A few days ago, the Ujamas were reeling from a devastating hurricane that left more than 1,000 homes and businesses without power, water or electricity.
A week later, the community was in the middle of rebuilding.
As we were heading into a second day of cooperative economics class at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa, I had an idea for how to help communities rebuild.
This time, it was not about just helping to feed people and pay the bills.
Rather, we were going to learn how to build cooperatives that could help the island of Hawaiʻi recover from disasters like the one that occurred.
The story of Ujas Cooperative Economy class is told in a story that began on September 9, 2001.
When the first Ujamoa Cooperative Economy program was launched in Hawaiʼi in 1991, there were no commercial co-ops in the island.
The Ujambas had been farming, fishing and ranching since the 1930s.
The people who owned and operated the islands largest business, the Jumai Cooperative Company, owned and ran the cooperative as well.
That was a good start, but the cooperative economy would be a different story in the years that followed.
The economic and social upheaval that followed World War II, and the subsequent rise of communism in the former Soviet Union, led to the collapse of the U.S. dollar and the economic collapse that occurred in Hawai’í during the 1990s.
It was during this economic crisis that Hawaiʿi faced its first wave of Hurricane Katrina.
As a result, the economy collapsed.
That is when the Ujuas Cooperative Economics class started.
We were not the first to learn cooperative economics.
As soon as we started working with the Ujias, we began learning about the economics of cooperatives and the effects that they had on people and the environment.
The idea for this class came to me while listening to the UJamaa Cooperative Economics Program Director, John Jumaru.
We all knew that if we can create a cooperative economy, then the Umi and Ujumas can have their own businesses.
The class was developed over the course of a few weeks, and it began in a classroom with two chairs in a conference room.
The first chair, which was filled with paper, was filled by a group of us who had been working with community members in the past to develop a program to help people recover from disaster.
The other chair was filled entirely by the students.
The students had developed a curriculum that included the basics of cooperative management, including how to organize a cooperative, and how to set up a cooperative in a crisis.
The next lesson of this class was a discussion of how the Ujunas Cooperative Businesses had managed their first major disaster, Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
As it turned out, the students had spent a lot of time working with survivors of the disaster.
For them, the lessons of Katrina were not just about getting their business back on track, but also about building an economy that could support their livelihoods and that could keep them safe.
In addition to working with their students, the course also included discussions with representatives of local community organizations.
Students were also given feedback from the Uojas Cooperative Administration, a community-based organization that is the agency that oversees the Ujaas Cooperative Economic Development program.
I think the lesson of Katrina that students learned the most was the importance of the people that had been affected by Katrina, and what it means to be a part of a community.
For a number of students, Katrina brought back a number that had gone missing during their time working in the cooperative community: The knowledge that they could help their community, and they were also able to create jobs that would keep them in the community and help their families, and help them to rebuild and rebuild themselves.
This class was not just a way to build a community economy, it also helped to build cooperative economic systems that would allow the Uajamas to prosper.
During the class, students learned about the role of the cooperative business in a number different aspects of the economy.
In the first lesson, we learned about what happens when a co-op operates a small, self-sufficient business.
This is when a cooperative is able to provide the basics to the community, but not necessarily the biggest needs.
It also shows that when people are in a cooperative business, they are not just providing a paycheck, but they are also able a community to grow and prosper.
In this lesson, students also learned about how cooperative businesses can provide services to the communities and local businesses that are not necessarily owned by a specific community.
The second lesson of the class focused on the cooperative economic system.
In other words, it taught us about how the cooperative model of economic activity can work for the entire economy.
As the class progressed, we heard about how cooperatives can support the local economy, as