Allow Me To Re-Introduce Myself (July 25th, 2026)

It’s been about three months of writing and posting a weekly blog. I have largely enjoyed the practice and feel it has been worthwhile. I am finding myself trusting my voice more than I did at the beginning, having gotten to work through some ideas better than I have before, and gaining confidence to put my thoughts out into the world. On the last point, there has been a steady reduction in engagement to near zero. There are two likely reasons I have been playing with that explain this: 1) my writing is not good enough or relevant enough to warrant engagement; or 2) the strategy I’ve been using to promote the pieces itself is not good enough. 

In last week’s post I referenced The Least Dangerous Assumption and how that often shapes my thinking. I am putting that back into practice here, though in a very different context. Assuming that my writing is not good enough for public consumption means that I stop writing for publication. I would still fill my notebooks, but no longer have this dedicated time to try and use my writing to influence the world beyond me. Of course, the strategies that emerge from my notebooks would influence the world beyond me so far as the organization(s) I am part of influence the world, but the writings themselves would not. If there is a chance that my writings ever could or would influence the world beyond me, then this assumption would be devastating, as not publishing my writing takes away the possibility of this ever happening.

Assuming that the strategy I have been using, however, is flawed in some way is a much less dangerous assumption. It does not stop me from writing, just changes how I publish them. If my writing is ultimately not good enough in some way to achieve the high hopes of what it could, then I maintain a writing practice that I enjoy. If it really is the strategy that was holding the pieces back, then tinkering with that gives these pieces the chance to influence the world in greater ways. So, at this point, I will assume it’s the strategy and keep on writing. 

The minor strategy adjustment that I am making is that rather than posting them as a LinkedIn post alone, I will post them as a LinkedIn newsletter and see if that increases engagement. So, this piece feels like perhaps a bit of a need to reintroduce myself, as it may be the twelfth blog post but it is the first newsletter piece. For those of you who have been reading my posts, thank you, it genuinely means a lot, and I will try to make this post different enough that it is not just a redundancy. For those of you who have not yet read my posts, thank you for giving me a shot, and welcome to my musings. This newsletter will capture thoughts and progress on my work.

The title of the newsletter is The Full Press because that is the name of the comprehensive agenda I am developing to strengthen our society. The name comes from the names of two initiatives I have worked on for many years - Full Capital and PressOn - and a play on words because we need a strategy that creates momentum quickly to change current trajectories, much like a full press strategy in basketball. What The Full Press is ultimately trying to do is promote wellbeing as a means of creating and capturing cost avoidance for public systems. I have been taught to say cost avoidance rather than savings because so frequently public systems will spend avoided costs so they are never truly saved, just reallocated. That cost avoidance can be used for two purposes that ultimately strengthen our society: 1) sustaining and scaling cost avoidance over time will allow us to pay down debt burdens that exist at federal, state, and local levels; and 2) sustaining and scaling cost avoidance over time will allow us to sustain and scale investment into what is driving returns in the first place. 

I have spent the majority of my career so far, whether as Director of Development or in a CEO role, fundraising for nonprofits, and I can tell you that often it has felt a lot more like begging than it has felt like sales. I am not alone in this feeling and it makes the sector weak. Public servants are often required to beg government and philanthropy with their changing strategies for funding to continue projects that are trying to do good in the world. For some work that does not produce a financial return, perhaps that model is the best we can hope for. But for those of us in the prevention world where there is a real ROI, this is infuriating. The changing strategies often interrupt work by either forcing elements of the project to change, not because the community that the work is being implemented in or an expert made a decision based on lessons through the process of implementation that a change was necessary, but because the funder of the project decided that they wanted something different. This is generally a better outcome than the other possibility when funders change their priorities, which is just that funding is lost and often the project ends. Of course, the ideal is to diversify funding so that no single funder has the power to change the project, but this is not a reality for most nonprofit projects. 

