Walking from Chicago to Lahaina

David Kowalski has spent twenty-two years in Chicago public schools — first as a PE teacher, now as an athletic director at a high school on the city's north side. He knows coaches. He knows what it costs them, financially and emotionally, to show up every day for kids who need them.

He'd never heard of Lahaina before August 2023. Like most of the country, he watched the news coverage in disbelief — the speed of the fire, the scale of the loss, the images of Front Street reduced to ash.

Then his daughter Emma came home from school with a flyer. Her fifth-grade teacher, Ms. Reyes, had a cousin who taught in Lahaina. Ms. Reyes had shared the Steps for Lahaina page in the school newsletter. Emma had printed it out.

"She put it on the kitchen table and said, 'Dad, you walk everywhere anyway,'" David recalls. "She wasn't wrong. I walk to work. I walk the dog. I walk when I'm stressed. So I signed up that night."

David started with a modest goal: 500 miles in a year. He hit it in seven months. He reset to 1,000. He's currently at 847 miles logged and climbing, with sponsors pledging per mile from as far away as London and Sydney — people who found his walker profile through social media and decided to join in.

"I've never fundraised in my life," he says. "I'm not a social media person. But I posted once about what I was doing and why, and it just — spread. People want to help. They just need a way in."

He's raised over $6,400 for the Steps for Lahaina fund. He's never met a single Lahaina educator in person. But he's exchanged messages with several of them through the platform — including Malia, whose story he read on the site.

"She sent me a message that said, 'Every mile you walk, I feel it,'" David says. "I think about that every morning when I'm out there at 6 a.m. in February, in the dark, in the cold. I think — someone in Maui is walking too. We're doing this together."