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our story.
The moments, people, and choices that brought us here.
BEFORE WE BEGIN
I'm so glad you're here.
Take a breath and stay for a moment. Choosing to show up for yourself is no small thing. It matters. And I hope you can feel that here.
I’m Cerise, and this is the real story of how Mahalo came to be. Not the polished version, but the honest one. The one that begins, like most meaningful things do, with love, loss, and the questions that linger long after you’ve tried to make peace with them.
The idea for Mahalo began several years ago, when Joel and I realized that the ways we were eating, moving, thinking, and living no longer served us.
So we made a promise. Not just to ourselves, but to each other and to the future we wanted.
What started as a shift toward a plant-based way of eating became something much bigger: a more intentional way to live, love, and grow every day.
We have a big, loud, beautiful family. Seven kids. Four grandkids. A table that is never quite big enough and somehow always full.
They are the reason behind every choice we make when it comes to our health.
Not to look a certain way. Not to hit a number. But to be there — fully present, genuinely energized — for the dinners, the milestones, and the ordinary Tuesday evenings that turn out to matter most.
THE HARD PART
This is personal.
This is the part that doesn’t make it onto most About pages, but it’s the part that matters most.
Ten years ago, my brother died unexpectedly. He was 38. A brain hemorrhage. Sudden. Shattering. The kind of loss that changes the shape of a family forever.
He was here. And then he wasn’t.
My parents never fully recovered from that loss. I don’t think you ever really do. But in the years that followed, I watched something shift in them. They got quieter. They moved less. They kept going, but not quite with the same aliveness.
They saw doctors who gave them prescriptions — pills to manage this, pills to manage that — but nobody ever seemed to ask the bigger questions.
What does your life actually look like right now?
Who is in your corner?
Are you moving?
Do you have something to look forward to?
Nobody asked them that.
And I can’t help but wonder what might have been different if they’d had more community. More walks. More shared meals. More people to laugh with, grieve with, and keep going with. A place where health felt less like a solo project and more like something carried together.
I think things might have been different. I can’t know that. But I believe it.
And then came a season of my life I still don't quite know how to put into words.
I lost my grandpa.
He was, quite simply, my favorite human on this planet. The person I could count on to show up — for the big things, but mostly for all the ordinary ones. I think some part of me believed he always would.
A year later, I lost my dad.
A few months after that, my mom.
One by one, I lost my people.
And it wasn't only the big things I missed. It was the late-night phone call when you just need to hear your mom's voice. Calling Dad because something went wrong and you know he'll know how to fix it. Knowing there are people in this world you can call without thinking twice, simply because they're yours.
And then one day I realized something that still catches me sometimes:
I didn't have those people anymore.
I was those people.
I was the person my kids called when they needed to hear a familiar voice. When something broke. When life hurt. When they needed someone to tell them it was going to be okay.
Somewhere along the way, without realizing it, I had become the person standing where my parents and grandparents once stood for me.
That changes you.
It made me understand time differently. It made me pay attention to the people still sitting around the table. To the phone calls. The birthdays. The ordinary afternoons. The times someone stops by for no particular reason.
Because you don't always know you're living one of the good days while you're in it.
And then, while we were still finding our footing, Joel was diagnosed with cancer.
“We thought we were doing everything right. Eating well, moving every day, living with purpose. When Joel asked the oncologist what we could have done differently, he looked at us and said: ‘Nothing. You're doing everything right. It's just bad luck.’”
The answer that broke something in me, and rebuilt it too.
— Cerise
I’ve turned that sentence over in my hands a thousand times. On one hand, it was the kindest thing he could have told us. On the other, it felt so profoundly unfair that I didn’t know what to do with it.
What it taught me, what it still teaches me, is that Mahalo was never meant to be a guarantee.
Life doesn’t work that way.
What Mahalo is, what I believe it is with everything I have, is a way to meet life more fully. To show up with more steadiness. More support. More connection. To not spend your healthiest years alone, trying to figure it all out without people who understand why it matters.Joel is doing better now. We came through that year together. And I came out the other side more certain than ever that this work matters.
OUR NAME
A word that
feels like home
When it came time to name what we were building, we wanted a name that felt less like a brand and more like a feeling.
Mahalo
Hawaiian · Gratitude · Giving thanks · Abundance
It felt right from the moment we found it. Not just a beautiful word — but a set of values. A way of showing up for life. A nudge to slow down, breathe, and notice the good that's already here.
-Cerise
Life, even with all its chaos and curveballs, is full of small ordinary moments — the first sip of coffee in the morning, the hug from a friend you haven’t seen in too long, the smell of soup on the stove when someone you love is on their way home.
We wanted to build a community that felt like that.
Like a deep breath. Like a hand on your shoulder. Like someone saying, I see you, and I’m glad you’re here.
And that became Mahalo.
WHY WE BUILT MAHALO
We built this for others.
And for ourselves.
We have extraordinary people in our lives. Family and friends who carried us through every loss, every hard season, every place we couldn’t hold ourselves up alone.
And still, Joel and I are the only plant-based people in our circle. We don’t have people to call when we try a new recipe and want to talk about it. We don’t have friends who want to walk on Saturday mornings and talk about longevity research. We don’t have a potluck where everything on the table was made with intention.
So we built the thing we longed for.
Because most people need more than one community to sustain them. Not because the communities they already have aren’t enough, but because we are layered, and we need different things from different people.
Sometimes the thing we need most is people who are walking the same path.
That’s Mahalo. Built for the people who needed it. Including us.
MAYBE YOU'VE BEEN LOOKING FOR THIS TOO.
A place to learn.
A place to belong.
A place to keep becoming.
If so, we'd love to meet you.