A life-altering experience in Africa changed the course of Dean Wong’s professional life. He left a promising and fulfilling career in for-profit business and transitioned to the nonprofit sector. As the Chief Executive Officer at Imua Family Services, he has since impacted the lives of countless children and their parents.
Recently, while on a plane, a father told Dean that the work their organization did with his family, supporting them through a difficult period of diagnosis and fear, changed their lives. “If your team had not been there, every day in our home, to help us understand what parenting was going to be for our child,” he said, “we would not have had the confidence to be able to raise our child.”
Dean’s goal is to ensure that every child and every youth in their community has what they need to strive forward and to thrive, so that no child is left without access to what they need. His perspectives are bigger than the status quo, and he never shies away from going after the goal. This is why Imua Family Services, an organization based in a small, rural island community in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, is one of the largest early childhood providers in the state of Hawaii. The world pays attention to the type of models, programs, and services they are providing.
“Meliorist” is how Dean describes himself in a word. “Meliorism is the belief that we can contribute to positive change and improve the world through acts of love, creativity, compassion, and kindness,” he says.
A Turning Point in Career
Dean started off in the for-profit business sector, but a transformative seven-year stint in Africa reshaped his perspective and made him reevaluate his career plans. For him, this experience early in his career was a “pinnacle moment” of his life.
When he first arrived in Africa, Dean was taken aback by the overwhelming amount of human suffering, human need, and devastation in certain communities. “It was nothing like I had ever seen before,” he says, “nothing like we’ve ever seen here in the West.” He witnessed life and death hanging in a fine balance.
Dean saw severe hunger, even starvation, and people suffering from diseases, such as dysentery, which were compounded by a lack of resources and health care facilities. “When you’re exposed, as I was at the time, to this level of need for compassion,” he says, “I just wanted to do something to make a difference in those communities.” He left his work and returned to the U.S. Once he came back, he could no longer see himself going back to a work existence where he was not putting people’s needs first. Dean says, “I couldn’t turn my back on even the level of human suffering and need that was around us here.”
He felt the urge to find a way to integrate his compassion and desire to help people at home, while still doing the work he knew he could do and being the leader, he knew he could be. “I had to find a way to marry those two things together,” Dean says. This made him transition to nonprofit executive leadership and the public health sector.
Stepping Into Imua Family Services
Dean was about to become a parent when he joined Imua Family Services as its Executive Director. It was a “personal decision” for him. He recalls feeling a deep sense of overwhelming anxiety about the whole process of becoming a parent. He was grappling with questions and doubts: “Will I be a good parent? Will they be healthy? What if something goes wrong? What if I am not ready? What if …” Dean found himself in a position where he could easily relate to the families and parents that the organization serves.
“These are the parents who are scared, nervous, and fearful of what happens next,” he says. “They do not know where to turn if any of the ‘What if questions’ happen to be the case.”
In a rural community or neighbor island situation where Dean lives, resources can be limited. “The challenge of continuing to build something for every family and child in the community felt right to me at the time,” he says. He joined Imua family in 2011. At the time, the organization was based in a community-based center. Dean recalls that it was paying high rent for a run-down location. Its windows were broken, the AC did not work, and the furniture in the offices was rejected donations.
“I thought to myself, this agency is living in poverty, it is reflecting a belief system that charity is poor, which also reflects that the people they serve don’t deserve much, just enough to get by,” Dean says. “It also spoke volumes about how it felt about the staff and what they could afford to give them.”
He believed that families deserve the very best that can be given; for example, the best of care and services, the best of staff and expertise, the best of facilities and treatment centers, and play spaces. It is then that Dean stopped settling for “second best”. If they were going to give families diapers, bottles, toys, and formula, he made sure that it was new and given with dignity.
Within three years of Dean’s joining, they opened the Imua Early Childhood Development Center in Central Maui, featuring over 10,000 square feet of state-of-the-art facilities, integrated workspaces, conference and training rooms, kitchens, and their first Inclusion Preschool. And this was just the beginning under his leadership.
Play: The Intrinsic Core Value
The word “Play” is fundamental to how Imua Family operates as an organization. It is also central to how they provide therapy and services to children. “Play is the highest form of research,” Dean quotes Albert Einstein to drive the point home. He says that when a child is given an opportunity to play, they will find what they need to develop the connections that they need.
Today, parents and society are increasingly forgetting how to play. Dean notes that children under the age of three are spending less than 30 minutes a day outside playing, while, on the other hand, they are spending more than three hours a day on devices. This may be the reason behind the rising development problems and behavioral issues among children, in addition to concentration issues.
