If poverty is an island, Rachel Solemsaas said she wants to be captain of the boat sailing over to help.
Over the years, Solemsaas has voyaged aboard multiple boats — all with similar missions of eradicating poverty. On Friday, when Solemsaas assumes her new role as Hawaii Community College’s chancellor, she hopes it will be her most-streamlined vessel yet.
“It’s not the career, that’s not the island for me,” Solemsaas said during an interview Tuesday in her soon-to-be new office at HawCC. “For me, the island is getting as many children out of poverty as possible — creating an island with no poverty. Being chancellor, as a boat, provides several more opportunities to help children and students in poverty.”
Solemsaas, 50, is replacing interim chancellor Joni Onishi. The college’s previous chancellor retired in 2015. Solemsaas comes from a job as vice president for finance and administrative services at Truckee Meadows Community College in Nevada.
Prior to that, she worked in multiple finance positions in the Seattle area and as an administrator at two Washington state community colleges.
But from early on, she said she’s had a passion for helping people in poverty. She’s originally from a suburb of Manila in the Philippines. In her youth, she remembers passing by squatters. Instead of shying away, she said she was intrigued.
“I always leaned toward them and wanted to get to know them,” she said.
Solemsaas immigrated with her family to the United States at age 20. She said her first role in community college administration years ago left her impressed with the system and its ability to educate low-income students.
She’s worked at community colleges since. Eventually, she earned a doctorate in higher education with emphasis on community college leadership, where she researched topics including financial barriers among foster youth in accessing community college education.
“Poverty is really a billion dollar industry, because we can’t do it right — we can’t get the prevention side,” she said. “And what’s the prevention? It’s education. If there’s anything sustainable to get people out of poverty, it’s education. And community college is the door, it’s the door to all these opportunities.”
Solemsaas said she also wants to push for programs and offerings at HawCC that lead to “sustainable, living wage” jobs for students in poverty.
Statistics show Hawaii County has among the highest number of low-income residents in the state. At a meeting in April designed for students in the UH system to weigh in on a proposed tuition plan, many HawCC students spoke of working multiple jobs and having difficulty making ends meet.
“There’s a lot of working students trying to balance family and jobs and going to school full time,” Solemsaas said. “We ought to really help them succeed … . Gone are the days where we can just get them into the door, get them to college and then turn around … and watch them be indebted and not have a degree at the end of it.”
Solemsaas is president of the National Asian Pacific Islander Council, an affiliate council of the American Association of Community Colleges. As president, she said she works to raise awareness about the challenges Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders face.
She said she wants to continue helping those students at HawCC, along with Native Hawaiian students, complete their education and successfully enter the workforce.
“At Hawaii Community College we’ve achieved the goal of getting Native Hawaiians more into college, but we have not done a good job of having them complete and succeed,” she said. “And that’s a nice challenge to be able to pursue.”