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Aloha Spirit

In late April, Marisa Castuera Hayase was tapped to lead The Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Foundation’s $150 million in annual grantmaking efforts that support nonprofits in the U.S. and Israel. As vice president of programs, she will ensure the foundation continues to improve housing stability, health, employment and educational opportunities, and aging.

“Our main focus is that we need to address poverty together as a community across sectors and make our communities stronger,” she told Aloha State Daily. “It's a big job, but we're not doing it alone. We have amazing community leaders to follow and … and we also have fabulous partners that have been working on these issues for a really long time, who all bring a lot of expertise to the table.”

 added, “I think that the opportunity and the privilege we have is to help coordinate and plug into those efforts; help convene people, help to celebrate and uplift what's working in [those focus areas]; and also connect people across priority communities that we work in … It's a great landscape view to have, and we're really lucky because we get to be inspired every day by all of the good work we see.”

According to its website, the foundation’s priority communities include Baltimore, Hawaiʻi, Israel, New York City, Northeastern Pennsylvania and San Francisco, which all “represent personal ties to the life and legacy of Harry Weinberg, as well as communities where Weinberg Foundation trustees reside and provide leadership.”

Aloha State Daily caught up with Hayase about her new position, how the foundation is evolving, its impact in Hawaiʻi, and more.

What initially drew you to the foundation?

I’ve been working for the Weinberg Foundation for six years now. Prior to that, I was running my own company, Storyline Consulting, working in areas that spanned public education, community health and health of the natural environment. I worked with philanthropy and government to do joint planning projects to help improve our communities overall. When the job opening for the Weinberg Foundation’s program director for Hawai’i came up, I felt like it was a good extension to commitments I had made to community over the years – to really listen to their stories, priorities and ideas, and find ways to bring policy and resources together. 

Expanding the work that I do within the foundation, my focus is Hawai’i still but also grantmaking across regions, which totals about $150 million per year.

My family is actually from here; my grandpa was born in Hilo, from the area of Pi‘ihonua, and he and my grandmother raised my mom and her brother in Waimānalo. We have a long history there. My mom went to Waimānalo Elementary and Intermediate School and Kailua High School, she met my dad from Mexico in Waimānalo and they lived to California before I was born, so I was raised there. It’s been a really wonderful experience to connect with my family here and move here as an adult full-time 20 years ago.

I moved here for my first job in philanthropy, which was with 

in Waimānalo with Nainoa Thompson and Robert Witt, where I was board chair. It’s still a K-8 school that’s open today and helps connect kids to voyaging to navigate in the open ocean, navigate their future, their leadership journeys.

I started my independent consulting business to uplift community stories across our Islands and in rural and remote communities. It was about how stories and data can be brought together to help inform good, quality decisions.

What grantmaking projects in Hawai’i stand out to you or are you currently working on?

We’ve continued that interest as a foundation that I had at Storyline, which is the opportunity to learn with and support our residents in rural and remote areas of our state. The Weinberg Foundation has been on a changed journey over the past 10 years, and it’s been really exciting to be a part of that shift to reach communities struggling with chronic poverty. …  We made an intentional goal to transition to funding more in Neighbor Islands – we moved from funding about 20% of our grants, to taking 80% of funding there.

This work predated the 2023 Maui wildfires, but we took a similar approach there of taking the time to listen and support community-led efforts needed at the time and in the long-term. It’s been great to collaborate with other foundations and coordinate support around community needs and opportunities. As part of our fire response in Maui, we support 

. Most recently, we did a $1 million capital grant to LCLT with other funders, which is purchasing some of the lots and the homes with a land trust covenant that ensures the properties will remain affordable and that they’ll be accessible to Lahaina residents for generations. They also help coordinate with insurance payments, construction costs, because not everyone has the funds upfront to be able to rebuild.

What other housing initiatives have you funded?

In general, with our housing work, not just in Hawai’i but across all of our giving, we focus on permanent affordable housing and supportive services. Especially in Hawai’i we are focused on supporting nonprofit affordable housing developers by building their capacity and have access to land for housing that remains affordable in perpetuity.

One of the ways we’re helping grow up-and-coming nonprofit developers is through fellowships and cohorts, as well as land grants. Last year, we made an initial land grant to 

, to address housing and food security. We are excited to do more of that in the future and are looking at the possibility of a land grant on Kauaʻi.

How do local nonprofits apply for a grant with the foundation? How do you determine what projects to give to?

We are definitely in a proactive mode right now of reaching out to the nonprofits that we see are partnering already and are a part of collaborative solutions in our areas of giving. So, we don

’t have an open application process, we have a process of connecting with networks of nonprofits and finding the orgs that are doing systems-change work, together.

In 2025, we are on track to provide $18 million in grants to Hawaiʻi – program grants, operating grants to nonprofits and land grants. The money comes from a $3 billion endowment; we steward funds left from Harry and Jeanette Weinberg

We’re always prioritizing ways to leverage other funding and with government funding decreasing, we are prioritizing working with communities again to listen, learn and reassess, and help them to build their capacity to respond. We want to continue high-quality, responsive grantmaking that puts communities and community members at the center of our work.

We have a wonderful team and plan to grow. The program team is about 25 members strong, and we work across grant operations and program. We need to be adaptable right now to make sure that our strategies and grantmaking are as effective and impactful as possible. So we aim to stay laser focused on that goal with the wonderful team and community partners that we have.

Tell me about the needs in Israel and how the foundation is filling the gap.

he Weinberg Foundation has a long history of grantmaking in Israel. It’s consistent with our work overall, in how we do our giving there and what we focus on. We have a special focus there on mental resilience, job training and support for older adults. 

We support a variety of populations in Israel including Jewish and Arab members of the community.

In terms of the needs, both in the U.S. and in Israel, we’re finding common themes across the need to support community-based organizations with capacity building and leadership support. There’s a common theme of how do we rebuild and how we support resilience over the long-term?

[For more on the foundation’s grantmaking in Israel, please click 

What do you enjoy most about your job? What are you learning now as a leader?

What is most meaningful to me about the work is the chance to be inspired by community member resilience and to invest in people, who haven’t always been invested in. Leadership, it can come from so many places we may overlook and the most meaningful part of my work is to be able to see them and support them.

What I’m learning now as a leader because of the stage of life that I’m in, is how leaders can make sure to pay attention to those who are next in line to lead and to also pay attention to those who paved the ways for us, building on all the experience and wisdom to date to help bring people into that pathway.

I would just add that it’s really complex work. It takes time and patience and a desire to listen and learn. As a foundation, we’ve been really fortunate to have so many people to learn from and work with as we address these challenges together.

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