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Twinkle Borge wanted to bring everyone home.

For years, the Native Hawaiian activist had worked tirelessly to forge a tight-knit sense of community among the several hundred people living in makeshift shelters near the Waianae Boat Harbor, turning what could have been a miserable and lawless encampment into the kind of place where people could think of themselves not as homeless but simply houseless.

Then, nearly a decade ago, she launched a movement to make her community houseless no more, leading efforts to buy a 20-acre plot of fallow land in Waianae that she hoped to transform into a vibrant village surrounded by fruit-bearing avocado, papaya and banana trees.

Borge, known by countless people as “Aunty Twinkle” or simply “Mama,” was still working on that effort when she died this week at the age of 54.

The cause of death has not been announced.

Her efforts to build Puuhonua O Waianae Mauka had served as a major source of inspiration for the kauhale or tiny house community movement, which is currently the centerpiece of Gov. Josh Green’s homelessness policy.

Friends, family members, politicians — and people across Hawaii who had never met her — were taking to social media on Monday to express their shock and sorrow at her passing.

Borge was “the Mother Theresa of Wai’anae,” Brandon Makaawaawa of The Nation of Hawaii, which operates out of Puuhonua O Waimanalo, wrote on Facebook adding that, “No matter where she went she always gave even when she never had nothing to give, she had that much Aloha for everyone.”

John Mizuno, the governor’s coordinator on homelessness, had seen Borge at an event just a few days before her death.

“Aunty Twinkle built character and dignity among the homeless and exemplified ohana, hanai, kuleana, love, hope and faith,” he wrote, pointing to her contribution to the kauhale movement.

A Love For Her Community

Borge became homeless in her mid-30s, after a series of poor life choices that she never tried to sugar-coat in interviews.

In love with a meth user, Borge went into a downward spiral of drug use herself, losing her job, her home, and her son. Then she found the Waianae Boat Harbor in 2006, already the site of a large homeless encampment.

It was in Waianae that she got sober and started to build a sense of community among her neighbors in the woods. When William Aila, at the time the harbormaster, warned Borge that the encampment would be evicted if something wasn’t done to clean up the area, she stepped into the role of community leader.

“Things needed to be in order here,” Twinkle told Civil Beat in 2015. “I thought I was the only one blunt enough to say it as it is.”

By the mid-2010s, Borge had transformed the Waianae encampment into a community with rules and a governance structure led by volunteers, most of whom were women.

Though she was determined never to turn away anyone who needed a place to live, her biggest focus was on providing a sense of security for homeless kids in the area. In 2015, when Civil Beat spent several months embedded in The Harbor community, she was housing multiple teens in her multi-room tent and had become something of a surrogate mother for numerous others in the encampment.

A no-nonsense woman who was as quick to enfold people in a hug as she was to deliver a tongue-lashing if they misbehaved, Borge had a remarkable ability to forge relationships with everyone from drug addicts to state lawmakers.

“You didn’t speak of doing things … YOU SIMPLY DID,” community leader Hinaleimoana Wong-Kalu wrote on social media Monday, adding that Borge was “one of the finest examples we could ever have for leadership amongst our people.”

In recent years, Borge had emerged as one of the most well-known homeless advocates in Hawaii, speaking at events across the country while pouring her efforts into the 20-acre parcel of land that she hoped would be a forever home for many in her community.

“I cannot wait for everybody to come home,” Borge said in 2021 as she looked out over the land. “I cannot wait to have our kids here.”