Dean also points out that parents are no longer playing with their children in a meaningful way. “So, a lot of our time is spent taking parents back to that place of coaching, teaching them how to play along the way,” he says. He underscores that connections are established when children play together.
“How they establish their connections is how they make correlations to things and how they begin to build and learn,” Dean explains. And play is an essential ingredient in that process.
“So, ‘Play’ has now become intrinsic to our core values.” Dean points out. “It is a direct reflection of every single thing that we do as an organization and our intention behind how we operate.”
Imua Family Services: Changes Over the Last 80 Years
Imua Family will celebrate its 80th anniversary in 2027. It began in Maui, Hawaii during the time of Polio when a group of parents fought to find resources for their children who were suffering from this debilitating disease. As a nonprofit with years of history behind it, the organization has gone through many levels of ups and downs and security and insecurity. Dean points out that at times, it had to build itself up, and there were times when it had to shrink back a little bit. “That is just the natural process of any business that has been in business for over that many different decades of change,” he adds.
Dean joined Imua Family at an opportune time for growth, he says. When he first arrived, one of the things that he quickly realized was that in order for the organization to grow and meet the needs of the community that existed around them, they had to be bigger than what they were. At the time, they were renting some space in a community center. Dean realized that Imua needed to have its own space, and they had to build a state-of-the-art early childhood development center. He wanted this space to be larger than the organization had ever had before, with the capacity to serve their community with therapy rooms, an early childhood learning classroom, and adequate spaces for all of the staff, both executive and administrative.
“So, we set out to build a $3.2 million campaign to build and grow this center,” Dean says. “We did that within about a year’s time and moved into this new space.” He saw this space as a better reflection of the organization’s caliber and its intention to meet children’s needs at a high level. He also thought it gave the staff a quality workspace to do their work.
However, according to Dean, it does not take long for an organization on a growth trajectory to outgrow those spaces. So, under his leadership, they continued to grow and expand the organization by adding satellite offices throughout their Island community. And, in 2020, they bought another space to expand their organization. This is about a six-acre property that reflects the other values they have for children and families by creating outdoor and nature-based learning environment spaces as well, according to Dean.
“Now, these spaces will allow the organization to continue to grow into a capacity that will help to expand our work and our programs for the next decades to come,” he adds. His vision for the organization is not about what they intend to accomplish this year or even five years from now. As he is leading an organization that will soon complete 80 years of existence, he is focused on the organization’s centennial. He has begun to consider what Imua would be like at 100; how it would be serving their community; and what its future would look like for the next century.
“Knowing that these decisions will be there long after my tenure with this organization,” Dean says, “I’m laying the groundwork now for that next 100 years.”
He is already working on a succession plan so that the organization can reach its 100-year vision with or without him at the helm.
Two Sides to Achievement
For Dean, there are two sides to achievement. One is the human side. They work with vulnerable children and families, especially during the difficult time when parents recognize that their child might have special needs. “We’re dealing with families that are emotional, fearful, and skeptical of their own ability to help their child in these times of need,” Dean says. He considers it a “real achievement” when families recognize their strength to be there for their children, and also when their children have the strength to do the smallest of things and reach their milestones. Dean also feels a sense of achievement when families recognize that they have been rewarded with an amazing gift, and that they know they can shepherd that gift to reach its full potential.
Almost every day, Dean and his team hear families appreciate the help and support they have provided them and their children. “They tell us how they wouldn’t have made it through whatever given situation it was without our support,” Dean says. “And that is by far the way that we measure our success, because it’s one life, one child, one family at a time, and those are the most important things to us.”
Imua Family is a nonprofit organization, a 501(c)(3), but it is operated as a business. So, they have to invest in themselves as an organization and find new and creative ways to build their own revenue and resources. Dean points out that there are achievements that they have to measure on the business side as well. “One doesn’t exist without the other,” he says.
Advice for Future Leaders
“Be careful of the noise” is Dean’s first piece of advice to future leaders hoping to make meaningful change in their communities. He says that instead of getting distracted by noise caused by social media, likes dislikes, comments, news, media, they need to focus on what is important. “If you are lucky enough to build a team, help them stay focused on the work as well,” he adds.
Dean underscores that in the end, it is only the work that matters. “We the leaders will come and go,” he adds. “If you are truly building a legacy or a meaningful change then it needs to continue after you. A real leader will be sure that this is possible.”
Pressing Forward!
“When the circumstances present a difficult time in front of Dean and his amazing team, they “move in” or “move forward,” as the word ‘IMUA’ is the Hawaiian word to “move forward.”
“That is what we do,” Dean points out. “We always press forward because the lives of children and young people depend on us, and without them (all of them) there is no future.”
