Cheryl Lupenui is the President and Chief Executive Officer of The Kohala Center, a Hawai‘i-based non-profit that turns ancestral knowledge and research into action across the fields of conservation, education, agriculture and leadership.
Cheryl is also founder and principal of The Leader Project, a business that sources from Hawaiian and Western models to develop leadership capacity throughout organizations. Spanning multiple sectors such as transportation, education, health, human services and public safety, her practice is based on building place-based leadership where all group members share the responsibility of leading and following.
Prior to The Leader Project, she worked for one of Hawaiʻi’s 20 largest corporations in business development, ran her own restaurant that promoted sustainable local agriculture, and consulted native-led entrepreneurs. Then at the age of 35, Cheryl became the youngest Chief Executive Officer and the first of Native Hawaiian descent to serve at the YWCA of O`ahu. She was honored by Hawaiʻi Business Magazine in 2007 as one of “25 People Who Will Shape the Next 25 years.”
After the YWCA, she was appointed by the governor to the Hawai‘i State Board of Education. Cheryl worked with communities on key policy-making including the adoption of Hawai‘i-based, system-wide learning outcomes (Nā Hopena A‘o or HĀ) and the establishment of the first Office of Hawaiian Education.
She holds a master’s degree in business administration with a concentration in marketing, management and finance from Tulane University, and a bachelor’s degree in business administration in international business from the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa.