About Us
Ke Keʻena Kūpaʻa Mauli Ola: Our resilience is in our wellness. This is the ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi (Hawaiian language) name that was gifted to us as the Office of Wellness and Resilience. While it translates directly, the arrangement also poetically asserts that our resilience is rooted in our wellness.
To learn more about our Office, check out our fact sheet.
Our Kuleana
The kuleana (responsibility; privilege) of the Office of Wellness and Resilience is to strengthen our state service systems, using hope-centered principles as strategies to make Hawai‘i a trauma-informed state. We break down barriers that impact the well-being of Hawai‘i’s people – from keiki to kūpuna.
Our History
Following more than a decade of community support for a trauma-informed movement in the state, including the groundbreaking work of Hawai‘i’s Trauma-Informed Care Task Force, Gov. David Ige signed Senate Bill 2482 in July 2022, creating the nation’s first statewide-legislated Office of Wellness and Resilience. It is now known as Act 291.
The Office was founded in January 2023 with Gov. Josh Green’s appointment of Tia L. Roberts Hartsock as its inaugural director, and became fully staffed about six months later in June.
During the 2024 legislative session, the State of Well-Being Project was created via Act 106, which grew our office in terms of size and scope.
Trauma-Informed Care
What do we mean when we say we are a “trauma-informed state” or that our organization strives for a culture of “trauma-informed care”? Essentially, we are referring to the below six principles, as outlined by the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA).
In addition, we use the definition of trauma-informed and -response practices as adopted by the Hawai‘i Trauma-Informed Care Task Force in the framework section of their recommendations report: an approach to understanding, recognizing, respecting, and responding to the pervasive and widespread impacts of trauma on our ability to connect with ourselves and others, our place and the elements around us, and our ways of being.
