Paul Gracie, PhD
Past President
I was born and raised in Los Angeles, and after high school, I moved to Minnesota for college. I did a bachelor’s degree in classical Japanese at the University of Minnesota, which included one year living in Kyoto. I then moved to Honolulu in the spring of 1978 for work and later that year I met Keo Sananikone, now my husband of 43 years.
Until my retirement in 2019, I worked for several of the Sananikone family businesses, including, until 2014, its restaurants.
In my time outside of work, I did a master’s degree and a PhD in linguistics at UH Manoa, including a year doing fieldwork in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. While at home in the islands, I did nonprofit work for the American Friends Service Committee, (https://www.afsc.org) a Quaker social justice organization.
From the late 1990s to early 2000s I was ‘clerk’, the Quaker equivalent of board president, for the Hawaii AFSC program.
Around the same time, I was one of early members of the Interfaith Open Table, which became The Interfaith Alliance Hawaii.
A few years after that, I was one of five founding members of Equality Hawaii, (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equality_Hawaii) an organization advocating first for LGBT civil unions and then for full marriage equality.
On the home front, Keo and I became the fathers of twins, a boy and a girl, in 2002. Our family deepened its ties with the Honolulu Jewish community when our children entered our local Reform synagogue’s preschool in 2004. The twins left Hawai’i for college in the fall of 2020.
I’ve served on the board of directors for the O’ahu Jewish Ohana since 2016. (https://oahujewishohana.org) In 2020, I was elected as OJO’s vice president.
Earlier this year, I was elected the president of The Interfaith Alliance Hawaii.