Stray (August 1, 2026)

My old mentor used to call me a stray. As with any good mentor, he saw a lot of talent in me. And he was always amazed that I had essentially been hidden when he met me. It was a term of endearment from Dan and it made me laugh. If you ever saw the way Dan took care of his animals, you would know he did not mean this in a bad way at all. It was his way of calling me a diamond in the rough. I had mostly forgotten about that until recently when I had a call with one of his old colleagues that joked about how he used to call me his stray. It was nice to remember Dan with him. I didn’t realize he used to tell other people, and it made me smile. 

This week I’ve thought about that nickname a whole bunch. I had very different experiences throughout the week, some that were uplifting and others that took the wind out of my sails. 

I had a presentation at the Philadelphia Trauma Conference that led to a very nice conversation among those present. I had prepped for that presentation well, felt comfortable talking about The Full Press, and engaged in a meaningful dialogue among participants. This was an uplifting day that shined a light on the potential to move this work forward in both the city of Philadelphia and more broadly. I am grateful for people’s time, attention, and insights. 

However, bookending the week were two high level conversations that made me feel a bit more deflated. Both were about conversations regarding capacity building for the work of HEAL PA and moving forward with The Full Press. One was a first time meeting, the other a decision about funding that I have been having conversations about for a year or so. Both can become informative as I move this work forward, but both felt like body blows. Monday’s meeting gave me the ability to get direct feedback on The Full Press. People are generally interested in the work, but the most common feedback I get is that it is very complicated. I didn’t get direct feedback from the foundation yet, other than the fact that they will not be moving forward with my proposal for HEAL PA and The Full Press, though they offered the chance to set up a call.

I understand that my proposal is different and multi-faceted; so whether to an administrative agency, a legislative office, or a philanthropic organization, I can appreciate that it is a bit complex. I continue doing the best I can to simplify the pitch as much as possible and clearly have more work to do. I will be honest that it doesn’t seem so complex to me that it can’t be moved upon. The fact that our community and social fabric has been fraying for a long time seems like an obvious statement to me. The fact that our national debt is nearly $40 trillion, and state debt is also too high (Pennsylvania’s is around $76 billion), and the trajectories of those figures have been moving in one direction for a while is problematic also seems obvious to me. Given those two seemingly obvious observations, building community capacity to promote wellbeing as a means of creating cost avoidance for public systems to both pay down debt burdens and sustain and scale investment into community capacity seems obvious to me. 

The evidence that we can do this is strong. The need for us to do it is great. Yet there is something that seems to be getting in the way of bringing it to life and I just haven’t quite figured it out yet. I am not mad at the people who didn’t move forward with my proposals this week, nor with the many proposals that have been denied before. Always disappointed, of course, but never mad. If success comes after being told “no” a whole bunch of times, then I must be right on success’ doorstep. There are so many needs and people only have so many resources, whether we are talking about financial capital, social capital, or some other resource.

Even stepping back a bit from the most recent denials to build capacity around this work, I can appreciate the growing capacity I have around the work I have been doing. HEAL PA’s ESC and growing network are genuinely exciting. The people who get The Full Press really love it, and while I can get narrowly focused on trying to find the philanthropist(s) or government official(s) who can build capacity quickly, I don’t take for granted any support that is received. 

But for anyone who understands why this work is important, they understand that we need to build capacity so that we can provide funding for and engage with community and government systems to advance the work in the way it must be done. We cannot reasonably expect people to do this work for free forever. I did this work as a volunteer for several years before I got to call it my job, and I know many others who do this work as volunteers longer than I had to. Even if I am frustrated by less capacity than I need to fully advance the work I am grateful for the capacity that I have to do this work full-time. As someone at the conference this week said, we must be able to hold the complexity of multiple truths existing at the same time. 

I think my biggest challenge and what gets me so frustrated is that I understand the psychological mechanisms that are at play. The urgency and vastness of today’s problems produce a state of overwhelm that easily stresses us out. This makes it challenging to think in new ways and follow through on long-term plans. I fight these forces with some regularity. “The thing I’ve been doing hasn’t worked yet so I need to try something else” every few years, as many strategic plans create, doesn’t allow ideas to mature enough to fully take hold. It is understandable and comes from a genuine place of wanting to create positive change, yet that produces at a more macro level an inability to produce the deep change we require. There are superficial changes that occur that make a meaningful impact in people’s lives, but we can look at our society, the trends we have had for some time, and see we need to go deeper. 

There is of course a need to reassess our work regularly and just because something started doesn’t mean we have to do that thing forever. We must learn and grow over time. I have been questioning my own direction honestly, as recently it feels like there has been a lot of rejection and wondering if I need to be doing something different. This has been challenging. So far I have come to the conclusion that, no, this is not because The Full Press is a bad idea. It is just new and needs someone to fight for it, and then I go into the “if not me who, if not now when” mentality. It is healthy to question if we are on the right path, but priorities shifting all the time cannot create the deep impact that we need, and is a result of traumatized thinking, not of a single individual or organization, but collectively as a society. It leads to traumatic reenactment, where we seem to create similar impacts in new ways, trapped within a cycle that produces outcomes we want to avoid.

We need a paradigm shift to overcome these cycles. We cannot keep doing the same thing over and over and expecting different outcomes. And while we may be trying different programs, we are not trying new thinking. We are not collaborating across sectors and systems in new ways, if anything we are becoming more entrenched and guarded. We are not building community capacity to promote prevention in new ways, if anything we are focusing further downstream as the impacts of budget cuts make the dollars available to us for this work tighter. Yet, from my perspective at least, this is backward thinking. We cannot solve generational challenges through short-term thinking alone. We need a comprehensive strategy as to how we not just ease the burden of the challenges we face today, but how we make them better long into the future. 

That is what The Full Press is doing. That is what it was organized to solve for, being crafted to work in the current climate in which we must do the work, while being adaptable enough to evolve as conditions change long into the future. I am open to learning as time moves forward. If I knew everything that I needed to know already then the tone of not just this blog post but all of my writings would be fundamentally different. Yet I believe that The Full Press is a path worth pursuing. It is informed by the mentorship of special people who have lived more life than I have so far to inform their positions, perhaps with my own flair on top. I am lucky to have been taken under the wing of some truly extraordinary people. Every stray needs a home, and I am committed to carrying these efforts forward for longer than they were able to alone. I have a lot of career still to go, but already know that this is something bigger than me, bigger than just this generation, and is something that I need to hand off to future generations and leaders as well.

What we must be willing to do is try something different. New programs and innovations are critical, but we must also develop a comprehensive agenda and strategy in which these new programs and innovations fit and work together. That is the container that The Full Press creates. It is different. There are certainly challenges in helping more folks understand not just what it does but why it is important. But I am committed to seeing this through. “The obstacle is the way.” Addressing the underlying paradigm and structures that are organized around unresolved grief from all that our society has experienced and continues to experience is a core challenge and opportunity that accelerates the broader work of The Full Press. I haven’t figured it out yet, but I sure look forward to when I do. I have started pretty much everyday of my career thinking that today could be the day that all the effort put in compounds into greater capacity. It is the energy that took me from being a stray to having a home. I will continue to believe that each day holds that miraculous possibility, and look forward to when these dreams come true.