with local communities to achieve our mutual goals. The new logo was inspired by the motifs of A&B’s historic building’s architecture, the crest represents strength in history and solidarity through change.
