🎓 Honoring Our 2026 PAAC Scholarship & Award Winners
Empowering the next generation of global leaders
Each year, PAAC recognizes outstanding students who exemplify our mission of global engagement, leadership, and service through two signature honors: the Paul S. Honda Scholarship for graduating seniors and the Eddie Tangen Award for leaders in grades 9-11.
These students aren't just learning about the world—they’re changing it. From building clubs and launching service projects to representing Hawaiʻi on global stages, their stories are a powerful reminder of what’s possible when young leaders are connected, supported, inspired, and heard.
🎓 2025 Paul S. Honda Scholarship Recipients
Founded by longtime PAAC supporter Paul S. Honda, this $1,000 scholarship recognizes graduating seniors who have grown as global thinkers through PAAC and are headed into higher education to keep going. This year's recipients are three students whose paths look different on paper but share the same quality: they didn't just participate. They paid attention.
Conner Birdsall has been working since he was 14 — not just at a job, but toward something. While holding down part-time work, completing 47 college credits before graduation, and serving as a Keiki Caucus intern with a sitting state representative, he was also doing something more personal: reconnecting with his Okinawan heritage, tracing his family's history and traditions as a way of finding his footing in a larger Pacific story. That inner work found its outward expression through PAAC. In March of 2025, Conner was part of the inaugural Sister-State Study Tour to Ilocos Norte and Ilocos Sur, where he learned about Hawaii’s long-standing relationship with the provinces. This trip built the foundation for the engaged, informed citizenship he's building his life around. He earned third place at Academic WorldQuest, organized a prom fundraiser so classmates who couldn't afford to attend still could, and is now preparing for the 2026 PAAC Summer Study Tour to Taiwan.
“Living through some of the most major conflicts and an increasing risk of the next World War, I see the importance of international peace... I still have so much hope for Hawaiʻi, the US, and the world — things will change, and it will soon be for the better.”
Conner will dual-major in Political Science and Asian Ethnic Studies at UH Mānoa — and he's already in discussions about launching PAAC's first college chapter.
Elizabeth "Ella" Balanza grew up going to Ala Moana beach for family outings, birthday parties, and afternoons in the ocean — and noticing, every time, the trash that had built up along the shore. That tension between a beloved place and its slow degradation became the lens through which she started seeing global issues: not abstract, but personal and close to home. She's been a leader in Chinagu Eisa Okinawan Taiko at Roosevelt since her sophomore year, a barista through most of high school, and a four-year PAAC member who rose to club president. The 2025 Vietnam Study Tour sharpened that instinct in a moment she didn't expect: visiting a family in Hội An who pointed to watermarks on the walls from the 2020 floods, then cooked a meal and told the story of how their community held together afterward. It's the kind of experience that doesn't translate into a résumé line — but it's exactly the kind that shapes what you decide to do with a platform. Her teacher describes her as someone who leads by showing up: responsible, consistent, and learning to balance school, work, and community all at once.
“I want to be able to voice concerns I wasn’t able to do before — my creations in the media will help push for a voice that needs to be said.”
Ella will study Communication Studies at Temple University Japan's Tokyo Campus — bringing her closer to the cultures that have shaped her in Hawaiʻi, and to the audiences she hopes to reach.
Most students join organizations. Shayna McElhannon builds them. She founded HTA's first student council, wrote her PAAC club's officer bylaws from scratch, and co-organized a statewide peer mediation conference for five schools — then emceed it. Her approach to leadership is structural: she doesn't just show up, she creates the conditions for others to show up too. That instinct extended to her animal welfare work, where she didn't just run a supply drive for the Hawaiian Humane Society — she looped in elementary schoolers, taught them to make animal toys, and organized a field trip so they could deliver the toys themselves. In August 2025, she stood at Pearl Harbor's "Lights for Peace" commemoration and spoke about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, drawing on the Peace Literacy Summer Institute she'd completed that summer to connect history to the work of empathy. The National WWII Museum in New Orleans selected her as Hawaiʻi's representative for the Billy Michal Student Leadership Award. She is the only student in Hawaiʻi named a National Honor Society national semifinalist scholar in 2026.
“I realized that consumers’ purchasing habits, economic conditions, and inequalities throughout the world influence why companies produce these types of garments... Solutions require action and accountability from all levels, governments, communities, and individuals, including myself.”
Shayna heads to Creighton University in Omaha to study Political Science or International Affairs on the pre-law track, carrying a 4.0 GPA earned under HTA's accelerated semester model and a clear-eyed sense of what she's building toward.
🏅 2025 Eddie Tangen Award Recipient
Honoring the legacy of Eddie Tangen — Hawaiʻi labor movement pioneer and former PAAC board member — this $300 award recognizes a rising leader in grades 9–11, nominated by the people around them. This year, that nomination came from eight of them.
Eight people nominated Thalia Grace Hoapili for this award. Independently, her fellow officers, club members, and PAAC Project Coordinator all said the same thing in different words: when the room doesn't know what to do next, Thalia figures it out. As Vice President of HTA's PAAC Club, she helped lead SDG lessons and Global Action Projects, attended the LEAD Summit, GVS, WorldQuest, and a Study Tour to Vietnam — and co-founded the school's student council. But her peers don't lead with her résumé. They lead with how she makes people feel.
“Thalia is always leading us in some way — if we’re all in one area and don’t know what to do, she directs the club.”
Thalia continues as a senior at HTA, where she’ll continue to leading her PAAC club to new heights.
These four students didn't arrive at PAAC already formed. They grew here — through summits and study tours, through service projects and late-night conference prep, through the slow work of learning to see the world more clearly and their place in it more boldly.
We're proud to honor them, and grateful to the advisors, nominators, and community members who saw them clearly enough to say: this one. This one is worth celebrating.
