Beverly Creamer has worked for almost four decades as a Honolulu newspaper and magazine journalist, covering everything from education and health, to government and lifestyles. She cooked with Aretha Franklin; mourned with Lorna Onizuka after the space shuttle explosion that killed her husband, Ellison; danced with Lawrence Welk; and interviewed Anwar Sadat’s widow, Gloria Steinem, Simon and Garfunkel, and many, many others.
When companies offer effective wellness programs, many of their employees become healthier, happier and more engaged. Here are before-and-after stories of four employees who signed up for wellness programs and turned their lives around. Does one of these "Before" stories sound like yours?
For an hour each month for the past four years, Shelley Umeda has put her face in the hands of aesthetician Susan Snyder, who steams and massages it, plucks out impurities and skims off a layer of dead cells to…
“What I have been doing most of my adult life and professional life is being very open and honest,” says Daniel Chun, one of Hawaii’s openly gay business leaders. “If it’s weird to me, and if I make it weird,…
Nicole Velasco: Struggling While Starting Out It was 2008, the depth of the Great Recession, and Nicole Velasco had just graduated from Princeton University. She quickly found that even an Ivy…
A lot of collaboration takes place around the main work table at WATG’s Honolulu office. From left are Craig Takahata, VP and managing director for Honolulu; Tiffany Lee, associate operations manager; and Brittany Meyers, administrative assistant. Photo:…
Muscular and athletic, Shingai Masiya was certainly college football material. He hoped for that coming out of high school, but the dream died. While he had come into the U.S. legally at age 13 with his family from Zimbabwe, a…
Kunz oversees a budget of $1.9 billion that pays for a staff of 25,000 and 289 public schools, including charter schools. Q: Energy costs for the schools are one of the largest parts of the annual budget. How are you tackling…
The Sultan brothers are a major new force in Hawaii’s venture capital and startup communities. Their two platforms are Sultan Ventures, a Hawaii-based venture capital firm, and XLR8UH. Last year, the two of you and UH launched XLR8UH, a public-private…
By sixth grade, Cedric Gates' future already looked bleak: Severe childhood obesity had pushed his weight over 200 pounds. A year later things got worse: His mother collapsed at work and died from heart disease. By the time he was…
Teresa Bill goes to work every day at UH’s Bridge to Hope program knowing that she makes a difference in people’s lives. Bridge to Hope began 15 years ago to help welfare recipients, victims of domestic violence and struggling single…
YouthBuild offers a second chance to young people who dropped out of school or face other serious challenges. The Honolulu city-run program provides hands-on training in painting, carpentry, plumbing, electrical and other real-world skills, while students work toward a high…
The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 required that colleges provide services and help students with disabilities. Eighteen years later, partly because of a series of lawsuits, Congress radically enlarged the definition. In the past, disabilities primarily included blindness, deafness…
The Boys and Girls Club has changed the lives of young people in Hawaii for 40 years. This year alone, it has 2,000 members between the ages of 7 and 17 at its 14 club sites, says Tim Motts, president…
It was 1955. The FDA approved the Salk polio vaccine and Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus. The Brooklyn Dodgers won the World Series for the first time and Disneyland opened. Jimmy Stewart and…
As the sun rises on Waikiki Beach, some workers are going home while others have just arrived and are preparing to serve, feed and entertain up to 6,000 visitors at the Hilton. Senior writer Beverly Creamer and photographer Greg Yamamoto…
The Queen’s Health Systems was facing a difficult and expensive decision: whether to rescue the North Hawaii Community Hospital in Hawaii Island’s paniolo country. The hospital was considering bankruptcy, a path taken by other Hawaii hospitals in the past four…
Since April, Barnes has led Kaiser in Hawaii, which has 231,000 member clients, a hospital in Moanalua, 22 clinics and 4,400 employees, including 500 doctors. Barnes started her health-care career 40 years ago as an intensive- care-unit nurse. “It’s easy…
As Brian Adrian stands atop a 42-foot ladder on a Dallas construction site, the alarm on his mobile phone rings. It’s time to call his wife, so he secures his grip and hits speed dial. Almost 4,000 miles away in…
When Hawaii Business published its first Top 250 list 30 years ago, the “Big Five” were still big. The companies that once dominated the local economy were no longer the five biggest companies in the state as ranked by gross…
