Our Work
Hawaiʻi Land Trust protects, stewards, and cultivates reciprocal relationships between people and ʻāina that sustain Hawaiʻi. Guided by our 2025–2029 Strategic Plan, we work across three core strategies—Protect, Steward, and Cultivate—to build a Hawaiʻi where land and people thrive together.
We focus our efforts across three critical ʻĀina Priorities to maximize community well-being from natural landscapes to built environments:
Biocultural Ecosystems: Weaving ecologically significant landscapes with cultural heritage and practices.
Food Systems: Protecting the fertile soils and farms that nourish and feed us.
Kamaʻāina and Local Communities: Expanding our kuleana to secure land that provides housing, living-wage jobs, and essential health and social services.
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Protect
We recognize that critical connections with land are threatened by dispossession, displacement, climate events, and incompatible development. Utilizing legal and financial tools like conservation easements, land acquisitions, and deed agreements, we mitigate these threats to protect entire landscapes and ensure ancestral ties remain unbroken. When HILT works to protect a place, we engage kamaʻāina, lineal and cultural descendants, and the surrounding community to build a shared foundation of long-term care.
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Steward
True stewardship goes beyond basic protection. We work to maximize the reciprocal benefits of our connection to the land by building an active culture of aloha, shared responsibility, and interdependence—where people care for the ʻāina and each other. In partnership with communities, we responsibly restore natural and cultural resources, manage infrastructure, and implement community-informed practices that keep the land healthy, sustainable, and productive for generations.
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Cultivate
I ka wā ma mua, ka wā ma hope. The future is guided by the past. We acknowledge that forming new and renewed relationships with the land is essential to continue the cycle of reciprocity.
Through our community programs and cross-sector partnerships, we intentionally create, facilitate, and expand spaces for people to access and bind themselves to the land. We place a special emphasis on helping peoples of place—specifically honoring and uplifting lineal and cultural descendants—to re-connect, heal, and re-establish their rightful generational bonds with ancestral ʻāina.