A new resource was recently launched by Hawai‘i Data Collaborative to offer a consolidated view of how resources flow into Hawai‘i.
Hawaiʻi Funding Project pulls from disparate funding and data sources, providing access to visualizations and data to explore funding at the most relevant and useful depth.
The project is a direct response to questions from various local stakeholders regarding how federal funding disruptions early in 2025 — and potential future changes in federal funding — would impact local government and nonprofit ecosystems.
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.
The goal behind developing Hawaiʻi Funding Project is to close the gap between data and those positioned to act on it by tackling these issues:
- Accessibility: State budget data is available, but it’s 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 various funding streams that impact the local ecosystem.
Hawaiʻi Funding Project uses three main tools:
- Hawaiʻi state budget Explorer visualizations: Explore 10-year trends, year-over-year changes and fiscal year drilldowns to individual programs.
- Federal funding in Hawaiʻi: A tool allowing users to explore longitudinal trends, per capita spending and fiscal year drilldowns to individual federal funding awards.
- Public funding database: These consolidated, standardized datasets power the other two tools, including state budget appropriations, state contracts and federal funding data.
Hawaiʻi Funding Project’s concept started as a set of visualizations to see the flows of public funding, but conversations with community partners revealed they wanted to tap into the database directly.
A series of regularly updated datasets — along with the visualizations for those who might not have the technical expertise to work directly with the database — will allow people who still want to access data, but now in ways that were difficult before.
The project was developed a great deal from conversations with its intended users, and it is only as successful as it is useful to stakeholders. People are invited to use the tool and share their feedback.
Click here to explore Hawaiʻi Funding Project. Feedback, questions and comments are welcome via email at hfp@hawaiidata.org.
