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More than a dozen fire trucks, four jet skis and a helicopter are among the $30 million worth of donations received by the Hawaii County Fire Department from the Daniel R. Sayre Memorial Foundation over the past 27 years. 

Now the foundation is fundraising for another helicopter and two more trucks for the Big Island. That will bring the foundation’s total donations to well over $40 million by the end of 2025.

Concerns over adequate funding for Hawaii’s fire departments were heightened after the Aug. 8 Maui fires, which outmatched the Maui Fire Department’s resources and staff. The , released in April, identified funding as a key “conundrum” for MFD. 

Fire departments across the islands have long been on the lookout for funding to supplement their county-funded budgets. They apply for state and federal grants, but also look to private sources to fill financial gaps that national advocates say have widened in recent decades.

Now the is stepping up to help Maui Fire Department with six new fire trucks, having begun fundraising $2.5 million as part of a partnership in response to the Aug. 8 fires.

“The county needs our help and the fire department needs our help … I kind of feel like maybe we should have been helping earlier but now we’re helping,” foundation co-founder Laura Mallery-Sayre said.  

The Sayre Foundation was formed to help Big Island firefighters 27 years ago when its namesake, Daniel Sayre, died after a fall while hiking the Pololu Valley on the island’s north shore.

The firefighters’ efforts inspired Mallery-Sayre and Frank Sayre, the 25-year-old victim’s parents, to create the foundation. Mallery-Sayre said they were impressed by the the search and rescue staff’s bravery, but also its lack of resources. 

“They didn’t have the equipment they needed to get to our son. They didn’t have rescue ropes, they didn’t have the training,” Mallery-Sayre said. “The county couldn’t afford to buy that for them, when Dan fell off that cliff.”

Starting with their own $3,000 donation for the ropes, they created a foundation that had raised $1.5 million by 2017. A partnership with billionaire Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has seen that number increase to almost $30 million in the last seven years, as Benioff has both rallied for the foundation’s cause and donated himself, Mallery-Sayre said. 

Benioff’s donations represent half the funds for two new helicopters, including a state-of-the-art Airbus H145 medevac due to arrive sometime next year. 

The foundation is not the only nongovernmental organization formed to fill funding gaps. was formed to help support that island’s firefighters.  

“More and more our fire departments need assets and support for what their funding provides,” said Elizabeth Pickett, co-executive director of Hawaii Wildfire Management Organization. “Groups like Sayre Foundation and Friends of the Kauai Fire Department work hard to fill in some of those gaps.”

Looking To Washington, D.C.

The federal government has dispersed billions of dollars to county fire departments under the Fire Grants and Safety Act, originally enacted in 1999 in response to the widening gap between increasing responsibilities and funding and resources. 

The Federal Emergency Management Agency has since run two grant programs to help boost or maintain staffing levels. Over the past two decades the programs have funneled more than $13 billion to fire departments nationwide.

Hawaii has received just over $12 million of that since 2015. 

That number shows Hawaii needs to “take a swing a little bit more, and go for that funding and be aggressive and proactive,” said Jesse Cooke of the philanthropic investment firm . 

Ulupono, where Cooke is vice president of investments and analytics, has recently teamed up with Gov. Josh Green’s office to provide support for grant writing for fire departments statewide.

“The money is just too much to ignore, right? We’re talking tens of millions of dollars that we could possibly get to pay firefighters,” said Cooke. 

Hawaii received about $5.5 million through grants from the SAFER program since 2015, including $3.5 million for Hawaii County. The FEMA money is temporarily funding nine positions, which the county will eventually take over.

The remaining funds were slated for Kauai County, which was unable to afford the required cost-sharing amount, said Kauai Fire Department Chief Michael Gibson. This year the department is applying for $760,000 to fund two more positions, Gibson said. 

But that amount is dwarfed by what goes to Rhode Island, which has a population of just over 1 million people and received more than $54 million in SAFER grant funding since 2015. 

The disparity is partly because of how the feds determine the highest need, along with how fire departments are funded, said Hawaii County Fire Chief Kazuo Todd.

It is especially hard to compete with “some jurisdictions where there’s literally no funding and they’re just raising money off the billing from ambulances and bake sales and pancake breakfasts and things like that,” Todd said.

‘Everybody Is Facing Budget Cuts’

Instead, Hawaii’s fire departments compete against other similarly sized taxpayer-funded departments, said Honolulu Fire Department grants manager Michele Haruno. And it’s competitive.

“Everybody is facing budget cuts and hardship right now … the need for extra funding is a lot greater than what it used to be,” Haruno said.

Haruno manages about five grants yearly, ranging from $60,000 to a few million dollars, that pay for efforts ranging from buying new vehicles and protective equipment to cancer screening services and wellness initiatives.

Haruno’s role is rare in the firefighting realm, because none of the state’s other fire departments have dedicated grant writing and grant management staff. HFD created the role in 2008. 

The department’s fire captains had previously dealt with grants, and that’s still how it works in the other departments.

Every department would benefit from a grant manager, Todd said.

“The amount of money you’ll pay to have that grant manager comparative to the amount of financial benefit that the department will see helps pay for itself,” Todd said. “I think there’s value in it.”