>> very first president to attend the white house correspondents dinner was calvin coolidge in 1924. i had just been elected to the united states senate. >> the white house correspondents dinner. washington's premier black tie event is saturday, april 29th. what she spends live coverage from the washington hilton hotel. including red carpet arrivals of jonalists, politicians and celebrities. this year's headliner is the daily show's roy wood junior and president biden is expected to k.sp the white house correspondents dinner, live, saturday april 29th on c-span, c-span now, our free mobile video app or online at c-span dot org. >> since 1979, in partnership

with the cable industry, c-span has provided complete coverage of the halls of congress. from house and senate floors to congressional hearings, party briefings and committee meetings. c-span gives you a front row seat to how issues are debated and decided, with no commentary, no interruptions and completely unfiltered. c-span, your unfiltered view of government. . >> during hudson ocular droughts as new governor of hawaii, josh greene talked about his plan to combat homelessness in his state and climate change issues. which he called the greatest challenge of the century. governor greene previously served as hawaii's lieutenant governor. >> ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the ninth governor of the state of hawaii, josh green.

[applause] >> before i begin, i'm going to fix this first teleprompter. that's much better. aloha. this is a time in my speech, before we start rolling, where i have to recognize any of the people that were not yet recognized by the lieutenant governor. probably very shortly. it recognized the people that i love the most first. i need to recognize my wife jamie and maya and sam, thank you for everything you have done in my life.

i'm lucky to have my father here today, john green. [applause] my mother, natasha. [applause] my baby brother, ben. [applause] well uncles and my aunties and my fifth grade school teacher, mr. mccallum [applause] . we always also recognize anti dell, who has helped us so much raising our children. and he dell, where are you? i thank you all, i think you all for giving me, each and every one of you, the honor to serve. it's extraordinary to sit across from you family and friends today, here in our hall

and all across the state. you've always been there for me and i love you so much. thank you for being here today and welcoming sylvie and i entered the administration. [applause] hawaii is one ohana, one family. when we come together, we can meet any challenge and accomplish anything we set our minds to. more than 20 years ago, i started taking care of local families as a doctor in a small clinic on the big island. the people in ocean view, punaluu, volcano, took me into their hearts and their lives and taught me the true meaning of aloha. i learned how people and why take care of one another. i saw how our local families, communities, churches, and they all reach out to people who need our help and how we all try to lift people up whenever we can. i also, though, so how difficult things are for our local families. but if my patients didn't have jobs.

to many people i cared for were fighting addition. wrestling with untreated mental illness. and we just don't have the resources we needed to fight these problems, so are interested representative to try to make a difference. and the years that followed, as a member of the house and then of the senate, i learned more about our challenges that we face every day in each and every community. and i continue to see these problems. sometimes up close as an emergency doctor in pahala or levy. sometimes when i was volunteering in the clinic that we started because of your help when it was working at the capitol. we kept working on addiction, mental illness, access to quality health care. some problems got better, some problems got worse. we made sure that all of our key have health insurance. we built a statewide trauma system that saves lives. we make sure the families who have a child with autism, and there's so many, could get help. too often, i would come home to jamie for my weekend e.r. ship

with a tragic story of seeing another homeless individual who was in the e.r. are someone who had overdosed. or even worse, someone who had taken their own life ed of desperation. we knew we had to do more. four years ago, when you placed your trust in me like you did today for so be a disservice lieutenant governor, we started to address homelessness and this new crisis and a special way with a new commitment. the problem had gotten so bad, so difficult, that many people have stopped believing we could do anything to make a difference. no matter what we did. in hawaii, many of us have so much. many of us in this room. while others have almost nothing at all. this is a truth we understand. we knew it was our moral obligation to help those who are living without shelter. i saw one gentleman on the beach, just minutes away from our biggest, most beautiful hotels, under agenda and that was his home. our team was inspired by the work here in hawaii at kaori

keep village. we learned lessons from experts all across hawaii and around the world, that building communities of tiny homes for those who are homeless right now, how that would make an actual difference in an instant. when they got into a home, their drug addiction dropped, their lifespan increased from losing 30 years of life back to normal. we knew we could make a real difference if we pulled together. we've had small pieces of land in the last few years. one in one mullah, when i'm cal aloha, we start to build these kauhale villages. leaders like -- , james koszta, anthony blanche and twinkle. twinkle is in the back, round of applause for twinkle. amazing human being. [applause] these heroes built just enough trust amongst the homeless community to get these struggling friends to a place where that would come and live in the kauhale. local developers don't need their time and expertise,

