Where PressOn and Full Capital Came From (July 11, 2026)

I talk about The Full Press a lot, but I don’t know how often I’ve shared about where they came from. Both were initially created during the height of the pandemic, but for different reasons. They were not woven together at first, they developed as separate ideas that tackled different aspects of major problems the trauma-informed movement was facing, that perhaps not surprisingly wound up fitting together very well. Social infrastructure development, as is the case with all infrastructure development, and financial architecture go together. But their creation stories feel as though they are worth being told. Granted, I can only tell it from my perspective, but it is the best I can do to share where they came from. 

As a quick backstory before the backstory, before COVID, before I knew about trauma-informed care, back when The Change Campaign was an idea for a financial literacy initiative and not an incorporated nonprofit, I came up with the name Press On. As I was developing the concept of the financial literacy initiative, I saw the need for an “umbrella” organization that could have multiple initiatives within it to work toward a sustainable planet and a better future for all. Financial literacy is important, but alone it would not achieve that broad mission. So I came up with this concept and called it Press On because of a Calvin Coolidge quote I liked: “Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan ‘Press On!’ has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.” (Note: this is not an endorsement of Coolidge, just the quote.)

Now fast forward a few years. I was becoming integrally involved with CTIPP when COVID hit. For the better part of a year, I was part of a group that my mentor Dan Press created to launch a national campaign to uplift people’s stories about the impacts of trauma and the importance of trauma-informed care following a House Oversight and Reform Committee briefing hosted by the late Chairman Elijah Cummings on the impacts of childhood trauma, when he insisted that more people needed to share their stories. After a tremendous amount of planning, we were ready to launch our campaign in February of 2020. It started well and there was a lot of traction. I forget how many thousands of people signed up to be part of this unfunded campaign in the first month, but I remember we had representation across all 50 states. 

Then, the whole world changed and with that, we had to adjust our strategy. Normal legislation was not moving and members of Congress were not interested in joining a new caucus. All of the attention was, understandably, on trying to navigate the pandemic. When the CARES Act, the first Trump Administration’s stimulus bill, passed, we tried to have input as best as possible, though because of the speed and ways in which Congress and the Administration were working you had to be much better connected and resourced than we were to influence how that was written, so we worked with our National Trauma Campaign network to advocate for how those stimulus funds were deployed through appropriate funding streams at the state and local levels. Dan and another partner on the core team were both attorneys and read through the text of the legislation to determine what funding streams were able to be used to support trauma-informed approaches, and we then mobilized advocates around those funding streams. 

We held webinars, and through that started to be invited to present on available funding streams by different organizations and coalitions across the country. While different members of the core team would present when available, because of our ability to make our schedules work for the availability of when coalitions could bring their networks together, it was very often me and Dan doing the webinars together, and he called it our dog and pony show. 

After doing a lot of these webinars and working with a bunch of different states, localities, and organizations to try and influence the flow of these dollars, a disturbing reality became clear: the federal government did not know where so much of the money should go to promote public health. It also became clear that a lot of times states also didn’t know the best ways to get money to localities. This trend was clear in many ways across levels of government. We had an uncoordinated public system when we undoubtedly needed coordination. This was troubling. 

I do not mean to sound too critical to those working on CARES as COVID was a crazy time. People did the best they could in a time of uncertainty and some true brilliance came through. While some people misused the funds, learning more about how components like the Paycheck Protection Program came together is genuinely inspiring. But for so many of the funds, including PPP, the limited dollars and lack of clarity from government as to how best support communities and people in dire need went to those with the most resources already. In the nonprofit world, this meant that very frequently the grants were not necessarily going to the groups doing the best work, but rather to the organizations that could afford to hire the best grant writers. This was not new in the industry, but it was amplified given the rising needs, not just around COVID, but around the associated health and social consequences that accompanied the pandemic. 

When the Biden Administration took office, we knew that there would be another stimulus package, and we were able to better get out in front of that one. We still didn’t have money, but at least we had the resource of time to plan a bit better. We mobilized to support the funding streams as best we could, and then when ARPA passed, we again mobilized states and localities to leverage relevant funding streams to support trauma-informed work. It was around this time that I became CTIPP’s executive director and started working with Dan even more.

We took our dog and pony show back on the road and while we had more resources and saw greater success in mobilizing around use of stimulus funds for trauma-informed approaches, we also continued to see similar issues pop up around a lack of coordination across levels. One of the principles of trauma-informed care is collaboration, so it was clear that there was much work to be done in these respects to create a more trauma-informed government. Dan and I, and so many others, knew how many tremendous state and local efforts there were to meet people’s deeper needs and promote wellbeing that were just not getting funded. We also knew that so many of them were unknown to even their own elected officials, let alone the government as a whole, which was an even greater challenge. 

This was when the idea behind PressOn started to come together. In our dog and pony shows and CTIPP’s Community Advocacy Network (CAN) calls, we knew so many people doing such tremendous work all across the country. We saw the power of different communities learning from each other and different states learning from each other. Why wasn’t this happening in government? So we started creating a plan to bring these groups together under one initiative. 

Around this same time, just a few months into my time as CTIPP’s ED working with Dan, Dan was diagnosed with stage four non-smoking lung cancer, and given about a year to live. So we started working more and more on articulating the vision that laid in Dan’s heart and mind. Dan was a brilliant man, an attorney who graduated from Columbia University and Yale Law School before leading a career representing Native American tribes. Because of that orientation he had from his work, he knew that trauma-informed care was ultimately delivered at a grassroots level, but because of his years of policy advocacy, he knew that government could create conditions that better supported communities, and the families and individuals that live within them, to thrive, and he also knew far too well that government could also create conditions that led to harm. So he really built the concept of what became PressOn from the bottom up, though there are certainly components of interconnectedness as well as top down strategies. 

