The Mission
A dialysis clinic. In Kaʻū. A promise kept.
The Promise
My father needed dialysis at the end of his life. There is no dialysis clinic in Kaʻū. To receive the treatment that kept him alive, he had to leave Kaʻū— driving 50 miles each way, three days a week, on a two-lane “highway,” for the rest of his life.
He was not the only one. He is not the last one.
Kaʻū is the largest district on Hawaiʻi island by land area and one of the smallest by population. The entire island of Oahu easily fits within the Ka’u district. Our kūpuna, the elders who carry the memory and the language and the practices of our people, are aging into a healthcare system that does not reach them. A diagnosis of end-stage renal disease in Kaʻū is, in practical terms, a sentence of exile from the land that raised you.
I promised my father, before he died, that I would build a dialysis clinic in Kaʻū.
That promise is now my work.
Mālama Kaʻū Foundation
Mālama Kaʻū Foundation is a Native Hawaiian Organization (NHO) based in Pāhala. It exists for a single, specific purpose: to build and operate a dialysis clinic in Kaʻū, in memory of my father and in service of the community that raised both of us.
The foundation is funded by the profits of Akamai Intelligence LLC, the SBA 8(a) certified defense contracting firm I founded after retiring from the Navy. This structure is not philanthropy. It is not charity. It is the model that Congress designed when it created the 8(a) program and the Native Hawaiian Organization framework — a federal recognition that economic self-determination, not handouts, is the path forward for communities like ours.
Profits flow from federal contracts → into the foundation → into the clinic → into Kaʻū. That is how it is supposed to work. That is how we are building it.
Why This Matters Beyond Kaʻū
The SBA 8(a) Business Development Program and the Native Hawaiian Organization framework were written into federal law as a partial answer to a much older debt — including the 1893 overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom and the 1993 Apology Resolution in which the United States Congress formally acknowledged that overthrow as illegal.
The program is not DEI. It is not a diversity initiative. It is an economic engine, created by Congress, designed to produce self-sustaining wealth in communities that the federal government has formally acknowledged it once dispossessed.
That program is now under attack by the same federal government I served for nearly three decades.
If the 8(a) and NHO frameworks are dismantled, the dialysis clinic in Kaʻū becomes harder to build. So does the next clinic, in the next district, for the next community. The fight to protect these tools is not abstract. It is measured in kūpuna who can or cannot stay on the land they were born to.
I am writing the book, and doing the work, because I am not going to let these tools be taken from us.
Where We Are Today
✓ Foundation chartered — Mālama Kaʻū Foundation established as a Native Hawaiian Organization in 2021.
✓ Federal contracting in operation — Our NHO’s subsidiary, Akamai Intelligence LLC, received its SBA 8(a) certification in August 2023, and is now generating profits that flows DIRECTLY to the foundation, and not through a holding company or a separate “community service” nonprofit.
○ Site planning
○ Clinic construction
○ Doors open in Kaʻū
How to Stand With Us
DONATE Direct contributions to Mālama Kaʻū Foundation. Every dollar goes to the clinic.
CONTRACT WITH AKAMAI INTELLIGENCE If your organization has federal contracting needs that align with our capabilities, contracting with Akamai Intelligence directly funds the foundation.
FOLLOW THE WORK Join the list to receive updates on the clinic, the foundation, and the policy fights that determine whether communities like Kaʻū can build their own futures.