What Exists That Nobody's Using

It’s 6 AM on a Saturday in Southern California.

A partner organization just got 18 young people with lived experience in foster care hired at Ralph’s grocery stores across the region. Thoughtful placements. Each person at a store within walking distance of where they lived.

But to start the job, everyone had to be at Ralph’s headquarters in Compton by 8 AM.

People were coming from Whittier. Long Beach. Downtown LA.

The organization’s response: “We tried. We don’t know how to get everybody there.”

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I opened Google Maps.

Mapped every pickup address. Mapped the Compton drop-off. Built routes where drivers could make multiple pickups along the way. Split them across seven or eight teammates.

Lyft hadn’t introduced scheduling yet. Purely one rider, one driver.

So at 6 AM, we initiated each ride and immediately called the driver. Explained the multi-stop route. Asked them to trust us.

They did.

All 18 people made it to Compton by 8 AM. We reversed the whole process at end of day to get everyone home.

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That was the moment.

There are these technologies being built to make our lives better. To make money. To do all these things.

But none of them are being used in the social space.

Technology isn’t a product category. It’s problem-solving. The barrier was never that solutions didn’t exist. It was that nobody thought to use existing tools for this population.

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That was years ago. The instinct hasn’t changed. The lever got bigger.

Today I Co-Founded Doing Good Works, a social enterprise branded merchandise company. I’m also CTO of Foster Greatness, a digital community for people with lived experience in foster care. Both with small teams.

The Lyft hack was duct tape and hustle. Now it’s AI agents, data pipelines, and automation. A 3-person operation doing what used to require 30.

I’m not a trained developer. I’m a pattern-finder who learned that technology is the best multiplier for what I care about.

Same question every time: what exists that nobody’s thought to use this way?

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That’s what this newsletter is.

Build logs from someone applying AI across a for-profit company and a nonprofit. Because the problems are the same problems.

Frameworks for using technology to create capacity. Not theory. What I’m actually building, what’s working, what isn’t.

Stories from the intersection of technology and impact. Because for me, they’ve never been separate.

If you build things. Or you believe technology should create access, not just profit. This is for you.

Welcome to The Infrastructure of Belonging.