The System Isn't Broken. It's Just Not Connected to Anybody.
I graduated from Dorsey High in 2005. Where I grew up in South LA, there was no shortage of programs. There were programs for everything. Youth programs, job programs, housing programs, reentry programs, mental health programs. Every one of them had a brochure.
And almost nobody I knew was in one.
That is the thing I have spent twenty years trying to get people in boardrooms to understand. The crisis in social services is not a shortage of systems. It's the distance between the systems and the people they were built for. Somebody has to close that distance, on purpose, every day, or the system just sits there fully funded and empty.
That's my job. It's the only job I've ever really had. Connect systems to the people who need them.
What the distance actually looks like
People who have never needed help imagine the gap as a lack of information. Put up a flyer, launch a website, the people will come. That's not it.
The distance looks like a man leaving county jail with a bus pass and a list of phone numbers, and every number on the list wants him to already have an address, an ID, and a phone that works. It looks like a mother who qualifies for six things and can't get through the front door of one, because the door opens at 9 a.m. and her shift starts at 7. It looks like a referral that gets faxed from one agency to another and dies in a queue, and nobody on either side ever tells her.
It looks like language. Eligibility criteria written by attorneys, read by people in survival mode. Nobody in the building who has ever lived what the person across the desk is living.
None of that is a resource problem. Every one of those systems had money. The connection was missing.
I learned this as a case manager, not a CEO
Before Mysti's, before The Giovanne Show, before anybody called me the Social Services King, I was a case manager in Washington working with families coming out of homelessness. I left safe, salaried jobs more than once because I was tired of watching systems fail the exact people they claimed to serve.
What I learned on the ground is that the connector is a real job. It is not paperwork. It is not "navigation" as an afterthought at the bottom of a job description. Sitting with someone, translating what a system wants, walking them to the door, calling the agency back when the referral goes quiet, showing up when the appointment gets moved. That is the intervention. Not the program. The program only works once somebody has connected the person to it.
California actually wrote this down. When CalAIM created Enhanced Care Management, it built the whole model around a lead care manager whose job is to connect one person to every system touching their life: health plan, housing, behavioral health, probation, benefits. Washington's Medicaid transformation has walked a similar road. The policy caught up to what case managers already knew.
The money did not. The connector is still the lowest-paid person in the building. The person doing the one thing that makes everything else work is treated like overhead.
Why I built a company instead of writing a grant
My mother, Mysti, died during the pandemic. I never felt her death was truly investigated, because of the chaos and confusion in the world at that time. I named the company after her because I wanted to build something that mattered, something that lasts. Something healing.
But I also built it because after twenty years I could see exactly where the gaps were, and I was done asking a committee for permission to close them. Mysti's exists to stand in the gap. We show up, we move fast, and we don't stop until the work is done. That's not a slogan. It's an operating model, and it comes with three commitments I will defend in any room.
1. Hire the connector from the community, and pay them like they matter. Lived experience is a credential. The person who has been through the county system, the shelter system, the court system knows things a master's degree does not teach. I have the master's degree. I still say that. When the person across the desk can see themselves in the person helping them, the connection holds. When they can't, they leave, and the system marks them "non-compliant."
2. Build systems that don't depend on one person. A while back, an investor told me I seemed impatient. He was right, and I wrote in Entrepreneur about what I learned: impatience is often not a mindset problem at all. It's a structural signal. I restructured Mysti's into a holding company so compliance, finance, and HR are centralized and no operating entity depends on me being in the room. If the connection between a system and a person only exists because one heroic staff member is holding it together, that is not a system. That is a person about to burn out.
3. Measure whether the connection held. Counting referrals is easy. Counting how many people were still housed, still connected to care, still out of jail twelve months later is hard, and it is the only number that matters. Stability isn't the opposite of ambition. It's what allows ambition to compound. That is true for a company and it is true for a family coming out of a shelter.
Hand up, not handout
I get asked, usually by people who have never been on either side of this work, whether I believe in personal responsibility or in "the system." I believe in both, and I think the question is lazy.
A hand up is a connection. It's somebody who knows how the system works standing next to somebody who doesn't, long enough for them to get through the door and stay in the room. A handout is when we drop resources at the top of a system, never build the bridge to the people at the bottom, and then blame them for not crossing it.
I've watched people find housing, reconnect with their kids, break addiction, and breathe again. Not one of them did it because a program existed. They did it because somebody connected them to it and stayed connected until it held.
The marathon
I'm a father of seven. My kids are the reason I care what this system looks like in twenty years, and the reason I refuse to build something that only works while I'm standing in it.
So here's what I'd say to any executive, funder, or elected official who wants to fix social services: stop asking whether you have enough programs. Ask how far your programs are from the people who need them, who is paid to close that distance, and what happens to those people when that person quits.
Every answer you don't like is the actual work. Nipsey said it's a marathon. I'm running mine.
I talk about this on [The Giovanne Show](https://www.schachere.com/thegiovanneshow), with people who are doing the work of connecting systems to communities. Watch the latest episode, and if you want this conversation in front of your team, board, or conference, [book me to speak](https://www.schachere.com/contact-giovanne).
