he previously served as hawaii's lieutenant governor. >> please welcome the new governor of hawaii, josh green. [cheers and applause] >> i'm going to fix this teleprompter. much better.

aloha. this is the time in my speech before we start rolling where i have to recognize many of the people that were not yet recognized by the lieutenant governor. need to recognize the people i love are the most first. i need to recognize my wife jamie and my son sam. thank you for everything you have done in my life. [applause] i'm lucky to have my father here today, john green. [applause] >> and my mother natasha. my baby brother ben. my uncles and aunties and fifth grade school teacher,

mrs. mccabe. [applause] also recognize aunt yes who has helped us so much raising our children. aunt yes, where are you? i thank you all and i thank you all for giving me the honor to serve. it is extraordinary to sit across from you family and friends here today here in our halls and all across the state. you have always been there for me and i love you so much. thank you for being here and welcoming me into the administration. [applause] hawaii is 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 families as a doctor. people in ocean view, south kona

and taught me the true meaning of aloha and communities and churches reach out to people and how we lift people up whenever we can. and i know how difficult things are for our local families. many of my patients didn't have jobs. too many people i cared for were fighting with addiction and fighting with illness and we didn't have the resources. so i ran for state representative to try and make a difference. in the years that followed as a member of the house and then in 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. sometimes when volunteering in

the clinics because of your help when i wasn't at the capitol. we kept working on addiction mental illness and quality health care. some problems got better, some problems got worse. making sure we built a statewide trauma system and a child who had autism could get help. i come home to jamie with a tragic story of seeing a homeless individual in the e.r. or someone who overdosed or who had taken their own life. we knew we had to do more. four years when you placed your trust for me, we started to direct homeless and this new crisis. the problem had gotten so bad, so difficult, that many people stopped believing we could make a difference.

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 that are living without shelter. i saw one gentleman on the beach just minutes away from our biggest, beautiful hotels under a giant umbrellas and that was his home. our team was inspired by the work here. we learned lessons from experts across hawaii and around the world. building communities and tiny homes how it will make an actual difference. when they got into a home, their drug addiction dropped and life span increased and we knew we could make a difference if we pulled together. we found small pieces of land the last couple of years and started to build these villages. and community leaders like james

and twinkle, twinkle is in the back. amazing human being. [applause] these heroes built enough trust amongst the homeless community to get these struggling friends to a place where they would come and live. local developers developed their time and expertise, materials, resources and tiny homes began to sprout up. we used public resources. those resources made a difference because they added social workers to the mix and veterans' groups and came up with professional support when people were desperate and they began to rise. one story i would like to share, showed me how much this hope can give us and how hope can be created. a young woman has been homeless

in sherwood for years. they felt trapped by the situation and did not see a way out. after we built that first village as simple as it was, aunt yes blanch and jocelyn and we welcome her. they started a life there. her brothers and little sisters can go to school every day, one could go to the prom and her little brother could get the medication to stop seizures. this changed their lives. charlotte, a homeless elderly woman who was found by my chief of staff, brook brought charlotte to our community and living in a quiet, safe and dignified life. let's give us a round of applause to brook. that was an amazing moment.

[applause] >> what i share, we can and overcome homelessness in hawaii. as governor, i have reached out to the excellent mayors and suggested that we build the community given my commitment and theirs in each and every county in our state. [applause] it seems some simple but we will choose par else of land and partner with the private sector. we will build villages and support them with nurses and social workers and everyone else who wants to come together to lend a hand, which i tell you is one heck of a lot of people. to show you our administration will not wait, i'll authorize of the release of $50 million in grants and aid before the end of

this year. [applause] the legislature had the wisdom to approve in may but has taken some time to be released and will take that action. and these funds go to organizations all across our state like the hawaii blood bank, the food bank, domestic violence action center, aloha medical center, special blocks, just to name a few to pay for social workers, mental health care workers and those who support our families. food for our children and our first lady will continue. all of these dollars create safe places including those of victims of sexual assault and thanks for giving us to share with the people of hawaii.

[applause] some of the greatest lessons we learned come from outside of our state and our values have come from far from home. there was a crisis happening in samoa which threatened our children. i wanted to help as a volunteer doctor maybe donated medicine and bring attention to the crisis that perhaps a lieutenant governor can. my good friend, a leader, put me in touch with samoa's health minister and she shared with me how grave the situation was. thousands of children were unvaccinated as were their parents and they feared the outbreak would overwhelm their entire country. in weeks they present districted hundreds of children would die.

and she asked me to come to samoa with hawaii's health care workers to help vaccinate that whole country and treat anyone. i told her we would try. we pulled together like we do in hawaii. jamie and i reached out to hawaii health care centers and asked would you launch us an emergency medical mission and go to samoa immediately. by the next morning we had 485 volunteers willing to travel to western samoa with no helps tiges -- hesitation. [applause] hawaiian airlines gave us a plane to fly there. donated tens of thousands of fuel. unicef gave us measle

vaccinations. i never imagined so much aloha. and i know how much you have. within 48 hours, around 100 of our local health care professionals from communities from all over our state, some of whom are today, flew all the way across the pacific all night and landed in samoa to vaccinate their people. in the villages of that country, we saw great suffering and the tragic loss of life. i remember entering with my dear colleague where a young child has just died from the measles. this baby was still warm. we watched tears roll down her mother's face. we were too late, just minutes, but we were there for a reason. we had to keep going. in 36 hours our volunteer

