2012-05-03 Windward Transcript Circus

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All major decisions regarding the Village Green Society are made at our Annual General Meetings, held every year since 1987 and regularly attended by over 20 members representing at least two-thirds of our membership. And as is the custom in almost eco-villages, we make decisions by consensus. Consensus is a lengthy and arduous process but one that gives everyone a voice. It is a process that ensures that when we move, we move together as a group. Other less significant decisions at Bellyacres are made at a weekly resident’s meeting, where we also use consensus decision-making in our little village of about 20 adults and 8 children. SPACE is managed by a Board of Directors and an Advisory Committee. It also meets monthly and comprises of local community leaders, several of whom have been members of the Sea View Community Association Board in the past. This group also uses a consensus decision-making process. And it was this SPACE group that changed our current mission to creatively promote sustainable local community; and that was in January of 2008. We’d like to share with you about our experience with the special permit process. We actually started work on our special permit in 1998. It took us three years to come before the Planning Commission. We completed the whole process without hiring a lawyer. It was daunting, it was a very daunting undertaking. And that explains why, according to the Planning Department, groups like SPACE and Kalani Honua are the only non-profit community organizations that have actually applied for and obtained special permits, apart from churches and a few private and charter schools. That’s understandable if you look at the problems and troubles that we have to deal with. I believe that it took HAAS five years to get their special permit process, to get through the special permit process. And why is this? Well, it seems to be because special permits are not designed for community groups like us, not for nonprofits but for businesses. I’ve been told that some organizations pay $30,000 for legal representation to obtain a special permit. That’s a very big deal for an organization like us. Our annual budget is only $88,000 for all the services that we provide. We have only two part time employees. All other work is done by unpaid volunteers. The Pahoa Community Center, by way of comparison, serves fewer residents and provides fewer services than SPACE, yet it costs the County of Hawai‘i taxpayers $11,000 a month to operate. Now funding for non-profits is a different and a difficult affair. And after getting our permit in 2001, we worked with a professional fundraiser for nearly six years, applying to federal, state, and county governments, as well as private foundations nationwide. And after all this work, we failed to get a single grant for our community work. But we had raised $38,000 locally, it wasn’t enough, and decided to give up. We let go of our dream. And hours after that a private donor came through with a $250,000 challenge grant, and angle. We matched the challenge grant with volunteer, mostly with volunteer labor and we finally built SPACE. Now the complete SPACE facility, covering about 7,000 square feet, cost is $300,000 to build using eight local professional builders and a whole host of community volunteers. The main pavilion we built it in four months. To get a perspective of what a great achievement this was, compare our use of our very limited resources and what we accomplished, with the $150,000 that the County recently paid for the plastic kiddies playground at Isaac Hale Beach Park in Pohoiki, $150,000. And that took three months to install. 16 EXHIBIT B