Gift Impact

Scholarships created by gifts from Ward Village and Hawaiian Dredging Construction Co. were a welcome surprise for more than 150 apprentices in Honolulu Community College’s Apprenticeship and Journey Worker Training program.

Pat Adams was a UH Maui College professor beloved by students, faculty and staff. Her son and daughter-in-law pay tribute with a new fund for UHMC's construction technology students.

Bernard and Pamela Lum chose to add to their philanthropic legacy through a gift in their estate plan, not only adding to their existing cancer research and endowed scholarship funds, but also creating three additional endowed scholarships.

Brig. Gen. Edwin A. “Skip” Vincent, left, seen with Jon Osorio, dean of the Hawai‘inuiākea School of Hawaiian Knowledge, founded the Hawaii Pacific Foundation after retiring from a long career in the Hawaiʻi Air National Guard as a way to give back to the Native Hawaiian community. “What we're doing is we're taking the helpers and the people who need help and we’re a bridge between them, finding ways to allow them to communicate better,” Vincent says. The Native Hawaiian organization has invested nearly $1 million in UH programs that benefit Native Hawaiian students and their communities by helping to empower them and those around them.

The Vernon and Yun Soong Jim Micropropagation Endowment will support the Lyon Arboretum’s micropropagation lab into the distant future. The couple’s three daughters agree this represents their parents’ values and respect for the work at the Mānoa arboretum.

A gift from alumna Lori Admiral and her husband, Mark, creates the Admiral Residency in Contemporary Pacific Art at the UH Mānoa’s Department of Art and Art History, which will bring two visiting artists to campus to help art students see other cultures and perspectives. “Being a student in the art department was rewarding, and I felt it was important to give back,” says Lori Admiral, who earned a bachelor’s and master’s degree in art history at UH Mānoa. “When my husband, Mark, and I learned that funding for a teaching residency was a priority for the Department of Art and Art History, it was easy to offer support.

Dr. Kem Lowry was the kind of teacher, mentor and friend whose kindness, generosity and skill in teaching, and listening, inspired and enriched the lives of his students and colleagues at UH Mānoa — and allowed everyone he met to be their best selves. His legacy will live on with the Dr. Kem Lowry Scholarship Endowment.

For more than 25 years, the James & Abigail Campbell Scholarships in Teacher Education have helped more than 200 education students at the UH Mānoa and UH West Oʻahu committed to working as teachers or education leaders on the Waianae Coast.

UH Hilo’s ʻImiloa Astronomy Center features an award-winning landscape offering a glimpse of Hawaiʻi’s pristine, native ecosystem as it once was. Now, to memorialize longtime Hilo residents Koon Leong and Bertha Chock, beneficiaries of the K. L. Chock Trust have made a gift for the continued care of the native garden, renamed the Koon Leong and Bertha Luke Chock Garden. “We sought a fitting way to express our gratitude for their contributions to their family and to the Hilo community,” says daughter Thelma Chock Nip.