Home of Innovative
Visitor and Community-based Programs:
Tropical Organic Nature Farm
With Botanical Garden Exhibits
West Hawaii Sustainable Energy Project –
Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy
Green Business Incubator and
Green Jobs Training
YES Youth Empowerment for Sustainability Camps
Smart Living, Health and Wellness
Programs and Retreats
Art and Cultural Events
Hands-on Workshops, Special Events,
Festivals and Symposiums for all ages
Year-round Online Distance Learning
We now face undeniable climate and natural resource challenges on a global scale as never before. What can we do as individuals, at the local level, to become a part of a solution that will have positive global outcomes? What can we learn from sister communities that face similar resource challenges? Who will become the leaders to help us realize new lifestyles, new priorities, and new ways of working together? What legacy will we pass on to future generations?
There is a natural, intelligent way of living that we have almost forgotten. A native way of being in-tune with our unique home planet. All over the world people are looking across national boundaries to discover and share intelligent, immediate and long-range strategies that will help solve our common challenges. The motivation to think smarter and act wiser as intentional earth stewards has never been stronger.
One Island has opened its sustainable living center to provide a forum for the exchange of ideas that can equip us with powerful tools to transform our lives and our society in positive ways.
One Island is a non-profit education center sponsored by Heritage Ranch, Inc. Founded in 2004, Heritage Ranch hosts multi-generation education, renewable energy, and rural economic development programs in four western states. The flagship One Island Center has opened in Honaunau, Hawaii. Another is currently being developed in the Pacific Northwest.
ONE ISLAND in HAWAII
One Island is a local non-profit program that hosts sustainability education activities on agriculture, local food system and zero-mile home gardening, renewable energy and solar grants, health and wellness, and arts and culture. Our Sustainable Living Center is located on a 10 acre farm in Honaunau, overlooking Kealakekua Bay and the ocean, and includes 7,000 sq feet in organic greenhouse and ag structures, a farm-based outdoor learning center, educational gardens and orchards, and is partnering with fellow non-profits and schools to host a variety of empowering life-long learning programs for all ages.
“With all of the press lately about ‘going green’ (and warnings about hollow ‘green washing’), we realized how important it is to identify and then present practical, do-it-yourself programs on sustainable living practices that are about more than just a product to ‘buy’. Our learning-by-doing programs are designed to help our participants reflect on our personal behavior and to then make well informed choices that address the true short and long term consequences of our lifestyle choices. One Island’s goal is to help our island community focus on achievable, measurable changes in our outlook, our core values, and our chosen behavior that will really yield an ability to ‘walk the talk’ of sustainability in part through our buying power” explains Marcy Montgomery, One Island’s founder and director.
“We often say ‘Green is a Verb’ and remind people that green living is about actions, but before we are moved to action, we also can benefit from examining the underlying ways of thinking that then generate our behavior. How DO we really learn to do right by the aina? What changes can we make individually that contribute towards a local and global shift in human values that give us hope for our future?”
After five years of listening to the West Hawaii community, and successfully competing for several federal grants to launch its programs, One Island identified four core subject areas – agriculture, energy, wellness, and art – as cornerstones of sustainable living. “These four integrated practices can serve as a strong foundation for building individual household and community wide skill sets that help us step forwards and solve local-to-global problems of rising costs, resource depletion, climate impacts, environmental damage, and over consumption by re-addressing our core values and working together to change our personal and community practices” suggests Montgomery.
Hawaii is not alone in trying to answer the sustainability challenge. “Living on an island, with finite boundaries and higher levels of resource risks, the challenges of sustainability are very real and immediate for us” notes Stephen Shrader, One Island’s green jobs incubator advisor. “I’ve lived on islands in the Northwest for 40 years and have found the same questions we are asking here in Hawaii are also under discussion on our sister islands closer to the mainland. But here in Hawaii, the risk of not becoming more self-sufficient is even greater. Solutions are most likely to come from locations that face the most immediate levels of risk. If not here, where?”
One measure of success is the organization’s grant raising achievements that are helping to stimulate a local green economy. Heritage Ranch, Inc. is the parent non-profit organization hosting One Island and has received a $400,000 grant from HUD to develop its learning facility and programs, and is currently completing a USDA funded project bringing over $800,000 in small solar grants to West Hawaii’s most rural areas. Since beginning work on the Big Island in 2004, Heritage Ranch has brought over $2 million in federal rural development funding to Hawaii communities and has directly invested these funds in creating new green jobs and in purchasing green products from local businesses. At One Island, green is not only ‘a verb’, it is the color of rural community development.
One Island Sustainability Programs Feature:
Sustainable Agriculture
Renewable Energy and Efficiency
Recycling and Waste Reduction
Soil and Watershed Conservation
Wildlife and Eco-system Protection
Green Businesses and the New Economy
Human Future Strategies
Youth and Adult Sustainability Training
Organizational Leadership
K-12 Service Learning and Field Trips
Life Long Adult Learning
Health and Wellness Practices
Lifestyle Choices that Make Good Sense
Sister Programs Around the World
