Healing Tides: Weaving Culture, Place, Self, and Community for Collective Healing and Impact Among NHPI Organizations

The Healing Tides Initiative brings together nine Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander (NHPI) organizations across Southern California to address systemic inequities through culturally responsive, community-driven change and healing. The initiative navigates the tension between honoring organizational uniqueness and building collective impact through shared outcomes.

NHPI communities represent diverse cultural identities, historical experiences, and contemporary challenges. Recognizing diversity as strength, our evaluation approach leverages transformative practices that honor organizational uniqueness, foster individual organizational healing, and support collective healing. We collaboratively develop culturally grounded metrics, prioritize Indigenous knowledge, and elevate marginalized voices through deep community engagement and peer mentorship.

The initiative exemplifies distributed leadership, empowering NHPI organizations to define priorities, choose culturally meaningful metrics, and interpret outcomes. Evaluators facilitate rather than dictate, balancing individual goals with cohesive cohort-level metrics. This presentation shares strategies for co-creating responsive metrics, facilitating cross-organizational learning, and integrating organizational narratives into a unified collective healing and impact story.

Patti Dayleg; Alyshia Macaysa-Feracota; Noilyn Mendoza; 'Alisi Tulua