materials, resources, and these tiny homes began to sprout up. we used public resources, three sources made a difference because they added social workers to the mix. they ended veterans groups. they sometimes came and provide professional support when people were desperate and these kauhale began to rise. one story in particular i would like to share showed how much hope this approach can give us and how much hope can be created so fast. a young woman named joscelyn had been homeless in sherwood forest four years with their younger brothers and sisters, four of them. they felt trapped by their situation. they did not see a way out. but after we built that first kauhale village, as simple as it was, it he blanche in jocelyn found one another. we welcome jocelyn's whole family into that new community. they started a life there. her brothers and little sisters could not go to school every day. one could go to the prom. josiah, her little brother,

could get the medication he needed to stop the seizures. this changed their lives. and then there is charlotte, a homeless elderly woman who was discovered in china town an unsafe conditions by my chief of staff and wonderful person, rick wilson. brook brought charlotte to our kauhale community, and she's now living in a quiet, safe and dignified life that all of our people deserve. let's give a round of applause for brooke, that was an amazing moment. [applause] so, when i share that story, when i mean to tell you as we can, we can and chronic homelessness in hawaii if we pull together. as governor, i've always reached out to these excellent mayors and humbly suggested that we build kauhale, given my commitment and there is, and each and every county in our state. [applause] it seems so simple, sometimes

it feels complex but will choose parcels of land, partner with the private sector, just like we have done. developing the community, we'll build villages and support them with nurses, social workers and everyone else in hawaii who wants to come together to lend a hand, which i'll tell you, is one heck of a lot of people. to show you that our administration will not wait one minute to take action to help people, i'll authorize the release of the $50 million of grants and aid before the end of this year. [applause] that the legislature had the wisdom to approve in may but has taken some time to be released. we will take that action as soon as we can. these critical funds go to organizations all across our state. like the hawaii blood bank, hawaii food bank and domestic violence action center. the aloha medical mission, hawaiian ihs, the hawaiian

humane society, special olympics, just to name a few. to pay for social workers, mental health care workers, those who support our families. food for our children, like the first ladies we fight for and our next first lady will continue. all of these dollars go to safe people and create safe places, including for those who have been victims of sex assault. i'm so proud of the legislature and thank you for giving us his blessing to share with the people of hawaii. some of the greatest lessons that we learned come from outside of our state. and our values and our experiences have often come far from home. in september of 2019, there is a crisis unfolding in samoa, a measles outbreak that especially threatened the children of our pacific neighbor. i want to help in some small way, as a volunteer doctor with three or four colleagues. maybe some donated medicine. and to bring attention to the crisis of perhaps the

lieutenant governor can. my good friend and former mayor -- , a samoan american leader, put me in touch with some of his health minister. after the very modest can't help that i had planned. and that she shared with me how great their situation really was. the absence of western samoa and children who are unvaccinated, as where their parents. the health minister fear that this outbreak that was camille would overwhelm their entire country. and, weeks they protected that hundreds of children will die. she asked me if we could immediately do something more and come to some with an army of why is health care workers tell vaccinate that whole country. and treat anyone who was critically ill and they're limited facilities. i told her we would try. we pull together, like we do in hawaii. jim it i reached out that evening to hawaii's health care community and asked, would you help us launch an emergency medical mission and go to samoa immediately? by the next morning, the next

morning, we had 485 volunteers willing to travel to western small with no hesitation. [applause] . what happened next was unbelievable. why airlines gave us a plane to fly there. paraguay donated tens of thousands of dollars of fuel to fuel that plane. unicef gave us 50,000 doses of measles vaccinations and fiji airways promised to fly is back, thank goodness, or we would still be living and western samoa. i had never imagined so much aloha, and i should have known better. because i know you and i know how much aloha you have. but within 48 hours, around 100 of our local health care professionals from queens and hawaii pacific health, small clinics all over state, some of whom are here today, flew all the way across the pacific all night and landed in samoa to vaccinate their people.

