CHELSIE EVANS ENOS Q&A
Executive director of Hawaiian Community Assets
Chelsie Evans Enos can still remember the first housing units Hawaiian Community Assets purchased two years ago for its Ua Hale Aela program. It is one of her most memorable moments at the organization, which has now grown to have purchased more than a dozen units under the rent-with-option-to-purchase program. As executive director for HCA, the state’s largest HUD-approved housing counseling agency and community lending institution, Evans said she had a ongoing passion for financial education and real estate.
Under her leadership, staffing at HCA has tripled to about 45 employees and its annual budget grew from about $1.5 million to about $8 million. Before leading HCA, Enos was executive director for Maui Hui Malama, while also taking real estate classes on her own initiative in 2021. And when Enos was employed full time at the Domestic Violence Action Center, her weekends were spent as a volunteer with AmeriCorps VISTA, where she taught financial education workshops and helped with financial coaching in 2017.
How did you get into your current role at HCA?
I started getting these text messages from friends or colleagues saying, “look at this job opening, this is totally you.” But I felt like it took me so much work to really get a handle on Maui Hui [where] it was my first executive director job. … And so I kind of ignored the first few. And then they just kept coming so I [eventually applied]. … I think it had a lot to do with just kind of my passion on the real estate stuff … and lot of the thoughts that I had in mind for HCA I think resonated with a lot of people “like, yeah, we need some changes in this current housing market.”
And what are those changes?
When I came on board at HCA, one of the things that I mentioned was [that] HCA has been very solid for a long period of time … but the one thing to me that was still missing were actual housing units that were actually affordable. … What we’ve introduced since then the program is called Ua Hale Aela. I basically took what I learned in the real estate development world on how to be able to capture units that are on [or off] the market for under market value. … [Then] we take that housing-first model and we say to our clients, “hey, if you’re serious about buying a home in the next two years, we have a unit that’s available for you now.”
How were you able to grow HCA’s annual budget?
No one finds financial education or housing education as this really sexy thing that they want to fund [but] I just saw an opportunity at that point to really start to educate people on the dire need for people to be their own experts in their financial situation. So for me, it was staying steadfast in that and be an advocate for that … and people came along.
How does HCA make financial education more enticing?
Because we are primarily a Native Hawaiian serving organization, we want to make sure our curriculum makes sense to our people. We acknowledge that if we don’t address the differences between our cultural wealth and today’s society’s wealth, that it’s really hard for us to even get to that next step. So we address a lot of those issues in our conversations with people, which is usually a lot deeper than an average financial assessment.
– Elizabeth ‘Ufi