Island communities have no funded advocate for public safety policy designed from their structural realities. ISPI was built to be that institution — and independent research requires independent funding.
Government-funded research serves the government's policy agenda. Corporate-funded research serves the corporation's commercial interests. Donor-funded research at an independent nonprofit institution serves the research question. For island communities facing public safety conditions that no existing institutional framework was designed to address, independent research is not an academic luxury — it is the only pathway to policy change.
When ISPI documented that HPD's staffing crisis is a retention failure driven by the real compensation gap created by Hawaii's housing market — not a recruitment failure that signing bonuses address — that finding was useful to the City Council and the Police Commission precisely because no government agency produced it. It is independent. The Hawaii Emergency Management Agency cannot publish research critical of Hawaii emergency management frameworks. HPD cannot publish research critical of HPD recruitment strategy. An independent nonprofit research institution can. That independence is the product.
ISPI's 22 research documents are available free because donor and commission funding covers the cost of producing them. A policy brief that takes three weeks of researcher time to produce to institutional publication standards costs $8,000-$15,000 to produce. Without funding, it is not produced. Without the research, Pacific Island governments negotiating complex security agreements with major powers have no independent analytical framework to evaluate what they are being offered. Without the research, HPD's incoming chief has no independent evidence base for the island-specific conditions driving his department's vacancy crisis. The research produces policy change. The funding produces the research.
The 39 Small Island Developing States recognized by the United Nations have a combined population of approximately 65 million people. The broader island community — including U.S. territories, large island nations, and island-geography states — includes 600 million people. The Samoa Pathway (2014) identifies governance, disaster risk reduction, and climate security as the three priority challenges for SIDS communities. All three are public safety domains. No research institution before ISPI produced policy designed from island structural realities for this population. Every dollar that funds ISPI research produces findings that are applicable across this full community — not just Hawaii.
All donations support ISPI's free public research library and the production of new island security policy research.
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