for the good

Like a lot of friends in their early 20s, Richel Cole, Mariah Maniulit and Chelsea Adams often would meet up at coffee shops and talk about their aspirations for the future. The three had different passions and varied backgrounds — Cole in nonprofit marketing, Maniulit in communications and Adams in environmental science —but they found they had a shared goal: to positively impact the community.

“We all knew that we wanted to do something that would create a movement of doing good things,” Cole recalls. “We wouldn’t be where we are without the support and encouragement from our community, so if we are able to provide that much-needed support to someone else, we will gladly do it.”

“No matter what we were going to do, we knew that giving back to the community was going to be a big part of it,” Maniulit adds.

Last year, the trio launched For The Good Hawaii (FTG), a hybrid event-planning service provider, media company, online shop and nonprofit organization.

They launched their first component — a blog that highlights companies doing positive things in the community — last January, and things quickly took off. Within a few months, FTG had several thousand followers on its social media accounts, and it now has bloggers spread throughout the state and in California. FTG expanded its services to include event planning and media management, and in October, it launched a retail boutique.

“Everything we were talking about has really flourished even more than what we were expecting,” says Cole, FTG’s CEO.

“I think, at the end of the day, everybody inherently wants to support a mission like this and be a part of something positive,” she adds. “If we can be a catalyst to doing that through our products and services, then I think we are doing our mission.”

Both in its blog and event-planning services, FTG works with organizations that focus on community outreach, or have charitable giving embedded into their business models. They have, for example, organized events for HUGS (Help, Understanding and Group Support), which aims to improve quality of life for seriously ill children and their families, and Moms on a Mission, which empowers people to make safe choices on foods and household products.

Early on, FTG garnered a substantial following for its fashion-related blog content — and later capitalized on this interest by producing an online boutique line with products curated from designers in Los Angeles and New York. The boutique offers clothing that can go from work to play for young professional women. But, as FTG sees it, the most important aspect of the boutique is that some of its proceeds benefit its Pay It Forward program.

“A portion of every sale from the retail line goes directly to Pay It Forward,” Cole explains, “and we use those funds to be able to host our own charity events, or donate to nonprofits.”

“I want to see our Pay It Forward program be able to really flourish — so that we wouldn’t have to worry about that asterisk of ‘a portion of our proceeds,’ and have this work happen on an even larger scale,” Maniulit says.

So far, FTG has conducted restoration work at a loi, and over the holidays, they surprised kids staying at Kakaako’s Next Step Shelter with Christmas decorations and gifts.

Collectively, through these different facets, FTG ultimately aims to foster, as they say, “a community of individuals doing good things.”

“When we envision the community doing good things, it is really just kind of integrating that into your daily life … whether it is making an extra donation at the register, or spending couple of hours a week doing some volunteer service,” Cole says. “If we are promoting that, we are hoping that our supporters will be able to do that, too, and share it with their network — and it will be a ripple effect.”

For more information on For The Good or to get involved, visit forthegoodhawaii.com.