"Doing Well For Doing Good" — First Unitarian Church

On July 13, 1997, Dr. Lauren Ekroth spoke at the 10:15 a.m. Sunday service of the First Unitarian Church of Honolulu, 2500 Pali Highway. His talk was titled “Doing Well For Doing Good.” The listing appeared in the Honolulu Star-Advertiser’s church service notices.

The title captures the intersection of ethics and enterprise that defined his post-retirement life. By 1997 Ekroth was running Kama’aina Fundraisers — helping schools raise money — and the Natural Learning Center of Hawaii, a personal development training operation. “Doing Well For Doing Good” suggests that financial success and service to others are compatible, a philosophy that bridged his activist past with his entrepreneurial present.

He was billed simply as “Dr. Lauren Ekroth” — not professor, not retired professor, just doctor. The academic credential had become a personal brand, independent of the university. This is the clearest early marker of the identity he would later develop as “Dr. Conversation,” the professional speaker and conversation coach whose eSpeakers profile listed dozens of seminar topics. Twenty-five years earlier he had delivered “Gurus, Temples & Charisma” from the pulpit of the Church of the Crossroads; the venues and topics had shifted, but the Sunday morning speaker had not.