and the villages of that country, we saw great suffering when we landed. there was tragic loss of life. i remember entering a holiday with my dear friend and colleague doctor nadine -- where a very young child had just died from the measles. his baby was still warm. we watched tears roll down our young mothers face and our hearts broke. we were too late for that child, just minutes. but we are there for a reason. we had to keep going. 36, hours our volunteer medical mission from hawaii did what we are asked to do we like may 36,998 people against the measles. six days later, the measles stop spreading. children stop dying. we got back on a plane and we flew home to hawaii, exhausted but filled with a sense of aloha that will never forget. and then the samoan people told me that they will never forget with the people of why, our

nurses and doctors and our patrons, during those 36 hours. so, around of applause for you, why, for stepping up like that. [applause] now, why do i share that story? because, in that moment, either realized it's absolutely no challenge that the people of hawaii can't meet when we pull together. that in just a few days we can stand together and care for a whole other country. so, surely we can stand for ourselves. six weeks after we return from samoa, an ominous toy began to appear in the news from china and from italy from around the world. there is a new virus that had been detected in humans for the first time. we had no immunity to it and it was spreading fast. this virus would become known of course has covid-19, and it was so new that no one could predict what would happen or how serious the outbreak would

be. past coronaviruses have been stalled in weeks or months we have to do this same thing, but it didn't, as the governor so. well covid would spread every corner of the earth, including hawaii. our health experts told us that without decisive action, as many as 10,000 of our people, mostly caputo, would pass away. they would die in hawaii. but again, because of our values, because we weren't going to let that happen, we knew that we could pull together and put up a good fight. and that fight saved lives. we masked up and vaccinations became available, we set up thanks nations all across our state. because of the leadership of the job in the department of health and so many champions, here we vaccinated a higher percentage of people here than almost anywhere else on the world. that one is worth it.

what was amazing was partnerships group between hospitals that and barely spoke with each other because of this pandemic. doctors and nurses covered for each other when they were too exhausted to stand. some people have been treating patients for 24 hours straight and someone would step in. i remember walking down a corridor in the intensive care unit in queens hospital and i heard that distinctive sound of the ventilators print breathing for our sickest kupuna. i saw the exhaustion in the faces of nurses about their masks. a woman came up to me and share that her daughter was in the icu right then. on that haul, she had been near death twice from covid and have been on a ventilator. this was an uplifting story because her daughter was finally coming off of that ventilator for good. she's going to live. she began to weep with exhaustion, this mother, and her gratitude came out and she embraced and are standing next to me and me, knowing the

hawaii had stepped up. what she didn't know, what she didn't know, was at that moment we had less than five days of oxygen left in our state. because so many people were sick with covid but they needed a breathing assistance and all of our hospitals. she did know that hundreds of our nurses and doctors were having to quarantine themselves, because they had tested positive for covid and re-sick. we were literally running out of health care workers and oxygen. but once again, we pulled together. the health care association led by instant rate, all one of our davis champions. elton, where are? you should put your hand up, where amazed by what you do. [applause] general herrera, who i'm honored to continue to work with from our team. which with the state department of health and they raised to find new sources of oxygen. meanwhile, our team also flew hundreds of child nurses to come here, fema paid for that. we rushed them to hawaii to

support our sick and exhausted health care heroes. so people lived. it was because of these commitments that we have. the sense of aloha. these commitments, a refusal to quit, we have heard it an even greater crisis and loss of life and ultimately why had the lowest fatality rate of any state in the entire country. [applause] it's important that i share this. none of this was achieved with an incredible sacrifice. small businesses suffered, our economies slowed. we did everything we could, everything you could, to support our people with safe travel programs and responsible guidelines. it is difficult. our teachers return to work if you know there weren't too many kids in each classroom for pandemic conditions. in a prison facilities, pretzel workers battled outbreaks that

could easily be prevented as many of our most vulnerable people still weren't vaccinated. hotel employees, police, firefighters, frontline workers, everywhere, work to keep us safe. stop the spread of the virus. all across our state, people do their best to keep us going. keep themselves alive, living their lives, staying safe. they went to work. we cared for one another, protected our neighbors when we could and, in the end, in the end, because of how we all are, and we come together as one family, with aloha and a common purpose, for away from the mainland, hawaii led the nation in almost every measure of success during this pandemic. we are the safest place in america, we were one ohana. [applause] so, red we go from here? how can a lie need and overcome our greatest challenges when

