The RISE Center Provides Local Resources for UH Students
The new center at UH Mānoa connects student entrepreneurs with the local business community.
A year ago, the six-story dorm that sprang up around the pink Charles Atherton House on University Avenue opened its doors as a live-work space designed to foster student entrepreneurship. Now, the entire complex at UH Mānoa—known as the Walter Dods Jr. RISE Center—is complete, including Atherton House renovations.
RISE, which stands for Residences for Innovative Student Entrepreneurs, facilitates connections between student entrepreneurs and the local business community through a partnership with PACE, or the Pacific Asian Center for Entrepreneurship at the Shidler College of Business. Executive director Sandra Fujiyama says PACE offers more than 15 programs to students. “We more than doubled our impact in this first year,” she says, with residents of RISE representing every college and school at UH Mānoa. “Having students activate the space was a key part in making sure RISE was a welcoming space.”
One of those students, Hōkūmālie Serna, is a PACE Leader who hosts classroom presentations, mixers and events to spread the word about the organization’s leadership program. “It’s inspiring to see young students get really inspired by what we do at PACE and for them to be encouraged to use our resources for free,” she says. “We don’t want people to think PACE is just for business students; it’s for everybody.”
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Ann Tai Choe, a former PACE student with a doctorate in applied linguistics, continues to take advantage of RISE’s resources to work on a language learning app she and her partners conceptualized in 2022. She goes to RISE almost every week seeking business and legal advice from resident experts and advisers, while also mentoring students. “My business partners and I came from a research background in academia,” she says, and so she enjoys networking with other passionate entrepreneurs.
Students don’t need to live in the building to utilize more than 10,000 square feet of innovation space—coworking areas, makerspaces, recording studios, classrooms—but Dani Pasion chose to do just that, both for convenience and to experience the kind of college life she missed while taking online classes during the pandemic. “Living at home, it was hard to be involved and fully immersed in the experience of being in college. Being at RISE completely changed that for me,” she says. “It felt like I was given back the two years that I missed … because I was able to be present on campus and so immersed in everything that was happening at RISE.”
