Teach for America – Hawaii – Josh Heimowitz, Piikea Kalakau,Trever Asam, Elizabeth Higashi
One day, all children in this nation will have the opportunity to attain an excellent education. Trever, Josh, Piikea, and Elizabeth share their work as both educators and administrators striving to achieve this goal.
Trever Asam is a partner at the law firm of Cades Schutte, representing individual, corporate, and nonprofit taxpayers. He is a regular speaker on Hawai‘i State taxation and the taxation of nonprofit organizations.
Prior to joining Cades Schutte, Trever was in private practice at Miller & Chevalier in Washington, D.C. Before beginning his legal career, Trever worked as a teacher in the District of Columbia Public Schools. Trever was a 1998 Washington, D.C. corps member where he taught seventh and eighth grade social studies. His school, Paul Junior High School, became the first conversion charter school in Washington, D.C. in 2000.
While at Duke University School of Law, Trever was the recipient of the Douglas A. Poe Mordecai Scholarship and was an editor for the Journal of Law and Contemporary Problems.
Josh Heimowitz works to shape Teach For America’s vision for our work in the broader community and oversees our efforts to grow and maintain strong partnerships and networks and build a sustainable, diversified local funding base in Hawai‘i. Josh manages four staff members focused on our external affairs work and helps to support the Hawai‘i Regional Board of Advisors. Josh has spent the last 20 years working to improve communities through his volunteer work with many organizations and his work at the YMCA and The Redwoods Group. Josh moved to Hawai‘i in 2001, where he was the executive director for YMCA Camp Erdman until 2011. After a brief stint in North Carolina, Josh and his family are happy to be home in Hawai‘i.
Piikea Kalakau is a Waimanalo native currently teaching 8th grade English at Wai’anae Intermediate School through the Teach for America program. She graduated from Kamehameha Schools & Hawai’i Pacific University and previously worked in law and politics, most recently for Senator Josh Green during the 2015 legislative session.
Piikea joined Teach for America in order to actively help the native Hawaiian community at large. Growing up in Waimanalo, she was exposed from a very young age to vast amounts of educational and social inequity experienced by her peers. While attending college on the mainland, she decided that her life goal would be to help the entire native Hawaiian population not just survive as is, but to thrive and succeed in a Western-dominated world. She chose to effect this change through education, and the Teach for America program has given her all of the right pathways and opportunities to do so.
Elizabeth is an Assistant Principal at Waipahu High School, her placement school and where she taught and served as a Special Education Department Head and TA-VP over six years before working at Waikele Elementary School as Vice Principal. Elizabeth is a graduate of Roosevelt High School, Gonzaga University, and the University of Hawai`i at Mānoa.
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The hosts for this episode were Jay Fidell, Piikea Kalakau.
The hosts for this episode were Jay Fidell, Piikea Kalakau.
The hosts for this episode were Jay Fidell, Piikea Kalakau.
