Opened last August, the Walter Dods Jr. RISE Center provides a place for its student residents to collaborate and innovate.
RISE, which stands for Residences for Innovative Student Entrepreneurs, is located across from the University of Hawaii at Manoa campus and is home to UH students who range from freshmen to graduate students.
The live-work-learn facility features 10,000 square feet of multi-purpose space including coworking and meeting areas, a recording studio, a classroom and prototyping labs.
UH, UH Foundation and Hunt Companies Hawaii partnered to design, build and finance RISE, which represents the first public-private partnership, or P3, housing project for the university. The $77 million construction project was funded entirely by private, non-taxpayer money through bond financing, according to representatives of UH Foundation.
For more on RISE, read the corresponding cover story here.
UH Manoa’s Pacific Asian Center for Entrepreneurship runs educational programming for the facility. PACE, in collaboration with UH Foundation, also raised an additional $10 million through a fundraising campaign to expand the "learn" and "work" components of the facility, according to the PACE website.
This funding, PACE Executive Director Sandra Fujiyama said, enabled the center to “outfit the space with furniture, offer the programs for free, and give grants to help the students do what they need to do to bring their ideas to life.”
Fujiyama said she was amazed at the “outpouring of support” generated from the campaign.
Funding came from corporate, foundation and individual donors. Here is a list of donors and how much they contributed:
$250,000+
American Savings Bank
Ben Godsey & Yvonne Chan
First Hawaiian Bank Foundation
Hawaiian Electric Industries
Island Insurance Foundation
Mamoru & Aiko Takitani Foundation
Rich & Eileen Wacker
Shidler College of Business
The Dods Foundation
Yamada – Scott Family Foundation
$100,000- $249,999
Architects Hawaii Ltd.
Anonymous
Atherton Family Foundation
Hawaii Technology Development Corp.
Hunt Companies
John & Sue Dean
Kamehameha Schools
Kent & Jean Tsukamoto
Matson Navigation Company
Moss & Associates, LLC
Par Pacific Holding
Roy & Hilda Takeyama Foundation
Russell & Valerie Hata
Savan Patel
Servco Foundation
Steve & Nan Baker
The Clarence T.C. Ching Foundation
Thomas & Debra Nichols
$50,000 – $99,999
Allen Uyeda
Anonymous
Bright Light Digital
David Y.Y. & Roselyn H.C. Yun
Mark Tawara
Omnitrak Group
Ritchie & Sunny Mudd
$25,000 – $49,999
Alexander & Baldwin
Assaf Karmon
Central Pacific Bank Foundation
Dale & Wendy (Kuwamoto) Peterson
Denis & Ella Isono
Earl & Joy Fry
Edgar C. Harrell Associates
Eric Tom & Boni Lally Tom
Hawaiian Telcom
Larry Rodriguez
Peter Rowan
Rob Billingsly
Sandra Fujiyama
Source: PACE.SHIDLER.HAWAII.EDU/RISE