medical mission did what we were asked to do and evacuated 36,000 997 people against the people and six days later, the measles just stopped spreading, children stopped dying and we got back on that plane and flew home to hawaii exhausted but filled with the sense of aloha and then the people told me they will never forget what the people of hawaii, our nurses, doctors and patrons did. so a round of applause for you, hawaii, for stepping up like that. [applause] now why do i share that story? because in that moment, i realized there is absolutely no challenge that the people of hawaii can't meet when they pull together. just in a few days we can stand together and care for whole

other country. six weeks after we returned from samoa, a story appeared in the news from china and italy and around the world, there was a new virus that had been detected in humans. we had no immunity to it and it was spreading fast. this virus would become known as covid-19 and it was so new no one would predict how serious. past coronaviruses had been stalled weeks or months. this didn't. covid would spread to every corner of the earth including hawaii. our health experts told us about action, as many as 10,000 of our people would pass away, they would die in hawaii. but again, because of our values, because we weren't going to let it happen and we could

pull together and put up a good fight and that fight saved lives. we masked up and when vaccinations became available, we set up clinics and because of the the department of health and so many champions, we vaccinated a higher percentage of people than in the whole world. that one's worth it.

on that hall, near death twice from covid and had been on the ventilator, but this was uplifting because her daughter was coming off of that for good and was going to live and began to weep with exhaustion and her gratitude came out and embraced the nurses knowing that heavy had stepped up. but 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 and needing the breathing assistance in all of our hospitals. she didn't know hunsz of nurses and doctors were sick. we were running out of health care workers and oxygen. but once again, we pulled together. the health care association one

of our dearest -- hilton, where are you? [applause] i'm honored to continue to work our team and race new sources of oxygen. our team approved hundreds of traveling nurses to come here and fema. these commitments and refusal to commit and hawaii had the lowest fatality rate of covid in the entire country. [applause] this important device, i share

this, none of this is achieved without incredible sacrifice. small businesses suffered. our economy slowed. we did everything we could, everything we could to support our people with safe travels programs and responsible guidelines. it was difficult. our teachers returned to work. in our correctional facilities, prison workers battled outbreaks that couldn't easily be prevented as most of our vulnerable people weren't vaccinated. hotel employees, police, firefighters, front-line workers worked to stop the spread of the shiers and all across our state, people did their best to keep us going and living their lives and staying safe. they went to work and protected our neighbors when we could, in the end because of how we all are as we come together as one

family with aloha and common purpose, far away from the painland, hawaii led in almost every measure of success during this pandemic. safest place in america. we were -- [speaking hawaiian] [applause] where do we go from here, how can hawaii meet its greatest challenges when other states are struggling to talk to one other. heme less is surging, inflation, housing prices threatens the way of life and climate change looms over us and our entire planet in the form of fires and the west, superstorms. and hawaii is not immune. but unlike others, we have proven we can come together and

face big challenges and saw homelessness and the suffering it causes, we built these communities to provide shelter and care. we need to build more. and i will do that with all the mayors across the state. and now we need to come together to build affordable housing for all of our people and why so many children are leaving the state of hawaii. as governor, i will unite us. built thousands of new homes for hawaii's families. with will and determination, we will do another thing and turns the illegal airbnb's so thousands can afford to live in our communities. [applause] another critical thing we'll do is empower the department of hawaiian homeland that the money

that has come from the legislature is to bring peace in healing and house the thousands of families on the waiting list. this is a priority for jamie and i. [applause] so together we stopped an epidemic of measles in samoa and now we are addressing the health care disparities that exist. hawaiians die eight years sooner because of the disparities that exist. we have to end this and make this a charge for our future. [applause] how do you do that? use scholarships to pay down the loans that nurses and doctors have so they can live in hawaii and provide the care to those who need it the most. [applause] we dealt with the worst global

pandemic in a century better than anyone else but there is epidemic of poverty and injustice. with the legislature's help, i would like to end and lee name ate the tax on food and medication. i will ask my colleagues to do that. [applause] the reason i ask for that consideration is that because the poorest families are hit the worst and those who are struggling really can't afford that tax. and in partnership with the judiciary and i'm so happy to be here with a dear friend, with the judiciary leaders and our legal community, we will find a way to restore justice who lost their way but do not deserve to be lost forever. thank you for being here, steve. we know you are a champion with

us. [applause] so finally as i begin to close, we have to all come together, friends, we have to address the greatest challenge of this century and that is climate change. hawaii will lead on climate change. [applause] justice wilson knows i'm thinking about him. and we'll take our commitment from each and every one of us to make a difference. we can our ambitious goals that have been fought by each of all of these governors and by aggressively approving a range of renewable energy products in our state. we can do it. the challenges facing our country and entire planet in the 21st century and set an

example. we can set an example because people love hawaii and they will say we are taking action on housing, homelessness and poverty, but it will only happen, only happenful we come together and commit ourselves to putting our values of aloha into practice and making them a reality for everyone in the state of hawaii. let us find this moment, find this moment, address it like a new beginning for our state. i am so honored to serve as your governor. i will be here for you day in and day out. we are family, aloha. i love you, guys. [cheers and applause] >> ladies and gentlemen, governor of the state of hawaii, josh green.

[cheers and applause]

market. this is 45 minutes. >> a welcome first of i would to thank everybody appeared to thank the