The virus unexpectedly took us into virtual spaces

As a young organization carefully planning our program and infrastructure development, the dawning of the COVID-19 pandemic was an abrupt redirect. After our successful Black Futures Ball Fundraiser, we anticipated a summer of continued and deeper engagement in the community, but Hawai’i’s shelter in place orders both challenged us as a small organization in need of resources and revenue and contributed to sense of uncertainty and isolation that rippled throughout our still coalescing Black Local community.

In April we found the opportunity to host a virtual film screening of The Ball Method (2020), a short film on the life of Alice Ball, chemist and professor at the College of Hawaiʻi, who discovered a pioneering technique to treat Hansen’s Disease in the early 20th century, when that illness was a major public health challenge in the islands. Our panel reflected on Ball’s unique contribution as a Black woman scientist working in Hawaiʻi nearly a hundred years before we found ourselves challenged by the current pandemic.

The Pōpolo Project, along with our community partners Pacific Islanders in the Arts, convened a virtual collective, now called Creative Resurgence, drawing together cultural practitioners, artists, museums, arts organizations, and other cultural workers to collectively envision Hawaiʻi’s response to pandemic recovery in a way that centers the diverse cultural roots of the most marginalized as models of resilience and adaptability. The collective has produced multiple public programs, a microgrants program for community makers, and initiated hearings with the Hawai’i State legislature to create a Creative Resurgence caucus that will advocate for creatives and culture bearers as the Hawaiʻi recalibrates.

We reworked our Darker Than Blue program which in other times has provided a rare much-needed Black centered space for us to gather in a community where Black people comprise 2% of the population. We increased our engagement in that space, providing weekly gatherings via Zoom from May through December and connecting with over 200 different community members—with many regular attendees—over the eight months when we all needed connection most.