Photography Courtesy of Northwest Energy Innovation Devices to measure wave energy and convert it into electricity will be deployed in Kaneohe Bay near Marine Corps Base Hawaii starting this year, say the Navy, state Rep. Cynthia Thielen and a…
Photography by David Croxford In April, the state Public Utilities Commission ordered Hawaiian Electric’s utilities on Oahu, Maui and Hawaii Island to take action in four ways: “aggressively pursue energy-cost reductions, proactively respond to emerging renewable-energy-integration challenges, improve the…
Hawaii-born Russell Leu loves working in China, though he recognizes living there offers challenges. The Hawaii attorney wears a top quality, high-tech, air-filter mask on the street on days with heavy air pollution, and has a phone app that tells…
Did you get all the way through high school and college without actually learning about a potential career and test driving it? Did your college courses have little connection with what you learned in high school? If you answered yes…
Delaney launched HiHR in 2009 and the company has made the Hawaii Best Places to Work list in every year for which it was eligible – four straight now. In the same time, HiHR went from revenues of $6.1 million in 2009 to $123…
GMO has been a divisive issue on the Neighbor Islands. Is there a further role for GMO agriculture on Oahu? I want to preserve as much of our agricultural land as possible outside the urban growth boundary, and I want…
2014 appears to be a crucial year for the Neighbor Islands. The future of agriculture is being passionately debated, tourism is at a crossroads, and the sources of county revenue are up in the air. Hawaii Business interviewed the three Neighbor Island…
Shonka, who oversees 300 employees, says First Insurance will continue to pursue core values exemplified in the acronym RICE: Respect for others; Integrity in all we do; Creating the future for ourselves and the community; and Excellent customer service. You…
The Hawaii Tourism Authority understands how hard it will be, but it is trying to rewrite the old saying that insists, What goes up, must come down. There are already strong signs that the tourism boom of the past few years has…
Stanley Kuriyama did something all too rare for a CEO: He put his company's success ahead of his personal interests. A lot of people think Stanley Kuriyama is a local hero. As chairman and CEO of Alexander & Baldwin, he…
Kimberly Hahn says no escape waspossible. Growingupwithonly brothers near the red-dirt cane fields around Mililani meant growing up riding dirt bikes and loving it. “The boys weren’t going to play Barbies,” she says with a laugh. “So you either play…
Once a month on a Saturday morning, Francis Imada flips on radio station 105.1, and heads to his backyard, where 20 miniature trees await his gentle care. Then, with Hawaiian music playing in the background, the CFO of Clinical Laboratories of Hawaii spends two hours snipping, pruning…
In our lives, we’re probably given more than a million words of advice. Almost everyone feels free to dispense it, even if we don’t ask for it, but much of it is trivial and soon forgotten. The advice that resonates…
What changes have you seen in the healthcare industry during the five years you’ve been with Kaiser? We’re seeing more accountability and transparency around quality, and we’re seeing the healthcare systems beginning to integrate. The hospitals are hiring doctors and…
Bill Chee, CEO of Locations LLC, has always been ahead of the curve. In 1969, when he was 24 and just starting in real estate, he launched a primitive database of sales information long before others even thought of such…
What started two years ago as a healthy vitamin and mineral water to combat jet lag has turned into Aloha Friday Beverages, which are designed to keep everyone healthy, every day. Andrea Gall Krasnick explains the mistakes she first made and…
Pacific Links Hawaii owns five golf courses on Oahu – Kapolei, Royal Hawaiian, Makaha (West), Makaha Valley (East) and Olomana. How do you manage roles at both Pacific Links and KS? I think there’s a perception that trustees operate like they…
Students crave internships that make them stand out from the crowd on a college or job application. How about a summer volunteer program that takes you halfway around the world to work with children from war-ravaged countries alongside other international…
Carey oversees an empire of 35 hotel operations in the Pacific and Asia, with more coming soon. He has an undergraduate degree in electrical engineering from Stanford University, plus a law degree and an MBA from Santa Clara University. He…
Heenan has served in many influential roles in Hawaii: trustee of the Estate of James Campbell, CEO of Theo H. Davies & Co., dean of the UH-Manoa College of Business and UH VP for Academic Affairs. He is currently a…
It’s simple, really: Everyone in Hawaii needs to give a hearty round of applause to tourism for lifting us out of the recession. Thank you for an estimated $13.9 billion in visitor spending during 2012 (that’s a record) from 7.8…
