MA'ILI — Several years ago Selby "Jake" Jacobs of Kailua had a worthy notion: Build a modern, temporary receiving home where abused and neglected O'ahu kids can live in a protected environment while trained professionals find them a loving home.

Jacobs was enough of a pragmatist to know that limited available land, huge design and construction costs, tough permitting policies and bureaucratic red tape likely would work to prevent his idyllic idea from becoming a reality.

And then, all the pieces fell into place.

This morning Jacobs' dream comes true with the opening of Ho'omalu O Na Kamali'i — "safe haven for our children" — a first-of-its-kind receiving home for children in Hawai'i.

"The planets and the stars lined up just right," said a smiling Jacobs, chairman of the board of Family Programs Hawai'i, a social service agency serving thousands of children and families in the state, and the organization that will operate Ho'omalu.

"It was serendipitous," said Linda Santos, president of Family Programs Hawai'i. "This idea meets everyone's needs. Everybody's happy."

The center, a 4,000-square-foot facility with 10 bedrooms, a large kitchen, dining and living area, can accommodate 15 children up to 17 years of age. It has round-the-clock staffing with access to social and health professionals who will assess and evaluate the needs of each child before transitioning them to permanent homes.

The Wai'anae Coast was selected for Ho'omalu's location because that is where the need was the greatest. From the beginning the goal has been to keep siblings together and, whenever possible, reunite them with their parents in a safe environment. Otherwise, the center would work to place children with area relatives.

If that's not possible, the center will move to put the children with appropriate families in the foster care system.

Initially, Jacobs said he was convinced that enough money could be raised to buy a house and convert it into a receiving home for children. With luck, he reasoned, other obstacles might be ironed out in the process.

"But the sticking point was always that there weren't any operating funds," Jacobs said. "And this is where Mike made a huge difference."

Mike Wood, 68, a Honolulu businessman, became interested in Jacobs' dream when he joined the board of Family Programs Hawai'i four years ago.

"I just told Mike about it one day," Jacobs said. "I really had no idea he would be willing to step forward and fund something like this."

But Wood, who had come from an unhappy childhood, was captivated by the plan. He not only told Jacobs that he would furnish $1.2 million of his own money to build the center, he would kick in an additional $8 million to operate the center for its first two decades.

Stunned by the offer, Jacobs was more than happy to accept.

When Lillian Koller, director of the state Department of Human Services, caught wind of the project, she quickly moved to have Ho'omalu incorporated into the state's new $14.5 million Villages of Ma'ili transitional homeless shelter project, which was being built on Department of Hawaiian Homelands property off St. Johns Road in Ma'ili.

The transitional shelter opened in December. Meanwhile, construction of Ho'omalu had been under way on the same property since June.

Connecting Ho'omalu with the transitional shelter seemed an obvious match, she said, because a high percentage of kids from the Wai'anae Coast in foster care had been removed from families that were homeless or had recently been homeless.

"So there was definitely a link there between these kids and the homeless, as well as Hawaiians," said Koller, pointing out the fact that the coast has the largest population of people with 50 percent or more Hawaiian blood. "This is DHH land, after all."

Problems that created the need for a place like Ho'omalu had previously been compounded by a disconnected social system that had to deal with the situation as it was unfolding.

"This is literally a safe haven for abused and neglected children that are coming out of a family situation that is at crisis," Wood said.

Typically, that crisis involves angry parents, who may be abusive, intoxicated, or on drugs, having a hostile encounter in the middle of the night.

In the past, Wood said, police would be called in to deal with such chaos as it was happening — "the swear words, the screams, the crying, the broken glass." That would lead to brothers and sisters being removed from the home on the spot and taken to the police station. There, authorities would contact child welfare workers and attempt to sort out the mess.

Ultimately, confused and frightened kids would be separated from one another, bounced from one temporary, emergency location to another — sometimes never to see their siblings or kin or siblings again for years.

For O'ahu-born and raised Kintaro Yonekura, that process began at age 3 and continued throughout his entire youth, as he landed in and out of as many as 20 foster homes.

Today, Yonekura, 32, is a volunteer for Family Programs Hawai'i. He is enthusiastic about Ho'omalu because he says he knows the pain associated with never knowing where you will end up next, a situation he compares to the panic of a toddler lost at a carnival filled with swirling sounds and objects, and unfamiliar, uncaring people.

"For me it was a living, recurring nightmare," said Yonekura, a sales and marketing student at Heald College. "It's a scary thing. It's frightening because you never know what is happening."

Susan Szabo can only imagine such a nightmare. But her adopted daughter, Kira, 13, knows it well.

"It was absolutely devastating," said Kira, who, along with her older brother and younger sister, was abandoned by her mother at age 7 and left in an inappropriate setting with strangers. Bad as that was, the real horror began when she was removed from that home and separated from her younger sister, and later her brother as well.

"She lost the two people she was closest to," said Kira's mother, who spent much of last week painting flowers on the walls at Ho'omalu. "It was really sad. And that's why I think this center is such an amazing place where they can keep these kinds of kids together until they figure out what they're going to do.

"My daughter is a person who would be in this receiving center. As it was, she was so unsettled by the time we met her because she'd been bounced around to all these places."

These days Kira is a happy, energetic child living in a loving home. Susan Szabo volunteers at Ho'omalu because she believes the center will spare other children from the trauma and fear her daughter suffered.

"To me that's not how we should be treating children," said Jacobs, who believes the time has come for Ho'omalu.

"This just makes so much more sense."