What the mission means to Deanna
I know what it means to navigate systems as a young parent without support, and what becomes possible when families are met with compassion, cultural connection, and true partnership. Every baby deserves to grow up surrounded by love, identity, and belonging. Supporting parents navigating substance use, trauma, or system involvement is how we protect those early relationships that shape a child’s future. This work is about strengthening families and advancing systems that support healing, not separation.
Professional Background
Deanna is a peer support leader and systems-level practitioner with more than 20 years of experience advancing family-centered, culturally grounded, and trauma-informed practices across Hawaiʻi’s child welfare and family-serving systems. She brings both professional expertise and lived experience navigating child welfare, perinatal substance use as a pregnant teenager, and domestic violence- perspectives she intentionally uses to inform leadership, strengthen parent engagement, and influence policy and practice.
Throughout her career, Deanna has led both direct service and systems-level efforts to support families. She has founded and led multiple community-based initiatives, including a home for teen mothers and their babies, a family resource center in a rural Native Hawaiian community, and a youth mentorship program focused on strengthening cultural identity and connection to place.
Most recently, Deanna served as a Peer Support Supervisor with EPIC ‘Ohana, where she contributed to the development and statewide implementation of Birth Parent Peer Support services for families involved with Child Welfare Services. In this role, she provided supervision, program development, and practice guidance grounded in harm reduction, trauma-informed care, and cultural responsiveness, while strengthening collaboration between peer support and child welfare systems and elevating parent voice in system-level decision-making.
She also co-developed the Makua Allies Program (MAP), a peer-led model supporting mothers navigating perinatal substance use disorder. This work reflects her ability to translate lived expertise into program design and system change, with a focus on strengthening parent-infant relationships and preventing unnecessary family separation.
In her current role with ZERO TO THREE’s Safe Babies initiative, Deanna supports national efforts to advance parent leadership, integrate lived expertise into systems change, and strengthen cross-system approaches that improve outcomes for infants, toddlers, and their families.
Deanna lives in Hawaii, on the east side of Oʻahu, where she raised her five adult children, each now with families of their own, and is a grandmother to 18 grandchildren.
Future Vision
Deanna envisions systems that trust and invest in families, where lived experience is recognized as expertise and where support comes before surveillance. She is committed to advancing a future where parent leadership and peer support are embedded across systems, cultural practices are honored as essential to healing, and families are supported to remain safely together.