Initially, Dan came up with the name Coalition of Coalitions (CoC) to describe this work. I don’t know if I was right, but was able to convince him that the sound of that acronym may not be the best marketing strategy for what we were trying to launch. I told him about my initial idea for Press On and said that this was a far more concrete strategy that deserved that name, and because his name was Dan Press, it was the perfect name to carry his legacy. He was not a fan of the idea at first, because he didn’t want the focus to be on himself. But the name was too good and too many other people agreed that it would be the perfect name. So eventually he accepted this, but his only request was that instead of Press On it would be PressOn. For some reason not having the space made him more comfortable with the idea, though I never asked why. I am sure there was deep wisdom in that decision that I could have learned from, but I was just so thrilled that we had come to an agreement. With that, PressOn was born.

Now, we need to go back to the lockdown phase of the pandemic to talk about Full Capital. The backstory to this backstory is that my wife is a corporate attorney and for the first year of COVID the practice group she was in specialized in project finance. We had wildly different experiences during the pandemic. It was the first time we had worked together in the same place for extended periods of time. Though we met in Philly, she moved to DC in 2018 for work while I continued working in Philly, and so despite regular weekend visits to see each other, COVID provided an opportunity for us to spend more time together. She moved from her apartment in the city back to the suburbs of Philadelphia, where we were lucky enough to split time between both of our parent’s houses (and I would also spend one day a week with my Bub and Pop). 

Though we were together, our work experiences during COVID were wildly different. Because interest rates were so low, financing projects were occurring at historic levels. Meanwhile, as described a bit in the story of PressOn, my fundraising efforts were not quite so fruitful.

One day at her parent’s house we were eating lunch between work together and I just went on an all time rant, so good that it launched an initiative. I wasn’t mad at her, but I just went off about how it was not just unfair that all these companies could raise billions of dollars so easily while I struggled to raise a single dollar, but it also made no sense. At a time that so much of the population was in need of trauma-informed care, dollars were flowing elsewhere. Yet I was left begging for anyone to provide the capital to be able to really help people. It was a fundamental flaw in our society that I believed needed to (and I still believe needs to) be fixed. 

After letting me get my frustrations out, she taught me a bit about how finance worked when you don’t need to beg for the money. We didn’t have the collateral or infrastructure to leverage finance in the ways that companies were doing, but there was no reason we couldn’t build that.

Project finance is a better system than philanthropy. I still don’t fully understand it like she and so many others do, so pardon my layperson explanation. A project is broken into multiple phases from beginning to end, and tranches of capital are agreed upon up front, given that certain agreed upon benchmarks are met within a phase then the next tranche is delivered. This enables long-term projects to be undertaken because the risk of not completing the project is diminished by the promise of funding so long as the project delivers on its promises. It also reduces the risks of the investors because they do not need to provide all of their assets upfront, which enables them to both protect against bad projects and grow assets until needed. It allows financing to occur when a company doesn’t have the upfront capital to develop a project. 

Compare this to so much nonprofit fundraising, while there are better models that some utilize, it is largely applying for short-term funding and usually not enough to fully implement a project. I joke that if oil projects were financed the way that nonprofits are, our carbon footprint would be so much lower. We would have a bunch of half built rigs, some unfinished pipelines, and very few completed projects, because it takes more than a few years and partial funding to go from knowing where oil is available to us ultimately filling up at the pump. The difference is that there is a financial architecture that can place a known value on oil, project the value of a project, and agree to terms that enable long-term investments to be made. 

But the great irony is that there is so much money to be made by preventing harm, we just haven’t built a financial architecture around it. I told her about the return on investment that Washington State experienced through Self Healing Communities and all that I knew about the returns from trauma-informed education practices I was aware of. There were returns available, and investment opportunities that our society so badly needed to make at the time (and still so badly needs today), we just needed to build the mechanism to capture and return savings. 

The name full capital comes from the idea that we operationalize capitalism very poorly, as we invest economic capital disproportionately into more economic capital, failing to invest in social capital, cultural capital, environmental capital, and all other forms of capital. It is like trying to bake a pie, I always say, by only creating a single slice. If we baked the whole pie, the entire pie would be bigger, including the slice of economic capital, and we could use that to sustainably and scalably grow the pie for a long time to come. While our national debt has only continued to grow since that day at the lunch table, it was plenty big then and I saw the opportunity to create cost avoidance to pay down debt burdens and continue to invest in better supporting people. 

Both ideas have progressed substantially since these early days, but this is how they were born. The two were always meant to work together, but it was not for several years until The Full Press was created as a single initiative. My buddy Jared is an author and political commentator, and has been working with me for a few years on an initiative to create moderation in our nation’s politics and create the conditions for dialogue across ideological divides. We were talking about the need for a comprehensive agenda, and how I believed that Full Capital and PressOn created a strong foundation to build such an agenda from. Jared used to be a creative writing professor, and we realized that the two initiatives together would be called The Full Press. It evoked the right feeling, for anyone who knows basketball, because a full court press is a tactic used when you need to be aggressive and turn momentum back in your favor. 

It is amazing to think back on how far these ideas have progressed in many respects, yet look at the world around us and see that so much more needs to be done. It’s funny also to think of all the elements of these stories that I left out and still how long this post already is. There will need to be more of these story telling blog posts woven into the strategy-oriented ones, because it is important to recognize and understand where these ideas come from. PressOn carries with it the legacy of my mentor and friend Dan Press who dedicated his life to trying to help as many people as he could to reach their full potential. Full Capital carries with it the genuine frustrations of injustice and the innovations that come out of that. The Full Press, bringing them both together, I believe in with all of my being, my biases noted, and I hope will in greater and greater ways advance the mission to create a sustainable planet and a better future for all.