Hawai‘i’s Got Pride 2024: Spotlight on Elena Cabatu
Hilo Medical Center’s director of marketing, legislative and public affairs advocates for women, girls and the LGBTQ+ community.
Growing up in Hilo, Elena Cabatu was quite the athlete, winning a scholarship to Hawai‘i Preparatory Academy in Waimea on Hawai‘i Island. While some of her dad’s buddies still focus on her athletic accomplishments, she jokes, “I’ve done some other stuff since then!”
Has she ever.
Cabatu played Division I soccer at Georgetown, where she majored in English and literature. She earned a master’s degree with a health care focus from the Shidler College of Business.
Her first job was in Washington, D.C., where she worked on international women’s rights and family planning, and encouraged Congress to fund programs to support reproductive health globally. “It was a political football. I came to the realization I’d grown up kind of apolitical in Hawai‘i. Not anymore!”
She is the current chair of the Hawai‘i County Committee on the Status of Women, and advocacy chair for Zonta Club of Hilo, an organization that works on behalf of women and girls.
In 2006, she joined Hilo Medical Center, which will be renamed Hilo Benioff Medical Center on July 1, 2024.
Cabatu says she loves coming to work every day, “getting to make a difference in Hilo and throughout the island. It feels like we are doing something remarkable. It’s barely a job. I call it service.”
In her off hours, Cabatu enjoys creative writing in pidgin, such as her play, “One Pretty Good Love Story,” and her one-woman show, “Mary Tunta to Da Rescue.”
The former is “a coming-of-age story of a young basketball player,” she says. “So many of us became part of the LGBTQ+ community. This was in the late 1980s and early 1990s. We are truly supportive of each other now, but I wonder what it would have been like if we talked openly about it back then.
“In the play, I wrote a line: ‘It almost felt like people could smell the gay on you.’ I felt that way because I was worried I couldn’t hide it and I was doing my best to. Many kids don’t have that level of anxiety any more about it and that’s great.”
Cabatu has a partner, who is a local therapist, and a 12-year-old daughter. “She’s a ballerina,” Cabatu says with a laugh. “I coached her basketball team for seven years and one day she said, ‘Let’s be honest, this isn’t me.’ ”
She urges businesses to participate in events such as Pride. “I was at last year’s Pride parade, and it made me so happy to see all those businesses, all the allies, the churches, the kūpuna riding the trolleys holding signs of support. It was so beautiful.”
