Our Story

As the pandemic ravaged the tourism industry in 2020, a group of volunteer CEOs from different industries took it upon themselves to help the community and explore ways to build resilience in the economy. They created a temporary resident program to attract remote workers to actively contribute to Hawaii. Since then, we’ve successfully run two groups.

After the first cohort, we realized we had built a Hawaii local immersion program around learning, contributing, and connecting and could tackle brain drain to help grow the economy.

As remote work evolves, Movers and Shakas is shifting towards helping newly relocated professionals, including returning kama’aina, to acclimate professionally, culturally, and socially to Hawaii. Our aim is to keep talent here in a new program called Hawaii Talent Onboarding Program (HITOP).

We are a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization. This is a completely local initiative and is not funded by the CARES Act or any government funding dedicated to COVID-19 recovery.

Website note: We recognize the proper use of the Hawaiian language including the ‘okina [‘], a glottal stop, and the kahakō [ō] or macron (e.g., in place names of Hawai‘i such as Lāna‘i). However, these have been omitted from this website for the best online experience for our visitors. We realize the importance and continue to use them outside of the online platform.

REMOTE WORKER PROGRAM

As remote work and the world evolved, Movers and Shakas has shifted our successful place-based community orientation program to address brain drain and improve our local economy. We will be sunsetting the Remote Worker Program for now and focusing on the Hawaii Talent Onboarding Program.

Cohort 1

Launched in late 2020, our pilot cohort received a whopping 90,000 applications for 50 spots…