Our team was cultivated in December 8, 2023 when four community members met at the Build4Good AI Hackathon hosted by Purple Maiʻa, and we gathered together around a shared value of wanting to increase pilina with native plants. Within 48 hours, we created and printed our first deck of plant-mon playing cards! We’ve been playing board games and learning about plants together ever since.

‘AinaQuest is our solution to plant blindness. We help people (re)develop their pilina with the natural world through our educational card game and provide a fun way to learn about native plants and share stories of plants. We hope our game will nurture the next generation of locally grown Hawaiian botanists and ecologists and provide a pathway towards ʻāina-based stewardship.