Former Congressman Neil Abercrombie says he played a major role in developing Healthy Start in Hawaii.

At a Kaiser Permanente-sponsored governor candidate forum at the Sheraton Waikiki last week, Abercrombie said: “I was instrumental in working with nonprofit groups across the state to get Healthy Start underway.”

Hawaii’s Healthy Start Program is a child abuse prevention project that began with one location on Oahu in 1985 and has since grown into a statewide program that has been replicated throughout the U.S., Canada and the Philippines.

Despite the popularity of the program, due to the national recession, Gov. Linda Lingle‘s administration severely cut funding for Healthy Start, from $15 million in 2008 to $1.3 million for fiscal year 2011. There are currently two Healthy Start’s left in the state, in East Hawaii and Leeward Oahu.

Abercrombie says that if he’s elected governor, he’ll “restore, refine and expand Healthy Start.” The question though, isn’t whether or not he plans to rebuild it – it’s whether he was instrumental in starting it.

The answer is clear: He was.

Civil Beat called Child and Family Service Hawaii, a private nonprofit that coordinates and manages over 30 programs on Oahu, including one of the two Healthy Start programs that is still funded by the state.

We spoke to the president and chief executive officer of Child and Family Service, Howard Garval, who validated Abercrombie’s role.

“There was a legislator in addition to Neil Abercrombie who, along with Neil, spearheaded the initial funding for Healthy Start,” Garval says. The legislator he was referring to was former Sen. Mamoru Yamasaki, who introduced legislation in 1984 for the initial pilot program of Healthy Start in Ewa Beach. However, the roots of Healthy Start came long before Yamasaki or Abercrombie became more involved with the project.

In 1968, Hawaii Revised Statute 350, established definitions of child abuse and in 1974, the first federal grants were awarded to Hawaii to help prevent abuse.

Gail Breakey, who is currently the executive director of the Hawaii Family Support Institute at the University of Hawaii’s Myron B. Thompson School of Social Work, led the effort in soliciting those federal funds.

“That all went along swimmingly until 1979, about four years later,” Breakey says. “Reaganomics hit, all the federal money disappeared and the state money was reduced. So we just kind of hung on by the fingernail until about 1982 when we began talking again seriously with the legislators about prevention of child abuse.”

Abercrombie, who at the time was a state senator, was one of those legislators.

“In 1984, we were talking often with Sen. Yamasaki,” Breakey says. “And he worked with us and some of the other legislators including Neil to put in legislation for a pilot project, which was Healthy Start, back in 1985.”

And even though Abercrombie didn’t lead the charge for the pilot program, Breakey says it couldn’t have happened without him.

“The person who found the money for it was not Sen. Yamasaki. It was Neil Abercrombie,” Breakey says.

Breakey told Civil Beat that in the 1984 legislative session, her group needed to not only start the pilot project in Ewa Beach, it also had to keep afloat “little baby prevention programs.”

Breakey says that “Neil looked for the money and he found a million dollars from Human Services in federal money that had not been used. It was just sitting there.”

With that money, Abercrombie funded the first Healthy Start program, allocating $200,000 over a two-year period. He also increased the funding for the smaller prevention programs, which, also eventually evolved into Healthy Start programs themselves.

Civil Beat tried to find the legislation from 1984 that Breakey spoke of but, as it turns out, 25 year-old laws are more difficult to come by than you might expect. Breakey says she is looking for her copy of the legislation and will forward it to Civil Beat when she finds it. We will update this Fact Check accordingly.

But just in case you you’re skeptical such legislation exists, Breakey is willing to put her money where her mouth is.

“I will testify in a court if need be that he was the one who found the money.”

While it does seem strange that Abercrombie could find a million dollars that simply “had not been used,” Garval and Breakey are certainly credible witnesses to back up Abercrombie’s claim.

He was instrumental in helping Healthy Start get its legs.