From the corporate to the Catholic world

Lisa Sakamoto has spent a decade overseeing the financial management of the Diocese of Honolulu

By Anna Weaver
Hawaii Catholic Herald

When Lisa Sakamoto attended her first Diocesan Fiscal Management Conference on the mainland after her 2009 hiring to lead the Diocese of Honolulu’s finance office, she kept being asked by fellow conference attendees where her boss was.

“I said, ‘You mean like the bishop?” Sakamoto said laughing.

“Oh, you’re CFO!?” it dawned on the questioners.

Sakamoto is the first woman to oversee the financial management of the Catholic Church in Hawaii and does report directly to the bishop. And a decade later, DFMC has a more diverse membership with more women diocesan chief financial officers members.

Sakamoto is highly qualified for her role as diocesan finance officer, directing and reorganizing the diocese’s finances during challenging times.

Before she joined the diocese, Sakamoto was the vice president of finance for Catholic Charities Hawaii. And her training and background is in the for-profit world.

Breadth of experience

Sakamoto, 59, comes across as confident, collegial and candid with a warm laugh and rapid conversational pace.

“I don’t have the personality of an accountant,” she says of what you might think a typical accountant would be like. “Very quiet, very introspective, very orderly, very structured. I am none of the above.”

“But in public accounting, you actually have to have a pretty good skill of relationships because you’re developing relationships with clients and things like that. So you get the technical skill but you also have to have the people skills.”

She has an accounting degree from the University of Hawaii and an MBA in finance from New York University. Her first jobs were with Coopers & Lybrand, the predecessor to PricewaterhouseCoopers, where she met her husband, Keith, and Prudential Capital Group.

After Keith accepted a job back in Hawaii, the couple moved home. She worked as a corporate planner for Hawaiian Electric Industries before spending the next 15 years as the vice president of finance at its former subsidiary, Hawaiian Tug & Barge/Young Brothers.

Sakamoto is also a lifelong Catholic and so brings a depth of knowledge and faith to the finance office.

Her Hawaii-born father, Thomas Kunimune, became Catholic while attending Maryknoll School. He met his wife, Yukiko, while serving in the Air Force in Japan. Lisa was born in Denver while Thomas was earning an accounting degree, and the family lived briefly in California before several years spent back in Japan. When the Kunimunes moved back to Hawaii, 5-year-old Lisa spoke only Japanese.

Growing up, Sakamoto and her sister watched their devout Catholic father attend daily Mass and read the Bible in the morning and at night.

Sakamoto says she’s also a “parochial brat,” having gone to St. Ann in Kaneohe from kindergarten through seventh grade, Star of the Sea School for eighth grade and Maryknoll High School.

When Lisa and her sister, Cheryl, got married, Thomas Kunimune told his non-Catholic future sons-in-law that if they wanted to marry his daughters they had to have a Catholic wedding Mass and raise their future children in the faith.

Over the years he also encouraged various family members to become Catholic and baptize their children. Sakamoto’s own mother became Catholic in her mid-60s.

For her part, Lisa supported her Buddhist-raised husband, Keith, in his decision to become Catholic. They both raised their sons, Jeffrey, 27, and John, 24, in the faith as well. Lisa, in particular, was encouraging with her kids about being regular Massgoers.

“And with the boys, I would maybe use a stronger word than ‘encouraging’ [for Lisa’s influence] to really get them to attend church but also understand what Catholicism and Christianity means and what it can mean in their lives to make a difference,” Keith said.

“And I know she constantly strives to do God’s will.”

The Sakamotos are parishioners at Mary, Star of the Sea Parish in Waialae-Kahala where she leads children’s liturgy of the word and he is a lector.

Beamed up to the mothership

It was discernment that led Lisa to switch from the corporate to the Catholic world.

An ownership change at Young Brothers made Sakamoto start looking at switching her job. When Keith pointed out a newspaper article mentioning an opening for Catholic Charities Hawaii’s vice president of finance, Sakamoto decided to apply. She was hired.

