The 23rd annual Executive Vineyards event raised a record $65,000 for the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa Shidler College of Business. Held at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel on March 9, a sold-out event of more than 600 guests enjoyed an evening of networking, sampling delicious items from local restaurants and tasting a variety of wines and spirits with the iconic Diamond Head and Waikīkī Beach in the backdrop.

More than 100 alumni gathered on February 5 at Aloha Beer Company, founded by Shidler alumnus Steve Sombrero, MBA ‘94, for the inaugural Asian Field Study Reunion, sponsored by the Asian Field Study Association. The evening was packed with catching up with old friends, sharing stories, enjoying music and delicious food and drinks. Asian Field Study directors K.K. Seo, Jack Suyderhoud and Ben Bystrom relived the program's history and some lucky guests won fabulous prizes from the raffle.

The University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa’s School of Travel Industry Management (TIM) in the Shidler College of Business received a $500,000 gift from the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation to support students who enrolled from Hawaiʻi high schools. The gift establishes a new scholarship that will assist juniors and seniors who demonstrate financial need and leadership abilities, with a preference for students of Native Hawaiian ancestry.

When Courtney Ro, BBA ‘12, was a student at Shidler studying management and accounting, she was busy preparing herself for her post-college path, which would include her first job out of college at Ernst and Young and then running her own bookkeeping business in 2017. She couldn’t have imagined it at the time, but the flexibility of setting her own schedule would allow her to help her husband, Zachary Villanueva, also a UH Mānoa alumnus (BA ‘15), sell handcrafted (?) ice cream while he was still working a full-time job. Now the pair operate Sage Creamery, scooping out flavors like strawberry fields, kiawe honey lavender and haulolo.

When Maura Mizuguchi, BBA ‘83, made the decision to earn her accounting degree after thumbing through the help wanted ads in the newspaper, she never looked back. She worked diligently at earning high grades and being involved in extracurricular activities to earn a position at PricewaterhouseCoopers. She successfully landed at the firm and eventually moved to the mainland. Since then, she’s worked at several Fortune 100 companies and is now the chief accounting officer of Cetera Financial Group.

Eva Kam, BBA ‘99, spent her childhood watching her father, Kwock Yum “Johnson” Kam open and grow the first L&L Hawaiian Drive-Inn on Liliha Street in 1976 with “Aunty Margaret,” the mother of his future business partner, Eddie Flores, Jr., BBA ‘70. She recalls that her father recruited friends, family, employees and customers to help grow the business and expand to seven locations over 10 years. On a 1991 family trip with Flores, the idea of franchising the company came up and the partners began. In the 1990s, Johnson Kam started to recruit employees to work in locations on the neighbor islands and in 1999, the first mainland location was opened as L&L Hawaiian Barbecue in Cerritos, California.