Ken
almost never wears a tieTKI Staff
Ken Stokes
is Executive Director of The Kauaian Institute where he has served as a
sustainability advisor to senior executives at some of
Hawaii’s largest corporations and most influential community
groups.
- He was recently retained by Maui Land & Pineapple to help their Sustainability Executive Committee think about the firm’s “ecological footprint”, and by Kamehameha Schools to help their Land Assets Division think about “green business”. He also recently assisted the Kaua`i Planning and Action Alliance with its “Community Indicators" report.”
- He is the author of “Tending The Garden Island,” and he produces the top-rated "green" blog on sustainability in Hawai`i at SusHI.
- He previously served as an assistant to Hawaiian sovereignty leaders all over the islands, as a strategic planning consultant across North America, and as a local talk show host on Kaua`i.
- More than ten years ago (Aug 96), Ken launched the “virtual taro patch” with Ho`okipa Network– one of the early initiatives (now archived) to make the web more instrumental in Kauaian community work.
- He has worked in Hawaii’s technology and tourism sectors as an entrepreneur and strategy consultant. In the late 1980s, he managed the islands’ first technology incubator, the Kaimuki Technology Enterprise Center (KAITEC). He also successfully launched AlohAmenities, Inc., an upscale guest services firm in Honolulu, which he sold in 1991 upon moving to Kaua`i.
- In the early 80s, he served as senior strategy consultant for McManis Associates in Washington DC before starting his own San Francisco firm, StratEcon, Inc., to provide economic strategy consulting for clients throughout the West.
- Prior to his consulting career, Ken served as Chief Economic Planner for the City of New Haven, CT, where he was also elected to two terms on the Board of Aldermen in the late 1970s.
Ken has a special interest in the ahupua`a (traditional land divisions) of Hawaii, and his exclusive maps of these ancient places and ecosystems, based on a dozen years of archival research, are available in The Kauaian Institute’s Online Shop and distributed to schools throughout the state.
Ken earned an MBA from Stanford’s Graduate School of Business in 1986, and completed 3 years of PhD work in Urban Economics at Syracuse University in the early 1970s.