How CPC Is Involved in Communities
Social Enrichment |
The CPC offers activities that provide family health and wellbeing. These include supplementary after-school activities for sports and hobbies, especially targeting at-risk youth in jeopardy of leaving school, as well as activities focused on post-conflict stress mitigation. Instructional health activities include prenatal health awareness, sanitation and prevention of communicable diseases, safety in the home, and recourses to domestic violence and how to access to professional medical care.
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Economic Empowerment |
The CPC offers activities that introduce various avenues of economic empowerment to the local population. Specialized training for preparedness relative to local career and entrepreneurial opportunities includes secondary graduation equivalency programs, small business development, bookkeeping, marketing, export opportunities, commercial use of IT and social media, microfinance, and establishing a successful cottage industry. A particular emphasis is on support for economic opportunities for women, and minority and indigenous communities. CPC training services address the particular needs of non-traditional learners. These include, among others: older school returners, currently employed individuals, single parents, physically challenged individuals, and recently decommissioned former combatants.
Programs that instill a strong sense of entrepreneurialism are key to developing a sense of empowerment and control over their life choices. To foster this, programs will be designed to develop business skills and entrepreneurial sensibility in an applied manner. This will entail learning to develop revenue streams from these pursuits in which they enthusiastically engage. CPC facilities are available for local commercial enterprises to advertise job opportunities and to recruit employees. |
Risk Mitigation |
Risk management and mitigation includes preparation for a broad array of potential natural and man-made hazards. Risk mitigation entails strategic infrastructure fortification and the enactment and enforcement of building codes that take into consideration various possible hazards. Mitigation and preparedness are the means by which a community reduces the conceivable risk factors associated with potential threats, and lessens the negative impacts associated with such events. Disaster recovery, in the development context, is the means by which a community gets itself back on sure footing in a manner that enhances subsequent risk mitigation, and the goal of CPC is to make communities more resilient so they can recover more quickly from any short-term or long-term shocks.
The CPC can help train emergency managers and first responders to provide essential services and quickly assess and survey a crisis area and communicate with local, regional and national level leaders to coordinate a timely and effective response strategy. CPC can also help expand appropriate innovative technologies, including cyber security and infrastructure protection, deployment of Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS), and the provision of reliable power from primarily renewable sources to power system components, potable water from local sources, local and global communications to transmit and receive voice, data and images via VSAT (Very Small Aperture Terminal), and a predetermined and pilot-tested community protocol for rapid deployment of local situational awareness and information sharing. |
Cultural Enrichment |
The CPC offers programs and a venue for music, dance, theater, and the visual and literary arts, as well as promoting those traditional cultural art forms that are the heritage of the various groups that make up the extended community. These programs include cultural exchange for the purpose of exploring cultural diversity between neighboring communities as well as internationally, involving travel for both inbound and outbound exchanges. All activities promote intercultural and multicultural awareness and respect.
The CPC can help a community focus historic preservation initiatives. Historic preservation reaffirms a community’s collective identity by memorializing its unique historical esthetic and cultural traditions, by preserving surviving icons that pay homage to historical achievements, by fostering the integration of current development initiatives in the context of a community’s perspective of that history, and by linking that history to the awareness of the social and cultural continuity that have enabled it to persevere over time. Development initiatives that are aligned with this socio-cultural continuity become part of a community’s historical dynamics and contribute to the well being and empowerment that ensure that continuity. |
Spotlight on a CPC Foundation Model Project
Community-Based Watershed Improvement Activities and Eduction
Prior to the construction of the Ala Wai Canal in 1928, the area that is today Hawaii's famous Waikiki was an expansive natural wetland used for taro fields and duck ponds. The canal serves as a drainage for three major stream systems, Manoa, Palolo, and Makiki Streams which comprise the Ala Wai Watershed Complex.
This region of South Oahu is the most densely population in the State of Hawaii with more than 170,000 residents crammed into a total land area of only 16.3 square miles. On any given day, as many as 400,000 people may be concentrated in the tiny Waikiki subarea of only 8.8 square miles where some 250,000 vehicles travel its meager 1.8 square miles of roadway daily.
With this kind of intense urbanization and public use, it is no wonder that nearly a century after its construction, the Ala Wai Canal and its feeder streams have earned the reputation of being the most polluted water body in the State, regularly exceeding most state standards for pesticides, nutrients and fecal indicator bacteria.
The Hawaii Exemplary State Foundation (HESF) is leading the effort to implement a more integrative, systems thinking approach in addressing environmental, public health, policy and all of the socio-economic issues surrounding the Ala Wai Watershed. The goal is to establish a new sustainable ecological balance that incorporates indigenous practices with modern technologies while accommodating societal changes that have occurred.
The communication, collaboration and coordinated action being organized by AWWA through a systems approach will lead to empowering the people to develop strategic solutions to complex problems and enable them to take charge of the communities where they reside. This community-based approach is being showcased by the CPC Foundation to serve as a program model to be exported and replicated anywhere in the world for addressing a multitude of issues and challenges to community resilience and their ability to thrive.
This region of South Oahu is the most densely population in the State of Hawaii with more than 170,000 residents crammed into a total land area of only 16.3 square miles. On any given day, as many as 400,000 people may be concentrated in the tiny Waikiki subarea of only 8.8 square miles where some 250,000 vehicles travel its meager 1.8 square miles of roadway daily.
With this kind of intense urbanization and public use, it is no wonder that nearly a century after its construction, the Ala Wai Canal and its feeder streams have earned the reputation of being the most polluted water body in the State, regularly exceeding most state standards for pesticides, nutrients and fecal indicator bacteria.
The Hawaii Exemplary State Foundation (HESF) is leading the effort to implement a more integrative, systems thinking approach in addressing environmental, public health, policy and all of the socio-economic issues surrounding the Ala Wai Watershed. The goal is to establish a new sustainable ecological balance that incorporates indigenous practices with modern technologies while accommodating societal changes that have occurred.
The communication, collaboration and coordinated action being organized by AWWA through a systems approach will lead to empowering the people to develop strategic solutions to complex problems and enable them to take charge of the communities where they reside. This community-based approach is being showcased by the CPC Foundation to serve as a program model to be exported and replicated anywhere in the world for addressing a multitude of issues and challenges to community resilience and their ability to thrive.
Mullet fishing along Ala Wai Canal in the 40s and 50s, prior to the environmental degradation of the Watershed