PlanetPuna.com is about to strike again.

The non-profit, Puna-based website--or, more appropriately, the people behind it--are organizing a third seasonal music festival in Pahoa. "Planet Puna Presents Pahoa's 1st Annual Winter Aloha Concert," as the event is officially called, will run from noon until 8 p.m. on January 27 at the Pahoa Neighborhood Aquatic Center, and will feature Braddah Kuz, Wiwoole, Randy Mattos and Landslide, Epe, and the choir of the Pahoa Assembly of God, among other performers. Those "other performers" will likely include a number of anonymous dolphins and whales, whose recorded voices will become part of an original musical composition by Maui composer Nixy.

The concert is free, and all of the performers are working for free-- "their gift to the community," as concert organizer Paradise Newland puts it. "Partly they like to play these concerts with us because they like to play together," she says. "Five bands of this caliber playing together is a knockout event."

"It's nice to meet other people, to talk, to find some people that do the same things I do," agrees Randy Mattos, who also played for the last Pahoa concert that Newland organized. But he's playing for other reasons as well. One is simply community-spiritedness. "The guys I play with, they play in other bands all the time," he says. "They make good money. It's nice to give back."

But Mattos also gives another reason: the organizer. "She's a sweetheart, you know," says Mattos. "I did a lot of things for her, and I always will. I know she's not out to make money. She's doing it for the people. And she does a pretty good job, too...."

Newland, the co-founder of the Planet Puna and the non-profit Sirius Institute, who once made a good income as a Vancouver television producer, doesn't like to use the word "no" or its derivatives. But she would probably refer to her own role in the concert as "zero profit." In fact, Newland lives below the poverty line these days. A tireless community activist, she spent most of a bequest from her uncle to organize an area home schooling support program, and has paid for some of the expenses of the concerts she's organized out of her own pocket. For a concert like this, she says, "A reasonable budget is like $2,400. She hopes to get some donations to cover expenses. But she notes, "It still goes on, whatever happens and whatever comes in. I still owe the sound man money from the last time."

She adds that the same sound man, however, happily signed on to do the new concert.

A dolphin-human collaborative piece may seem a bit out of the mainstream elsewhere, but only fitting for both a Pahoa music festival and for Newland, an unabashedly New Agish disciple of pioneering dolphin language researcher John C. Lilly. With neurobiologist Michael T. Hyson and others, she co-founded the Sirius Institute, a research group devoted to promoting "the dolphinization of humans and the humanization of space." At one point, she says, "I was producing documentaries on underwater birthing with dolphins, interspecies communication with humans, dolphins and whales, and [on] the flotation experience...."

When she tried to apply some of what she was filming to her own life, however, it led to the most traumatizing experience of her life--and propelled her into her current community activism.

Newland elected to give birth to her second child, Kehena, on Kehena Beach. An experienced delivery room nurse was present, and the birth was successful. "He was quite fine at the time," recalls Newland.

Then the state's Child Protective Services Agency heard about the birth on the beach.

"When he was four days old, the state social worker came with armed police," Newland said.

Kehena was taken from her, she says, without a spare blanket. He developed physical complications while in state custody and had to be med-evacuated to a hospital on Oahu.

The state eventually withdrew its charges and returned her son, she says, after a state expert testified that, while the oceanside birth may have been unconventional, "if the child had been left alone, he'd have been fine."

But the battle devastated her family. Kehena's father left for the mainland, taking Kehena with him. Newland stayed in Hawaii with her older son, Tiger. But the experience, she says, was "a life changing event. And part of the reason I got involved with the community was to help me deal with the grief."

Almost all of her community activities involve several common themes: networking, sharing of resources, and creativity. Camp Paradise, the home schooling program, for example, sets up "pod homes" that serve as resource and activity centers to "create grounded, loving and creative children." As an adjunct to that program, Newland decided to create a website that would serve as a center for learning resources. The result, managed by Hyson as webmaster, grew into Planet Puna, a cyber-meeting-place where Puna residents can network to share resources or to display what they've accomplished to the world: "the original coconut cyberdomain," Newland calls it.

"We might have three or four people [needed] in combination to bring a product to completion," she explains. "Someone can do the art for a CD cover. Someone else can work on the sound, the mix for the CD and burn it. Someone else can do the website. We bring people together to create their gifts and to put them out--either to each other locally, or to the World-Wide Web.

The concerts serve a similar function: creating a community gathering place, instilling community pride, and displaying creative accomplishments.

"This is a showcase for groups in the area," Newland says. "We're available to give them the audience.

Such showcases are important, especially for someone like Mattos. A veteran of twenty years as a night club musician, he quit to spend more time with his children. Now he's on the comeback trail.

"I started playing again, and I said, hey, I still got it. I think maybe I got it in me for one last try," he says. The Pahoa concerts, he says are "good PR," both because his band gets to be heard and because the community remembers the gift.

"I know there's a god up above," he says. "You do something good, it always comes back.

But it's also good PR for the community. After listening a CD cut from a previous concert, Newland says, "It was just like, wow, these people really put out for us. It was so touching, and the people could feel that. This is what we want. We want them to feel the aloha.

For Newland, the aloha is the greatest gift. "In my former life, I had everything I could want," she remembers. "But I hardly knew my neighbors 20 feet away from me. What did I know of aloha? I had American Express.

"Now," she adds, "I have aloha."

Author’s Note: The above headline, and all Kama`aina Shopper headlines, were written by an editor at the Hawaii Tribune Herald, and not by the author.