A history of Feed My Sheep

by Joyce Kawakami

In August 1999 a feeding program was accidently founded.  As a youth leader I noticed that many of the teens coming every week were not getting enough to eat. In fact, that was the reason they came: we served snacks; they were hungry.  I started bringing groceries to the meeting, keeping bags of food in the car to sneak to the kids as they left. They told friends who started asking for help too. Suddenly I had a weekly distribution of food to the poor out of the trunk of my car. Before long we gave up our sedan to purchase a green Tacoma pickup which became the first Feed My Sheep truck.  This was nothing official, just something my family did. My only volunteers were my three children Maile, Kekoa & Kelii and they didn't really volunteer, they were voluntold.

In 2001 My husband, Myles, and I were going to a weekly prayer meeting with pastors and leaders. When the September 11th attack sent the Hawaiian economy into a nosedive, I shared at these meetings what I was seeing, asking for prayer for the struggles people were going through.

At one of these meetings Pastor Eddie Asato of Grace Bible Church shared how God had revealed to him the need to feed the poor. He asked me if I would help start a food distribution at Grace Bible which happened in February 2002. I thought he was asking me to train up a team to do this, but at first, I wasn’t training a team, I was the team. It wasn’t long before members of the church stepped up to help and other churches joined the effort creating a coalition of churches, collaborating ministries and corporate sponsors. 

When Pastor Eddie first asked, I told him we might serve as many as 20 families a week. That felt like a lot. I still remember Pastor’s face when I told him we were serving 70 families. His reaction was shock, “How are we going to pay for this!?!”  

God provided and we learned we could not outgive him.

You might remember George W Bush’s faith-based initiatives in 2002 which allowed faith-based organizations to apply for government grants. Organizations from across 21 states were chosen to receive $60,000 to build capacity along with two years of university level training.

What you may not know is that Feed My Sheep was privileged to be one of the 21 organizations chosen in Hawaii. The training and grants lead to Feed My Sheep becoming a nationally recognized 501 (C) 3 organization with an active and involved board of directors: Pastor Eddie Asato as President, Pastor Mario Kaneshiro as Vice-President; and myself as the Secretary/Treasurer.  We hired our first part-time employee, Kamalani Rust, in 2003 and started distributing food in Wailuku.  Pastor Kaneshiro and I continued our training through 2004, learning grant writing, budgets, financials, non-profit taxes, reporting, leadership and board training, along with the necessity of internal controls and integrity.  

In 2004 continued growth enabled us to hire our 1st full-time employee, Momi Cummings, and we expanded our fleet to larger box trucks for distribution. We parked a converted shipping container in the Hawaiian Carpet parking lot for office and warehouse space and we started a distribution in Lahaina.

I distinctly remember someone asking me at this time “of all the things you could do why did you choose this one?”  I told him I didn’t choose this. His response was “it chose you” I told him “No!, It didn’t chose me, God tricked me into it.  I would have never chosen this!”  I still laugh about this.  We often think we know where we are going when we really don’t understand God’s plans for our life.  In my case, God knew I would be obedient once I understood, so he tricked me into understanding his plan after it was already happening! 

Our trucks and storage unwittingly became a nuisance for Hawaiian Carpet, clogging up their workspace and parking, so my husband Myles set out to find a better location for Feed My Sheep.  Through his friendship with Steve Holiday, General Manager of HC&S (Hawaiian Commercial and Sugar part of Alexander and Baldwin) we were invited in 2005 to move to land on HC&S property rent free. To this day the headquarters of Feed My Sheep still sits on HC&S land, although now it is owned by Mahi Pono.

2008 was another major year for us when Pastor Jonavan Asato started fundraisers to help Feed My Sheep expand into an island-wide program. Because of the event that we called Stomp Out Hunger, we started distributions in Kihei and in Hana.  The Island now had accessible distributions island-wide. This was also the year that Scott Hopkins joined the team, first as a part-time office clerk. Over the course of 12 years it became clear God was preparing him to take the role of Executive Director.

Beginning in 2009 the “great recession” gripped the country reaching its worst point on Maui in 2011. Attendance at Feed My Sheep hit a new record of 10,000 people. This was also a time when I found myself having doubts about the program’s impact. I knew we were serving more people than ever, but I was depressed that we often gave food I wouldn’t give to my family including a lot of sugary snacks and salty canned goods. 

We needed to do better!  We needed to provide nutritious food so that the people we served, the people we claimed to love, could thrive. 

It was 2012 that we made an intentional effort to harvest, collect and provide healthier products that included fresh fruit and vegetables.  We started an innovative, subsidized produce market that charged qualified participants 75% less than retail value.  This market helped us form relationships with farmers and community gardens and contributed to an island-wide trend demonstrating the value of healthier alternatives for people in need. The market has since closed, but the lessons and the partnerships are still shaping how Feed My Sheep operates. 

This brings us to today. So much more has happened over the last 25 years; all of which helped us to grow in wisdom and in service. The current form of Feed My Sheep has been unchanged in the last decade even while adjusting to huge challenges like COVID-19 and the Maui wildfires. We have also expanded our local partnerships to include more Maui farmers, various entities within the County of Maui and other volunteer organizations. With Scott and the current leadership team the vision to serve Maui is strong and unchanged.   We still carry dreams for the day when we will become more sustainable by farming our own food and through our farm train up others including our friends. 

We are working on plans for a new space to make our dreams a reality and allow us to do what we do best; provide nutritious supplies of food to the Maui community. 

AND THE FEED MY SHEEP STORY GOES ON!