Before DOGE, the realities of funding social service projects were challenging. After slashing social service investments, they are reaching a breaking point. We have seen many good organizations close and initiatives stop. As we see the need for basic services continuing to increase with current inflation rates, we simultaneously have a weakening social fabric to support these basic needs being met. Our society has been at a crisis point for a meaningful amount of time, but the actions of this current administration have exacerbated these crises. 

Within every crisis there is opportunity. The Full Press was designed to address these crises during COVID, another time when demand far outweighed supply. We need a true vision for what will create a stronger society. We need leadership that is more interested in implementing real solutions than playing politics. The Full Press provides this, and that is what I want for these blog posts, and now this newsletter to work through. As I often say in my presentations, we do not know everything that needs to be done to fix all the problems we are facing, but we know more than enough to get started. The Full Press is organized to layer looped learning processes over time so that we are learning more about what does and does not work, and integrating that knowledge into evolving systems across all levels of society that make people’s lives better. 

We are working to promote holistic wellbeing. We need for individuals to be well across many dimensions: physical, psychological, social, emotional, financial, cultural, moral, and spiritual. These dimensions of wellbeing are not necessarily unrelated from each other necessarily, but are also distinct in many ways. There are many efforts to promote wellbeing within each of these dimensions, and some that even work to promote wellbeing across some of these dimensions, but we do not have a comprehensive strategy to promote them all simultaneously. 

Promoting these dimensions is not just a moral necessity, but it is an economic necessity. What is causing the outrageous debt burdens we are currently experiencing as a society? At the federal level, we cannot talk about the rising national debt without talking about the massive role that defense spending plays in it, but at all levels of the public system the lack of wellbeing in our country creates massive drains on our society. The answer cannot be to stop spending money on the communities and people that make up our society, because that will be the death of our nation, so we must invest wisely to promote wellbeing throughout our society. 

Look at generational trends of physical, psychological, and social health data in the United States and you will see that we need something new and different. Democrats continue to argue that people want healthcare, and I believe that is not untrue, we need healthcare, but in my experiences and conversations, what people really want is to be healthy and well. They want a safety net so that there is somewhere to go when things go wrong, but most people I have met in my travels around the country would rather be self sufficient and not need to use a safety net, while also wanting for it to be there to both take care of their neighbors in need and to be there in case something happens and they find themselves or their family in need. 

Doing the same thing and expecting a different outcome is a mark of insanity. We must develop new fundamental approaches to how we invest in reweaving our social fabric to promote different outcomes. The Full Press does this by taking the best of what we have seen in both policy and practice to create a strong foundation that can be built upon as time moves forward. While we have created so much fragmentation throughout our systems, community does not exist in any one of these silos, but rather in how they are woven together. While we have integrated mechanistic governance into our systems, we are complex beings and not machines. We must create community-led, cross-sector coalitions that develop and integrate strategies that address systems to promote upstream wellbeing so that we can prevent harm in the first place, reducing bottlenecks and the stress placed on treatment and intervention systems, allowing for them to also improve, so that we can reduce the negative outcomes that contribute to our debt burdens and leverage cost avoidance to continue investing in community capacity. 

This is not some crazy financial architecture we have never seen used, it is just applying project finance approaches to public systems. The methods to support community-led, cross-sector coalitions have also been proven to be effective, though I don’t know why they have not scaled. We cannot develop a singular one size fits all approach as different communities have different populations, needs, resources, and desires, which is why communities must control the strategy and implementation of this work. Their buy-in is critical for success. But we can coordinate and align from the federal to state to local levels to support that community work and create a more integrated system that promotes wellbeing, captures cost avoidance and supports re-investment as well as reducing our debt burdens, learns throughout the work to improve strategies and not reinvent the wheel, and creates a supportive infrastructure to create accountability throughout. 

The Full Press is not some fantasy. It is a real solution that we are working to scale. In my work leading HEAL PA, we are working to implement this from the state to the individual level in Pennsylvania. As time moves forward, I hope to not just do this in more states, but across the country and maybe someday around the world. It is not just a top-down approach, but also has bottom-up elements. Where top-down and bottom-up approaches meet, flourishing occurs.