Fellows mentioned in this story: Kamuela Enos

From Honolulu Star-Advertiser:

The University of Hawai‘i’s Center for Indigenous Innovation and Health Equity has received a $2 million award from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

The money will support CIIHE’s five-year initiative to implement indigenous health innovations for Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander communities.

“We’re trying to identify where these potential indigenous innovations are that have the potential to improve health and how we advance those,” said Aimee Grace, CIIHE co-principal investigator and UH Office of Strategic Health Initiatives director. “It’s a whole different framing of what is health and what makes healthy people.”

Kamuela Enos, CIIHE principal investigator and UH Office of Indigenous Knowledge and Innovation director, said the idea for CIIHE was born while he worked as a director at Ma‘o Farms. Through a partnership with John A. Burns School of Medicine researcher Alika Mauna Kea, they discovered that adults working on their farms were 50% to 60% less likely to develop type 2 diabetes, Enos said.

“It was the first time we had actually witnessed biomedical research that we felt was really not focused on telling the community how sick it was,” Enos said. “It was instead focused on a community organization to show them the impact of their work.”

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