Hawaiʻi Funding Project: Making the Flow of Resources into Hawaiʻi Visible

News Release from Hawai‘i Data Collaborative, May 28, 2026

Hawai‘i Data Collaborative (HDC) recently launched the Hawaiʻi Funding Project (HFP), a new resource that offers a consolidated view of how resources flow into Hawai‘i. Pulling from disparate funding and data sources, HFP provides access to visualizations as well as the data itself so users can explore funding at the depth that is most relevant and useful to them.

A Call for Data Access in Response to Disruption

As Hawaiʻi was impacted by federal funding disruptions early in 2025, we began receiving questions from various local stakeholders regarding how these, and potential future changes in federal funding, would impact our local government and nonprofit ecosystems. Our partners were asking about the downstream effects for nonprofits and the social safety net. At that point, there were a lot of disparate data sources available, but they were not accessible. Just because data is ‘public’ doesn’t mean it’s easy to work with, understand or compare to other data sources.

Filling the Infrastructure Gap

Our goal in developing HFP is to close the gap between data and those who are positioned to act on it by solving for three things:

Accessibility: State budget data is available but locked in inaccessible formats.

Integration: Federal funding data is machine readable, but labor intensive to access and disconnected from local context.

Enabling action: No existing platform combines data from multiple funding sources to present a de-siloed, holistic view of the various funding streams that impact the local ecosystem.

To address these issues, the current iteration of HFP offers three main tools:

Hawaiʻi State Budget Explorer Visualizations to explore 10-year trends, year-over-year changes and fiscal year drilldowns to individual programs.

Federal Funding in Hawaiʻi A federal funding tool that allows users to explore longitudinal trends, per capita spending and fiscal year drilldowns to individual awards.

Public Funding Database The consolidated, standardized datasets that power the other two tools, including state budget appropriations, state contracts and federal funding data.

(Screenshot from Hawaiʻi State Budget Explorer)

The HFP concept started as a set of visualizations to see the flows of public funding, but as we spoke with community partners about the concept, they asked to tap into the database directly. Now we offer a series of regularly updated datasets along with the visualizations for those who may not have the technical expertise to work directly with the database, but who still want to access data in ways that were difficult before.

A Work in Progress‍ ‍

From the beginning, HFP was developed in conversation with its intended users – our tool is only as successful as it is useful to stakeholders. Now that HFP has launched, we are inviting folks not only to use the tool, but to share their feedback. How are you using the data? What could we add that would be even more helpful? To explore the Hawaiʻi Funding Project, click here. Feedback, questions and comments are welcome at hfp@hawaiidata.org.