HANAI Training Hawaii: What the Pre-Service Foster Care Curriculum Covers

Before any Hawaii resource caregiver can be licensed, they must complete H.A.N.A.I. pre-service training. The name stands for Hawaii Assures Nurturing and Involvement — and the curriculum is designed to be the opposite of a generic national training program repurposed for local use.

Here is what H.A.N.A.I. covers, how it is delivered, and what you will be expected to know by the end.

What H.A.N.A.I. Is

H.A.N.A.I. is Hawaii's mandatory pre-service education program for prospective resource caregivers. It was developed specifically for Hawaii — rooted in the state's cultural values of aloha, ohana, and malama — rather than adapted from a mainland curriculum. The training is delivered through contracted agencies, primarily Catholic Charities Hawaii and Family Programs Hawaii, on behalf of DHS.

The total training requirement is 15 hours of pre-service education.

How the 15 Hours Are Structured

The curriculum is divided into two components:

9 hours of live instruction: These are classroom sessions or live webinars covering interactive material where discussion, questions, and scenario-based learning happen. The live sessions cannot be replaced by self-study.

6 hours of self-study: Delivered through online modules or DVD materials, covering topics you can work through at your own pace. Topics include the Hawaii child welfare system structure, the medical and dental needs of foster children, and child developmental stages.

Together they total 15 hours. Both components must be completed before the home study can be finalized and a license issued.

What the Curriculum Covers

Trauma and Child Development

The core of the H.A.N.A.I. curriculum is understanding how trauma affects children — particularly what research now shows about the brain's response to adverse childhood experiences. Caregivers learn how the amygdala (the brain's fight-or-flight center) can become chronically overactivated in traumatized children, leading to behaviors that look like defiance or aggression but are actually fear responses.

Understanding this reframes how you respond to a child's behavior. A child who screams during bath time may be reacting to sensory triggers from a previous trauma. A child who hoards food is responding to real past scarcity. The training helps caregivers interpret behavior through a trauma lens rather than a discipline lens.

Attachment and Separation

Children entering foster care have experienced disrupted attachment — with biological parents, with previous caregivers, and in some cases across multiple placements. H.A.N.A.I. covers how attachment develops, what insecure or disrupted attachment looks like in behavior, and what caregivers can do to build a sense of safety and predictability for a child who has learned that adults are not reliable.

Ambiguous Loss

This is a concept specific to foster care that the H.A.N.A.I. curriculum addresses directly. Foster children often experience what therapists call "ambiguous loss" — their parents are alive but unavailable, present at visitations but not parenting them, part of their identity but unable to meet their needs.

The grief of ambiguous loss is different from the grief of death. There is no clear ending, no closure, no permission from society to mourn. Caregivers who understand ambiguous loss are better equipped to support children through visitation transitions, to hold space for a child's love for their birth family, and to avoid inadvertently messaging that the child should simply stop caring about parents who hurt them.

The Prudent Parenting Standard

Every H.A.N.A.I. participant learns about the Prudent Parenting standard, which is both a legal framework and a practical philosophy. Under this standard, resource caregivers are empowered — and expected — to make the same decisions a reasonable and prudent parent would make, rather than waiting for DHS approval for every normal activity.

This means: allowing a foster child to go to a sleepover, participate in a school sports team, have a social media account if age-appropriate, or attend an overnight field trip, without needing case worker sign-off for each one. The standard exists because foster children had historically been excluded from normal childhood experiences due to over-cautious bureaucratic approval processes.

Cultural Competency and the Ohana Framework

H.A.N.A.I. is grounded in Hawaii's multicultural context. Training explicitly addresses the cultural significance of the extended ohana, the importance of maintaining biological family connections, and how race, culture, and identity intersect for children in care — particularly Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander children, who are significantly overrepresented in Hawaii's child welfare system.

Caregivers learn to help children maintain their cultural identity through "life books" (documented personal histories and family connections), language preservation, and culturally relevant activities.

How Training Is Delivered

In-person sessions: Available on Oahu through Catholic Charities Hawaii and other contracted agencies. Schedule varies; check with your licensing unit or Catholic Charities for current session dates.

Live webinars: Increasingly available for Neighbor Island applicants (Maui, Big Island, Kauai). These sessions run in real time with an instructor — they are not pre-recorded videos. You participate from home via video conference.

Online self-study modules: The six-hour self-study component is completed online and can be done at your own pace, on your schedule.

This hybrid delivery structure means Neighbor Island applicants no longer need to travel to Oahu to complete training. The live webinar option was specifically introduced to address the geographic barrier that had historically delayed or discouraged fostering on islands other than Oahu.

Ongoing Training After Licensure

Pre-service H.A.N.A.I. training is a one-time requirement before your first license. But training does not stop there. As of 2023, licensed resource caregivers in Hawaii must complete a minimum of 13 hours of ongoing training per year to maintain their license at renewal.

Approved ongoing training topics are published by DHS and include topics like sibling placement, LGBTQ+ youth in care, substance exposure effects, and educational advocacy. Family Programs Hawaii and Catholic Charities Hawaii offer approved training throughout the year, both in-person and virtually.

The Warm Line (operated by Catholic Charities Hawaii) is also a resource for accessing current training schedules:

• Oahu: (808) 545-1130
• Neighbor Islands: 1-866-545-0882
• Email: [email protected]

For a full overview of the Hawaii licensing process including training timelines and how to access sessions on each island, see the Hawaii Foster Care Licensing Guide.

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