Advocate Snapshot: What Honolulu’s Right to Food Charter Fight Taught This Organizer
- 15 hours ago
- 6 min read
August 17, 2026
By Josh Caplan, Summer Intern with the National Right to Food Community of Practice
When Honolulu's Charter Commission convened to revise the city and county's governing document, it drew in a committed group of local advocates who saw a rare opening to formally establish a right to food. Kima Wassel Hardy, an urban agroecologist and community organizer based in Honolulu, was one of them.
For Kima, the right to food isn’t an abstract legal concept, it’s the throughline of her work. Kima builds regenerative agroforestry projects that strengthen local food security while restoring ecosystems. Her commitment to food sovereignty and ecological resilience in Hawai'i shapes everything from what she grows to who she brings to the table.
Over the past year, that commitment led her somewhere she didn’t expect: The City and County of Honolulu’s Charter Commission, and months of organizing community engagement with the body responsible for revising the municipal governing rulebook.
A Once In a Decade Chance
“The Revised Charter of the City and County of Honolulu is the founding document of Honolulu’s municipal government including its functions like our city’s constitution.
It provides the guiding policy on how the Mayor, City Council, and departments operate, how decisions are made, and how services are delivered.” - Honolulu Charter Commission
The Honolulu Charter Commission process gives community members and advocates a chance to “help shape the future” by having a say in any changes to the policy document that frames city and county activities. Residents are able to propose amendments to the City and County Charter, which must first win the Commission’s approval to appear on the November ballot, then win approval from voters.
Despite its potential as a space for community advocates to have a voice, it’s a process most residents don’t know exists.
That’s partly because there’s no permanent Charter Commission or office. Honolulu updates its charter once every ten years, and the Commission is newly formed each time. Six of its 13 members are appointed by the Mayor, six by the city council, and one jointly. The result is a body with little to no institutional memory. Last summer and fall, commissioners spent months hiring staff and figuring out logistics, a process Kima described as “building the plane while flying it.” When a commission does convene, it catches almost everyone off guard, including the advocates who most need to be in the room. Kima was no exception. She didn’t know the charter process existed until this cycle began. That gap became one of the clearest lessons of the campaign that followed: in a process this rare, showing up on time means starting years before anyone expects you to.
Building a Right to Food Coalition
Kima saw the charter review process as an opening to formally establish a right to food in Honolulu, and she set out to build a coalition that could carry it there.
This meant bridging traditional anti-hunger organizations and food sovereignty advocates, camps that in Honolulu rarely come together. Kima found herself standing in both groups, and used that dual footing to bring people together around a human rights framing of food (in)security. This created what she calls a “beautiful intersection of the two movements.”
Native Hawaiian community leaders were central to the amendment effort, emphasizing the political and cultural sovereignty dimensions of the right to food. Non-profit environmental organization Sustainable Coastlines joined as well. For many coalition members, Kima said, food as a human right landed as plain common sense. She points to alignment with foundational values many Hawaiians already hold: Aloha ‘Āina, caring for that which feeds us, and Ahupua’a, the traditional mountain to sea system of resource management. Together, they reflect a precedent in Hawai‘i for understanding food as a collective responsibility.
The hardest work was winning over anti-hunger groups like food banks, who initially told Kima they supported the right to food “in principle, but not as policy”. Many anti-hunger organizations were focused on backing a complementary measure on the ballot, the Food Security Fund. If approved by voters in November, this proposal would establish a reliable funding source for food access programs within the city’s annual budget and capital program. Most anti-hunger advocates eventually came around to the right to food measure, though their support never matched their enthusiasm for the Food Security Fund.
Where the Charter Process Ran Out of Road
The Commission ultimately advanced the right to food proposal to a vote, after clearing several rounds of internal review and skepticism. Kima believes this happened in part because Commission members knew they’d otherwise be cast as having killed a popular idea.
But when it came to a final decision, Corporation Counsel decided that the amendment would be beyond the legal scope of the Commission’s process, offering little explanation to local advocates beyond the assertion that the Charter simply did not have the authority to establish a right to food. The Commission voted the amendment proposal down without opposition, a decision Kima surmised was a relief for a body that had been searching for a way out that didn’t raise public attention.
She’d seen this quick rejection with other substantive proposals earlier in the process, but the right to food proposal had been spared until the final hurdle due to the strength of community organizing and engagement of the media. Kima believes Commission Counsel took an overly cautious approach to the Charter review process and was too quick to find reasons to strike amendments down. But she’s also sympathetic to the position they were in; a small counsel’s office was tasked with reviewing a much higher volume of proposed amendments than the previous cycle, with little time to give any single proposal a full hearing. The fact that so many people in Honolulu engaged with the process this year (a key aim of any participative governing process) ironically made it harder for any one of these proposals to receive the full attention it deserved.
The outcome of months of hard work left Kima and many of her fellow organizers with a pointed question “If the Charter is not the place for this, where is?” This can be a common frustration for right to food advocates when a political process offers no clear avenue to achieve their goal of codifying these values and responsibilities.
Lessons for The Next Fight
The Commission’s rejection of the right to food amendment didn’t change the underlying goal for Honolulu community members, it clarified how to pursue it.
Kima’s advice to advocates elsewhere starts with a question she thinks people skip too often:
What’s the actual endgame?
She argues that policy isn’t always the fastest or most effective path to achieving your goals. Sometimes on-the-ground action has to come first. Kima also cautions against a common trap. Advocates often want to sit and talk about food systems, but she has found that taking action in communities is what shows where the work is actually needed.
Kima puts strategy over sentiment. “Know your why”, she says, “but also know the body you’re engaging with.” Whether it’s a Charter Commission, a city council, or a state legislature, you will need to adjust your approach accordingly. Above all, she urges advocates not to let the right to food become a divisive issue; its universality is its greatest strength.
For now, Kima is stepping back from the Charter Commission process itself, but continuing to build the right to food movement from the ground up: growing food on public land, hosting community meals, and using rights-based language to make the idea visible before it’s ever on the ballot. She’s also looking ahead to the next state legislative session, where she plans to use the right to food framework to identify and support related bills.
Although Honolulu’s Charter won’t reopen for amendments for another decade, Kima’s coalition isn’t waiting for the rulebook to catch up.
For a personal reflection from Kima Wassel Hardy, read her guest post - We Fight for Freedom, Not Crumbs: What a Failed Campaign Taught Us About Power.
More about right to food advocates' engagement with the Charter Commission process:
