The Hawai'i Heritage Center is marking 25 years of celebrating the Islands' cultural blending.

"What we're here for is to preserve the history and heritage of the various groups that have come to Hawai'i," said Karen Motosue, vice president of the heritage center board and one of its founding members.

As the center's board members prepare for anniversary festivities set for tomorrow, they are also gearing up for a $4 million fundraising effort for a new complex. The center maintains operations without government funding, although it does receive grants for special projects.

"Basically, the board members and others do all the work," Motosue said of the all-volunteer staff that operates the center's 2,000-square-foot exhibit area in the Dan Liu Building, 1040 Smith Street, which it rents from the city.

A colorful hodgepodge of exhibits greets visitors. Dominating one side of the area's main hall is a turn-of-the-century four-poster bed that once belonged to the family of Anin Young, founder of Chinatown's Oahu Market.

One display features fragments of dishes, pipes, medicine bottles and other artifacts dug up in the Chinatown area as the region was redeveloped. The city gave the center an estimated 100,000 pieces in all, Motosue said.

Nearby are exhibits about various ethnic groups that have streamed through Chinatown over the years, including the Filipinos, Puerto Ricans, Portuguese and Jewish communities. The center has also displayed exhibits highlighting Hawaiians, Greeks, Koreans, Irish, Japanese, Germans, Samoans, Scots and others. Nearly all exhibits travel to the Neighbor Islands. Some have traveled as far away as San Francisco and Puerto Rico.

"Most of the groups who work with us, they want to be known for their own cultural traditions, their own history, their own heritage in Hawai'i which they see as separate and distinct from everyone else," Motosue said. "Of course, once these exhibits go up, whether it's the Greeks, or Puerto Ricans, or Filipinos, what you see is a lot of commonality."

One of the most pervasive themes among the groups is economic struggle.

"A lot of us, our grandparents went through a lot of poverty, a lot of struggle, a lot of working two jobs, a lot of sacrifice," she said. "You see that really throughout almost all of the ethnic groups. What they're doing is working hard for the next generations.

"So we don't want today's generation to forget what they went through because we didn't get here by ourselves. All of us got here because of our parents or grandparents."

Motosue noted that since many of the groups putting together exhibits lack federal nonprofit and tax exempt status, the center sometimes deals with their finances. Also, because of space constraints, the center now shows less than 5 percent of its collection at any given time.

The center has gradually become a repository of everyday items that might otherwise end up in the trash — everything from the old Chinatown business signs to the Kwangchow Society's portraits, meeting minutes and other records. The society elected to disband this year.

"What has happened is as people are seeing us do these exhibits, they are saying, 'Hey, can you care for our stuff?' " Motosue said. The center's volunteers have a difficult time refusing. "If they throw it away, the current and future generations have nothing to look back to. We don't want to see that raw material disappear or be thrown away."

The center is also home to a large collection of old newspapers dating to the 19th century. Motosue said the center wants to digitize them for a research library, which would cost about $100,000 to assemble.

The center's board members want to construct a four-story building on a site two blocks from its current Smith Street site. Directly across from the Smith-Beretania Park, the land was purchased with the help of five donors in 1989 for $1.25 million. Motosue said the new building is expected to provide about 8,000 square feet of exhibit and research space — double the current space.

In addition to collecting and displaying historical exhibits, the center organizes workshops on cultural traditions, produces oral history video projects and continues to offer its long-established Chinatown walking tours.

Former City Councilman John Henry Felix, one of the center's first board members, recalls being asked to serve on the board in the early 1980s.

"It was becoming very evident that there was a lack of attention being paid to the preservation of Hawai'i's heritage, which includes all the ethnic groups," he said.

The heritage center helped to fill that void, he said, praising those early board members and volunteers for keeping the organization together while struggling to get by with little money. Besides Motosue and Felix, the other founders were the late Larry F.C. Ching, its longtime president, and Agnes Conrad. Each contributed $1,000 to help start up the center.

"The perseverance and hard work paid off," Felix said. "It continues to do good work preserving Hawai'i's heritage."

Reach Gordon Y.K. Pang at gpang@honoluluadvertiser.com.