Public Health Resonance Project
Amplifying unique attributes and deep connections across regionally and culturally relevant physical activities for health promotion and community wellness, locally and globally.
This project is supported by the Chin Sik & Hyun Sook Chung Endowed Chair in Public Health Studies in collaboration and conversation with many other projects, teams, communities, and funders locally and around the world.
Mission
Our interdisciplinary collaboration is working together to help build the evidence base for community and culturally relevant physical activity for public health.
Many activities are well known in communities to be of deep value for the health and wellbeing of the self, family, community, spirit, and land. How strongly they resonate with each other and with the theory, values, and core goals of public health may not be as visible because they are regionally and culturally specific. This is also because many practices have been suppressed, marginalized, and discouraged through colonialism and other oppressive systems.
Our work is designed to help connect and build this evidence base for public health promotion to produce actionable results for individuals, advocates, and communities to improve health outcomes and health equity.
Our goal is to help support and connect this work, and those doing this work, locally and across the globe for collaboration, amplification, recognition, and synergy. We do this work to support health promotion and community action, locally and globally.
Projects
Our projects include (1) Research to grow and nurture this field for public health promotion, (2) Policy briefs to make research actionable to communities, policy makers, and other stakeholders, and (3) Connecting together in meetings and conversations.
Areas of focus include research synthesis for local and international relevance and activities of relevance to Hawai‘i and many other locations including hula, surfing, and spearfishing. As well as activities in these illustrations: body boarding, samba, gardening, Albanian Dance, outrigger canoe paddling, Bon Dance, hiking, wild skating, and Tongan dance.
Art by Sunnu Rebecca Choi
Inspiration
Strengths-based approaches to public health are critically important for health equity. Our team is continually inspired by the many who work towards these goals across the world. We highlight the notable work in hula over several decades by the amazing team in the Department of Native Hawaiian Health at the John A Burns School of Medicine at the University of Hawai’i.
See the groundbreaking work on hula and health
Read publications from Hula and Health
Curriculum and Program Resources from Hula and Health
JABSOM Researchers Study Relationship Between Hula and Alzheimer’s in Hawaiʻi Public Radio
10 Years of Hula & Health Research Studies in Asia Pacific Dance Festival
Kā-HOLO Project: a protocol for a randomized controlled trial of a native cultural dance program for cardiovascular disease prevention in Native Hawaiians in MBC Public Health
A Cultural Dance Program Improves Hypertension Control and Cardiovascular Disease Risk in Native Hawaiians: A Randomized Controlled Trial in Annals of Behavioral Medicine
Acknowledgement
In this work, we are deeply grateful for the wisdom, knowledge, and care that has come before us, the love, effort, and time that keeps these practices and activities living today, and the scholarship and dissemination efforts that makes synthesizing this work across so many locations and disciplines possible.
We acknowledge the ‘āina (land) on which we have gathered to do this work across the world and the many Indigenous communities that have nurtured these lands and their cultural practices across generations even in the face of colonialism and oppression.
Resources
PHResonance@gmail.com
Media
News
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Activating Ties Across the Tides
Cross Disciplinary Collaboration Supporting Sport, Health, and Culture in the Pacific brings over 100 global participants “Raananim! Joining from Washington State. From Chuuk, Micronesia.” “Aloha from Puʻunui!” “Haha Adai yan Tirow! I am Zooming in from Oahu but come from Saipan.” “Joining from Anchorage, Alaska.” “Tagio tumas, Wantok!” These were some of the comments of…
Events and Speaking
Aloha. We’ll be a these upcoming events. Join us!
- Community Research Report Back Event in Kāneʻohe, Hawaiʻi, August 20, 2026
- CURE-PA Research Event in Honolulu, Hawaiʻi, August 23, 2026
- 18th World Congress on Public Health in Cape Town, South Africa, September 6-9, 2026
- International Society for Physical Activity and Health Congress, October 5-8, 2026
- Collaborative Event on Folk Dance and Health in Albania, November 2026