“Whether you call it a calling or what, maybe it was meant to be,” she said of her switch from the corporate to the Catholic world.

“I know that she’s so grateful that she did make that decision,” said her husband, Keith. “It’s been incredibly beneficial to her life.”

She stayed at Catholic Charities for about four years before the then-vicar general Father Marc Alexander asked her to apply to the diocesan finance officer position.

“It’s the mothership!” Sakamoto said. “How can you tell the bishop no?”

At the time she came aboard in 2009, Lisa was challenged with the task of updating diocesan, parish and school financial accountability and record-keeping.

But she has never been afraid of a challenge. While Sakamoto originally intended to go into fashion merchandising in college — she grew up around the family fabric business, Kuni Dry Goods — she went into finance after failing her first accounting class at UH.

“I was determined to not fail, and then I got hooked,” she said with a chuckle.

That can-do attitude has served Sakamoto well at the diocese where she’s stretching much smaller budgets than those she worked with in the corporate world. And working for the church has taught her to be more patient, compassionate and empathetic, she said.

In her role as diocesan finance officer, Sakamoto does everything from advising the bishop on managing financial assets to orienting a newly ordained priest on handling his personal salary.

“When I walked in here, my commitment to Bishop was that we would get him accurate, complete, timely financials so he could make good decisions for the benefit of the church,” Sakamoto said.

“[Our role] is making sure that he can do the things that he is meant to do without having to worry about the administrative aspects of his organization.”

Long-term vision

Sakamoto is in the middle of a six-year plan for organizing and unifying parish financial reports. A constant goal is to make sure the diocese is fiscally strong and solvent.

Her management of the diocese’s finances has coincided with an extended period of lawsuits against the local church related to clerical sexual abuse cases. The state has opened and then twice extended the statute of limitations for filing claims of child sexual assault in Hawaii.

Despite the challenges of the job, Sakamoto says she especially loves working with the people at the diocese. She says there is a lot of camaraderie and trust between her department members.

Among them is Marlene De Costa, the diocese’s real estate director, who was hired around the same time as Sakamoto in a part-time role Lisa requested be created instead of having her own administrative assistant.

De Costa recalls that shortly after Sakamoto started with the diocese she managed to quickly turn around an overdue audit report. De Costa appreciates Sakamoto’s collaborative approach.

“What I like about how she functions is that there is a long-range goal with a number of shorter-term objectives and then tactics to make them come to be,” De Costa said. “She lets those of us who are responsible for a portion of it conduct ourselves separately and report back.”

“Lucky for us she has a breadth and contacts that go beyond the church because sometimes we can be very insular,” DeCosta said. “And that helps us when we’re trying to deal with the outside world.”

Her husband, Keith, describes Lisa as a dedicated worker who often brings work home with her and also juggles her role as a caregiver for her two elderly parents.

“I don’t know where she finds the energy,” he said. “She juggles and balances a lot.”

Sakamoto still has ties to Catholic Charities Hawaii as a member of its corporation. Outside of her Catholic-centric work, Sakamoto serves on the boards of HMSA, Iolani School, the Boy Scouts of America Aloha Council and Kahala Nui retirement community.

“She enjoys cultivating relationships. She’s a natural at that,” Keith Sakamoto said. “She’s very passionate about the causes that she believes in.”

“There is much in the news these days about women taking leadership positions in the Church,” Bishop Larry Silva said in an email. “Here in the Diocese of Honolulu, we are blessed to have a woman as our Diocesan Finance Officer.”

He pointed out that the role also means Sakamoto is a member of the Bishop’s Administrative Advisory Council, sometimes referred to as “the bishop’s cabinet.”

For her part, Sakamoto says that Bishop Silva is one of the best leaders she’s worked with in her career. “His greatest gift to me is that he listens and he gives you a lot of leeway, but he’s very decisive,” she said.