A neighborhood that staffs, navigates, and covers its own health.
Not a clinic we own. A workforce the neighborhood owns — credentialed, employed, insured, and paid to take care of the people they already love.
Where this goes
Five to ten years out, if it works.
The neighborhood staffs its own care
A standing corps of credentialed Community Health Workers and Peer Support Specialists, all from here, all employed, all insured. Not volunteers burning out — professionals with a wage, a title, and a ladder.
Employment becomes the coverage strategy
Every hire is a household that gains health coverage without asking Sacramento’s permission. As the workforce grows, covered families grow with it — through payroll, not policy.
The ladder reaches the licenses
Outreach worker to health worker to peer specialist to lead — then tuition support into LVN, RN, and social work licensure. The end state is residents holding the clinical credentials, not just the outreach ones.
The surplus pays for the uncovered
Billable work funds unbillable work. Neighbors with no payer are carried by the margin from neighbors who have one, plus philanthropy — and the ratio improves as the workforce grows.
The model travels
The Canal is the pilot, not the product. Our research arm measures and publishes. If it works, every dense, under-navigated neighborhood in America can copy it without paying us. That is the point.
Markets and ownership, honestly stated
We think enterprise does things bureaucracies cannot. We also think it is worth being precise, because the loose version of this argument is wrong and the specific version is right.
What we are not claiming. We are not claiming markets replace public programs. Our own engine runs on Medi-Cal. The medication pathways we rely on — 340B, patient assistance, Emergency Medi-Cal — are public interventions against the market price. The reason our neighbors cannot afford insulin is the market price.
What we are claiming. Public money built the supply — the clinic, the sliding scale, the discounted medicine, the eligibility rules. That supply is real, it is paid for, and it is sitting here half-used. Nobody built the distribution. No agency is staffed to earn trust door by door, in Spanish, at night, from a neighbor. That is not a thing bureaucracies can do. It is a thing enterprise does better than anyone, and it is the half nobody funded.
So we are not competing with the safety net. We are the sales force it never had. And distribution, as any businessperson knows, is where the value accrues.
Where the market carries it alone. Since January 2026, undocumented adults have no enrollment pathway at all. For them there is no program to navigate — not as ideology, as fact. Philanthropy, employment-based coverage, 340B through a partner, and patient assistance are the only things left standing. That population grows every month, and it is where we intend to prove ourselves.
Ownership is the mechanism. Not equity — we are a nonprofit and nobody owns us. Ownership of work: a navigator owns their panel, their outcomes, their credential, and their career. Not a volunteer being thanked. A professional being paid, with their name on results that get measured. Responsibility is what we hand people; a wage is what makes it real.