Here’s a website featuring an education innovation incubator at a sort of grass roots level. One might be able to imagine how something like this could be interwoven with “Community Schools”…where each school, or a group of regional schools, could be a locus for spinning out innovative experiments and tools that were locally derived by local learners. Yet still a part of a national innovation in education conversation. A good tool can be used in more than just one place in our great nation, perhaps with a bit of modifying for local cultures.

The Education Incubator referenced is the brainchild of Miki Tomita, more on her below. In one of those fortuitous coincidences, Miki is also on the BOD for Hawaii Pacific Parks Association, whose current ED is Margot Griffith. Margot may well be in a position to sit down and talk education innovation with Miki on camera at some point this year for our PSA video purposes and archives.

Her work is anchored at the intersections of education and innovation, with a sharp focus on placing youth at the center of transforming society’s greatest challenges into opportunities for learning, innovation and reinvention of a healthy, abundant world.

“Our kids are often a resource that we see bottled up in schools rather than allowing them to become transformative with their communities now.”

Miki Tomita

OCCUPATION: Founder and CEO
Education Incubator
AGE: 43

 

During nearly 20 years as a teacher, education administrator, curriculum developer and researcher, Miki Tomita recognized both the challenges and possibilities of Hawaii’s education system.

 

Every effort she made helped, but they were just “Band-Aids,” Tomita says. “There were wounds that were much deeper than we were able to fix by just adding better things in the classroom.”

 

When she became a mother, her worries increased about the education system her daughter would grow up in.

 

“Our kids are often a resource that we see bottled up in schools rather than allowing them to become transformative with their communities now,” Tomita says. “As a mother, I had so much fear in me around what might happen if we don’t fix these things.”

 

In 2017, Tomita and a small group of teachers created Education Incubator, a nonprofit social innovation hub for kids. Schools and other organizations bring students to local hubs where the EI team helps them to find and use their passions to positively impact the community.

 

“Once they get the idea standing up, we bring in a lot of these experts to take it to the next level so they can actually have a working prototype,” Tomita says. “The work that we do here is really about self-determination, about the kids determining what matters to us and what matters to Hawaii.”

 

Tomita was born on Maui, graduated from Baldwin High School, then earned an undergraduate degree in biosystems engineering at UH Manoa and a doctorate in education at Stanford University. Among her many education roles, she was the education director at the Polynesian Voyaging Society for Hokulea’s worldwide voyage and served onboard during three legs of that journey.

 

Pono Shim, president and CEO of Enterprise Honolulu, is one of Tomita’s mentors and says he’s a “huge fan” because of Tomita’s work ethic.

 

“She’s a different kind of educator,” Shim says. “She doesn’t measure her accomplishments … Miki is not afraid of failure and she aspires greatly.” Many people are drawn to her because of her passions and innovative ideas, he says.

 

About 200 children are currently involved with the Education Incubator and more companies and people are approaching Tomita to collaborate.

 

“There will always be a need for collaboration, there will always be a need for collective engagement and impact. There will always be a need for someone to step out of the system,” she says.