other states across our country are struggling to even talk to one another? homelessness is surging in urban centers across america. inflation, growing housing crisis, a housing crisis threatens the entire middle class way of life and climate change looms over us and our entire planet and our future. the form of droughts and fires in the west, super storms across the gulf coast. why is not immune to these problems. but unlike others, we have proven we can come together and face big challenges. when we saw homelessness and the suffering it causes. we came together and built the kauhale that i mentioned in these communities to provide shelter and care. we need to build more, and i will do that with mayor -- and all the mayors across the state. now, we need to come together to build affordable housing for all of our people. that's why somebody for children are leaving the state of hawaii. that's governor, i will unite it's a common purpose. i'll bring public officials

together with private developers and philanthropist and build thousands of new homes for hawaii's families. with will and determination, we'll also do another thing. we'll turn to thousands of illegal airbnbs into affordable rentals, so our regular people can afford to live in our communities. [applause] another critical thing we will do is empower the department of hawaiian homelands with the $600 million that is come from the legislature to once and for all keep all of our commitments to the hawaiian people, to bring peace and healing and house the thousands of hawaiian families on the waiting list. this is a priority for jamie and i. so, together, we stopped an epidemic of measles and some of. now, we'll come together to address the health care disparities that exist among our own people. winds die eight years sooner

than anyone else because of the disparities that exist. it has to, and we have to make this a charge for a future. [applause] how do you do that? we use scholarships to pay down the loans that social workers and nurses and doctors have, so they can afford to live in hawaii and provide the care for our families who need it the most. we deal with the worst global pandemic in a century better than anyone else, but we're still witnessing an epidemic of poverty and injustice in our own backyard. with the legislature's help, i would like to end in the little nate the regressive taxes that exist in our midst, like the tax on food and medication. i will humbly ask my colleagues to do that. [applause] the reason i ask for that

consideration is because the poorest families are head to the worst. those who are struggling to survive from paycheck to paycheck really can't afford that tax. in partnership with the judiciary, i'm so happy to be here with a dear friend, with the judiciary and leaders and all of our legal community, we will find a way to restore justice for those who have lost their way and been forgotten but do not deserve to be lost forever. i see my dear friend, steve -- thank you for being here, steve, we know we are championed with us. [applause] finally, as i began to close, we have to all come together. friends, we have to address the greatest challenge of the century. that is climate change. why will lead on climate change. [applause] justice wilson knows i'm taking

about him right now. we lead on climate change when others just talk or refused to act. we'll take our commitment from each and every one of us and make a difference. we can reach our ambitious renewable energy equals that have been fought for so passionately by each of all of these governors that sit in front of me. we can reach those in the coming years by aggressively approving a range of renewable energy projects in our state. we can lead on the biggest challenges, friend. we can't do it. the challenges facing our country and our entire planet in the 21st century. and we can set an example. we can set an example for the whole entire world because people love hawaii and i would look at us and say, we are taking action on housing. we're taking action on homelessness and poverty and climate change. but it will only happen, it will only happen if we truly come together and commit ourselves to putting our valleys of ohana and aloha and practice. making them a reality for everyone in the state of hawaii. let us lead by example, my

friends. let us find this moment, find this moment. address it like a new beginning for a state. i'm so honored to serve as your governor. we'll be here for you day in a day out for the next four years. we are one ohana, a hollow and aloha, i love you, guys. [applause] >> ladies and gentlemen, governor of the state of hawaii, josh green. [applause] >> all this month, watch the top 21 wedding videos from c-span's 2023 student cam

documentary video competition, every morning at 6:50 eastern, before washington journal. where one of our winning documentaries, where students were has to share with their top priority is if there ar a newly elected member of congress. watch the top 21-winning student cam documentaries all this month at 6:50 am eastern on c-span. also head over to student cam.org to watch all winning entries anytime online. >> c-span our free mobile app featuring your unfiltered view of what is happening in washington, live and on demand. keep up with the this is biggest events with live streams of -- white house, opens the courts, campaigns and more from the world of politics. all at your fingertips. we can also stay current with the latest episodes of washington journal and find scheduling information for c-span's tv networks and c-span radio, pasta variety of

compelling