UMass Boston

Educating Parents and the Public: Puaʻena Vierra-Villanueva

Puaʻena's Story: 

When Puaʻena Vierra-Villanueva introduces herself, she always begins in ʻŌlelo Hawai‘i—Hawaiian Language. This intentional choice reflects the deep responsibility she feels to honor her cultural identity and the generations that came before her—especially her great-grandmother, who was the last native Hawaiian speaker in her family. 

Puaʻena’s great-grandmother was one of the first women to graduate from Kamehameha Schools and was born during the Hawaiian Kingdom. During her childhood, she was beaten for speaking Hawaiian—a painful reality that contributed to the language nearly disappearing from Puaʻena’s family line. 

“She was the last fluent speaker in my family from the island of Kauaʻi,” Puaʻena explains. “That’s one of the many reasons why my family doesn’t speak Hawaiian anymore.” Committed to reclaiming this connection to family and culture, Puaʻena made the decision as an adult to learn Hawaiian—a journey that took eight years to reach a child’s conversational level.

“I’m the only one in my family that can speak it, and my child is the only one that that’s their first language,” she says. 

This family history shaped Puaʻena’s determination that her son would grow up learning Hawaiian. But she discovered a stark reality: while children enrolled in K-12 public education have a legal right to be taught in Hawaiian, that right does not exist in early care and education programs for children birth to five. Parents can enroll their children in private ECE programs that teach in Hawaiian, but they are expensive and hard to find. As Puaʻena realized the difficulty she would have ensuring that her son would grow up learning Hawaiian, it fueled her advocacy around language access. 

Rather than wait for permission from policymakers or institutional leaders, Puaʻena decided to “be the change I want to see in my community.” She started by working with Hawaiʻi Children’s Action Network to submit testimony on legislation affecting families and children, fighting for expanded preschool access and Hawaiian language education resources. 

Shortly after engaging in this advocacy work, she learned about Leading for Change through her professional network. Leading for Change is a professional development program that trains early educators on how to lead for change and quality improvement in their practice, program, or in the field. The program came into her life when she felt professionally adrift, missing her connection to the early childhood education community while staying home with her son. 

Leading for Change provided both the framework and the fuel she needed to expand her advocacy efforts. As part of the program, participants develop and implement a “Change Project”—a concrete action plan designed to address an unmet need or problem in early care and education. The title of her Leading for Change project, “He Lei Poina ʻOle Ke Keiki,” draws from a Hawaiian proverb meaning “a child is so precious, like a lei that they would never be forgotten.” The imagery is powerful: just as a lei wraps around you with beauty and meaning, children embrace us with such love that they become unforgettable. For Puaʻena, this metaphor extends across four generations—four lei before her and four lei after—that she carries with her as she works to preserve and perpetuate Hawaiian language and culture. 

He Lei Poina ʻOle Ke Keiki has two strategic components: creating community-based Hawaiian language learning spaces for families and building parent advocacy capacity to influence policy. The project powerfully demonstrates that early educators can drive systemic change from the ground up. 

Creating Safe Spaces for Language Learning

Puaʻena partnered with Family Hui Hawaiʻi to offer a 10-week curriculum for parents, but with a crucial difference—she made it a space for Hawaiian language learning. While the curriculum materials are in English, Puaʻena provides Hawaiian vocabulary to families and speaks only in Hawaiian to the children. 

“Children are going to hear English everywhere, but they never get to hear Hawaiian,” she explains. “That was the space I wanted to create for them.” 

The groups meet in public spaces like parks, where their conversations in Hawaiian often surprise passersby. “It’s a shock to people. You don’t usually hear people speaking Hawaiian in a public space, just in urban Oʻahu,” Puaʻena notes. By normalizing Hawaiian language in everyday community spaces, she’s challenging the invisibility that keeps the language marginalized. 

This grassroots approach creates what Puaʻena calls “ripple effects” throughout the community. Families include both Native Hawaiians reconnecting with their language and non-Hawaiian residents who want to learn the language of their new home. 

Building Parent Leadership and Transforming Systems 

Puaʻena systematically builds grassroots advocacy capacity among Hawaiian language families, empowering those closest to the problem to become agents of change. Many families she meets have never engaged with the legislative process—a reality reflecting both the complex relationship many Native Hawaiians have with government systems and the exclusion of parent voices from educational policy-making. 

Puaʻena connects families with Hawaiʻi Children’s Action Network’s “Parent Power Hours,” helping them learn to contact lawmakers and submit testimony. She extends her reach through social media, sharing information about legislative sessions and community events, recognizing that many families rely on these platforms for news and connection. Through this multi-pronged approach, she’s building what policy experts call “civic capacity”—the knowledge, skills, and networks communities need to effectively influence the systems that shape their lives. 

Recent Victories and Systems Impact 

The advocacy work is producing concrete policy victories that demonstrate how parent-led organizing can shift institutional power. A Hawaiian-language preschool classroom that was closed at Puaʻena’s son’s former school has been restored through “tireless parent and community planning meetings, mobilization, social media campaigns, testimony opportunities, letters of support, lawmaker support,” and a petition that gathered over 2,400 signatures within a week. 

That effort also led to the formation of “Oʻahu Kaiapuni ʻOhana Alliance,” a group dedicated to expanding access to Hawaiian language K-12 education. This represents a fundamental shift in how Hawaiian language advocacy is organized—moving from individual families fighting isolated battles to a coordinated network that can sustain pressure for systemic change. 

For Puaʻena, Leading for Change didn’t create her leadership skills—it helped her recognize and channel them more effectively beyond her immediate community. 

“Coming from an indigenous community, we’re empowered from a young age to be leaders in our community. We’re leading our families. We’re leading our schools,” she reflects. “Leading for Change just reassured me that it’s okay to be who you are, coming from your community, as a leader in your community, and that you are needed.” 

The concept of kuleana—privilege and responsibility—has been central to her approach. “My son knows it from two years old—these are the things he’s responsible for. These are things that I’m responsible for as your parent, as your teacher,” she says. 

Looking Forward 

Puaʻena continues expanding her impact, demonstrating how early educators can simultaneously transform their professional trajectories while driving broader systems change. She recently began teaching part-time at Honolulu Community College, her first step toward teaching early childhood education to adult learners in the University of Hawaiʻi system. 

Her story illustrates how effective systems change often emerges not from top-down mandates, but from community members who refuse to accept inequitable conditions as permanent. By honoring her great-grandmother’s legacy while creating new opportunities for families today, Puaʻena demonstrates that authentic drivers of change don’t wait for permission—they organize, advocate, and create the solutions their communities need. 

“I strongly believe that if we take care of our communities, our kaiāulu, our lāhui, then everyone will thrive,” says Puaʻena. 

About Leading for Change

Leading for Change is currently offered for free to licensed early educators in Massachusetts in partnership with the MA Department of Early Education and Care through its statewide network of Professional Development Centers. Leading for Change is also offered to early educators in Maryland through the Maryland Early Childhood Leadership Education Program at the Shriver Center at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, in Pennsylvania through the Pennsylvania Key, and in Hawaiʻi at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.

This institute is part of the College of Education and Human Development.