Roland Casamina, founder and CEO of House of Finance, Inc., and founding president of the Filipino Community Center, has made a generous gift of $250,000 to renovate and rename the Undergraduate Leadership Center at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa Shidler College of Business after Casamina. The Leadership Center will give students a professional space to meet, strategize and plan student-related activities. This gift is in addition to the Casaminas’ previous donation of $50,000 to establish an endowed scholarship for undergraduate students in 2012, which brings their lifelong gift value to $300,000.
“We are grateful for the Casaminas’ support of the Leadership Center,” Shidler College Dean Vance Roley said. “This gift will go a long way in creating an engaging, inspiring and functional space to cultivate future leaders and will add significantly to the college’s mission to grow and foster excellence.”
“The Leadership Center is a perfect opportunity to inspire students to strive to be their best and to become the very leaders that they themselves would want to follow,” Casamina said. “Coming to this country with nothing but hope, it was only a dream that I could one day be in a position to leave a legacy like this. Hard work turned that dream into a reality. My hope is that this leadership center will provide the opportunity to bolster up future generations of leaders who are putting in the hard work to turn their dreams into reality and uplifting the people and generations who follow them.”
Casamina was born in the Philippines and came to Hawaiʻi in the 1960s. He worked as a busboy while attending Farrington High School and supported himself as a waiter while attending UH Mānoa. In 1995, Casamina founded House of Finance, a family-run residential loan funding company with wife Evelyn. House of Finance was ranked No. 10 in residential loan funding in Hawaiʻi by Pacific Business News in 2019.
In 2014, Roland Casamina was inducted into the Shidler College Hall of Honor for his outstanding professional accomplishments, service to his community and exemplary work as an ambassador of Shidler College. He received his bachelor’s in business administration from the Shidler College in 1976.
This gift supports UH Mānoa’s goal of Enhancing Student Success (PDF), one of four goals identified in the 2015–25 Strategic Plan (PDF), updated in December 2020.
