About this Event
For those who are turning in a proposal. Please wait to buy your tickets until you've heard from the committee whether your proposal/workshop/poster is approved or not. Approved presenters (along with co-presenters) will be offered a discounted admission fee. We are still accepting proposals until Friday October 30, 2026 11:59PM Hawaii Standard Time. Turn in your proposals here: https://tinyurl.com/DoFAProposals2027
Welcome to the DoFA 2027 Conference!
In Tagalog, mana means inheritance. What's left to you, what gets passed down whether you asked for it or not. But what you inherit isn't always something you can hold in your hands. Sometimes it's language, land, a name. Sometimes it's harder to name than that, an energy, a spirit, a strength you can't point to but feel moving through you anyway, carried in your body long before you had words for it. It's fitting, then, that mana carries a similar weight in Hawaiian, a spiritual force present in people and place, as if the word itself knew we'd end up gathering here. And what we inherit isn't always good. Sometimes it's silence. Sometimes it's a wound, a weight someone handed us without ever meaning to. Mamana is the act of receiving all of it, the light and the heavy, and figuring out what we do next.
This conference is about what gets passed down: language, food, values, wounds, and what we choose to do with it. Some of us are trying to hand our culture to kids who'd rather eat ramen than sinigang. Some of us found our way back to it on our own, in college, in our thirties, on an ordinary workday when we suddenly heard our own language and felt something in us stand up and answer. Some of us are carrying histories no one in our family has ever said out loud: relatives split apart by land, money and shame, migrations that cost more than anyone ever admitted. And sometimes mana shows up in the smallest moments, like catching yourself holding your breath for a Filipino athlete you've never met, because when one of us is seen, all of us feel it.
Mana at Mamana holds space for all of it: the grounding and the grief, what we keep and what we finally put down, what we build new because no one built it for us.
For the first time, we're gathering outside of California, in Hawaii, a place that holds its own piece of our history: on plantations, on boats, in a place that became home to so many of our families who left the Philippines. Meeting here, together, for the first time, is its own kind of mana.
Who is this conference for?
-Mental Health Students, Trainees, and Professionals
-Academics, Researchers, and Professors
-Activists and Community Organizers
-Anyone who is interested in understanding how to provide better mental health services to the Filipino American Community & Diaspora
What does this ticket include:
-general admission to the conference
-vendor areas
-presentations/workshops/poster sessions
-keynote speakers.
This ticket DOESN'T INCLUDE:
-meals
-alcoholic beverages, drinks, coffee
-flight and hotel expenses
-admission to the Banquet (there will be a separate registration for this; TBA)
-parking fees
Event venue & nearby stays
Ala Moana Honolulu by Mantra, 410 Atkinson Drive, Honolulu, United States
Concerts, fests, parties, meetups — all the happenings, one place.