Q. How did you get involved in MADD-Hawai'i?

A. I had moved to Hawai'i and was pursuing a master's degree in social work and I was looking for a job that was something different, that I would find interesting, so I applied at MADD for a court monitoring position. After about two months I fell in love with the job, I fell in love with the mission and the people that we work with. Shortly after I started I realized it was something that I wanted to do for a career instead of just a job.

Q. It started out as just another job, but MADD obviously affected you.

A. My thesis in the past was looking at services for children with special needs and that's kind of what my background is in. Once I started with MADD, I started to see the impact that impaired driving has on not just our state but nationwide and the impact that we have on the victims and the support that we can give them after losing a loved one in a crash. So it started to become a new passion and I actually switched my thesis for my master's degree to work on grief counseling after homicides so that I could partner with what we do here at the office when we work with victims.

Q. You've been at MADD for two years and rose really fast. How did you do that?

A. It was actually perfect timing. I was starting to look at where I was in my current job and looking at where I wanted to go once I got my degree because I knew that I wanted to do something more and be able to use what I learned in school in my career. It just happened that our executive director at the time was planning on moving back to Canada and so the position opened up and I thought this would be the most opportune time to use the skills that I learned as well as continue to work in an organization that I fell in love with. So it just happened coincidentally that it opened up so I just thought, "Hey, I'm going to go for it."

Q. Any surprises now that you're heading the agency?

A. It just makes you more aware of everything that has to go on in order to make a nonprofit organization run well and smoothly. There's so much more that goes on behind the scenes that people probably don't realize. You work with limited funding and you have to take that limited funding and try so hard to get out there and reach every possible person you can in the community because you quickly realize that impaired driving doesn't just affect one group of people. It can affect anyone and everyone in our state and nationwide because it doesn't matter who you are, you can be impacted by it, whether or not someone in your family has been the victim of impaired driving or someone you know is out there driving impaired.

Q. How involved are you in the fundraising?

A. It's between myself and one other person in the office. We do the majority of the fundraising, as well as we have a fund development committee on our council who really assists with finding new ways to look for funding in our community through corporate sponsorships and different events. It is a big part of my job.

Q. What is your budget?

A. Right now we have five staff members and we each run different programs in the organization and our budget for the upcoming year is just over $400,000. That includes programs such as working with the youth to prevent underage drinking, our victims services program, as well as court monitoring and community education.

Q. Any plans to increase the number of programs?

A. We would love to find some alternative forms of funding so that we could bring more programs in here and be able to do more outreach, especially with the youth and also more work with the victims on the Neighbor Islands.

Q. MADD is a recognized organization, but do you still need to keep its name out there?

A. People definitely know what MADD means and know what our mission is. But what we really strive now is to have people realize that MADD is not just mothers, that MADD includes anyone that's been affected by impaired driving. So that includes brothers and sisters and husbands and grandfathers. Everyone in the community that is concerned with impaired driving and wants to fight that are included in MADD. We call them "all our mothers."

Q. You are very young. Do you see that as an advantage or disadvantage?

A. There are always things that you're going to have to work up and build some of that reputation for yourself when you're younger. But I think it also helps because I'm coming from a different perspective maybe than some other people that I work with. I can bring in a new, fresh perspective. I'm also part of the age group where we're really trying to target impaired driving, which is the age group of the late 20s and early 30s. Being in that age group I can really bring some perspective into our planning and those sorts of things.

Q. Have you had to reach out to elected officials?

A. We have a public policy committee and they are working really hard on various legislation. We're looking at pushing either in the next legislative session or in 2009 some new public policy with ignition interlocking devices, which is the device that is installed in convicted drunk drivers' vehicles that they have to blow in before they start the vehicle. If there's any alcohol in their system then the car will not start. It's some really complex things so that's why we're kind of making sure that we're ready to bring it to the Legislature. That's something that we're looking for, using technology to fight impaired driving because now that we have this technology we want to be able to use it to our benefit and to the community's benefit.

Q. Any other challenges?

A. We try and reach everyone when we go out and do public speaking. But we still find that there's a group of people that we're just not reaching. I'm really trying to figure out ways that we can reach that group of people, as well as reaching out to the Neighbor Islands because right now our only office is on O'ahu and my concern is making sure we can get those needed resources out to all islands.

Q. Where do you see yourself in five, 10 years?

A. I would love to be with this organization because starting new in a position like this, where I'm trying to build certain things up and reach things in different ways, that I'd really like to be here for a while to really start setting up some of the things that I have in my head, all these ideas I have. It takes awhile to get some of those implemented and so I definitely see myself here for a long time.

Reach Curtis Lum at culum@honoluluadvertiser.com.