From growing and harvesting food to preserving traditional Hawaiian practices, BYU–Hawaii’s Lanihuli Garden, operated by the Kumuwaiwai Center for Sustainability, gives students hands-on opportunities to care for the land while developing leadership skills.
For Asa Seversike, a senior from mainland Washington majoring in business management and marketing, that experience has grown from working as a maintenance worker to serving as the garden’s interim manager. His journey reflects the garden’s broader emphasis on student leadership, sustainability, and reconnecting with the land.
Becoming the Leads
Seversike’s initial visit to the garden, like many other BYU–Hawaii students, was during his first semester’s Holokai Foundations class, a success course designed to help freshmen become better acquainted with student life. The visit evoked a special feeling within Seversike.
“I’m Hawaiian, so I remember growing up and gardening with my grandma,” he said. “Some of my fondest memories are working in the garden with her, planting and doing things like that.”
Those childhood memories led Seversike to feel a responsibility for the land and motivated him to work in general maintenance at the sustainability garden for six months before eventually becoming the interim manager.
However, Seversike is not the only student leading the work at the garden. Alongside him, five other site leads help oversee hands-on work, train students and support the daily operations of the program.
Sharing about their work on the garden, he said that one of their biggest roles is to help students become disciple leaders, which echoes the Kumuwaiwai mission: “to develop students into disciple-leaders for a sustainable tomorrow.”
“It would probably be a lot easier for me to jump in and make all the decisions, but I’ve noticed that when I’m listening more than I’m talking and when I’m counseling with everybody, I get a lot better input,” he shared.
To Seversike, one of the responsibilities he continues to uphold is being a facilitator of leadership and giving people the opportunity to become leaders themselves.
Sustainability in Land and Culture
The Kumuwaiwai Sustainability Center teaches sustainable practices and traditional ways to grow, harvest and collect food while also producing food for the community. In August, the garden produced more than 1,000 pounds of produce.
As its motto suggests, "I ka wā ma mua, ka wā ma hope," which translates to “Through the past is the future,” the center connects traditional knowledge with sustainable practices for future generations.
“We have a group from Laie Elementary School that comes in, and we work with them on these planter boxes and teach them sustainable ways to grow their own vegetables,” he said.
The garden also has a unique opportunity to have a space focused on preserving native Hawaiian plants.
A key part of the center’s mission is making ʻāina, meaning “that which feeds us.” Through mālama ʻāina, or caring for and stewarding the land, students work to create a sustainable source of food while preserving traditional Hawaiian knowledge.
“Kalo is one of these plants that is special to the culture of Hawaii, so much so that Hawaiians even consider them to be family,” explained Seversike.
“Kalo grows a corm near the surface of the soil, and that’s what you harvest and eat. But the stem all the way to the leaf at the top can actually be replanted as many times as you want,” he added. “Some of these plants here at the garden might be hundreds of years old, just replanted and replanted by Hawaiians back in the day.”
Among the native plants the sustainability garden is working on to preserve is olonā, the plant that helped Hawaiians survive for hundreds of years.
“Olonā is a native Hawaiian endemic plant, and it’s dying off in its natural habitats,” shared Seversike. “Hawaiians would use it as cordage or rope for their canoes, as fishing line, for nets, and for other things. It was a super valuable plant that Hawaiians basically couldn’t have lived without.”
Today, the Olonā plant can only be seen in a few select places on each island. Under the direction of President John S.K. Kauwe III, they are currently working on propagating the plant.
“This is a really fun project because we’ve recruited faculty and students from multiple different departments,” he said. “We recruited faculty from the biology department, Hawaiian Studies, and Pacific Islands Studies, and we even recruited an olonā expert from the Big Island who is consulting with us on this project.”
If propagating the plant proves successful, it will then be reintroduced to its natural habitats, creating a restoration area. Seversike stressed the importance of doing so due to the Olonā’s cultural significance to the Hawaiian people.
Learn, Go, and Do
BYU–Hawaii is a place where thousands of students from the Asia-Pacific region come to get an education. But beyond classroom lectures, textbooks, and academics, BYU–Hawaii understands the value of experience, which is why it constantly seeks to give students those opportunities.
“One thing that I’ve learned is that there’s a massive difference between reading about an experience, maybe in a textbook or in a lecture, versus actually being out and doing it,” he said. “You could go into a textbook and read all that you want about kalo, but there’s something special about going out, getting your hands dirty, planting the kalo, then waking up at 6 am every day to water it and coming back at 6 pm to water it again.”
“I’ve only had this position for a couple of months, and I can already say that it’s changed my life,” he shared.
Beyond BYU–Hawaii
For Seversike, the experience has also changed the way he understands leadership. Working alongside other students has taught him that leadership is not always about taking charge, but about creating opportunities for others to grow.
“I’ve really learned that Christlike leadership is the most effective way to lead,” he said. “Sometimes the easier way would be for me to do everything, but then they don’t have any growth. I’ve really found that things usually go a lot better when I’m listening more than I’m talking.”
Through the Kumuwaiwai Center for Sustainability, Seversike and other students continue to learn by doing—caring for the land, preserving Hawaiian practices, and developing the leadership skills they can carry beyond BYU–Hawaii.
