The System Isn’t Broken. It’s Doing Exactly What It Was Built to Do.

We keep talking about fixing the system. But what if it doesn’t need fixing — what if it’s working exactly as designed, just not for everyone?

Every year, billions of dollars are poured into addressing homelessness, poverty, and economic inequality, and every year the problem grows: more people on the streets, more visible suffering, more strain on the very organizations trying to help. At some point, we have to stop calling this a failure of effort and start recognizing it for what it actually is — a failure of structure. Because the people working inside these systems are not the problem. The systems themselves are.

I saw this up close. When I returned to Los Angeles, I spent three years volunteering at the LA Mission — one of the largest and most respected homeless service providers in the city. I worked in career services helping write resumes, teaching job skills, raising money, delivering supplies, serving meals. Inside the system, I saw that the most effective way to actually impact homelessness is addressing income inequality through building pathways to opportunity. The system, as it is, is too outdated to effectively deliver the level of service needed to impact this issue effectively. Not because people dn’t care, but because the structure itself can’t move at the pace the problem required.

After launching a pilot workforce program with women at the Mission — something that actually worked — we tried to scale it. What followed was administrative gridlock, legal barriers, and an inability to structure even a simple revenue-generating model. Three and a half years of work, and we couldn’t move forward — not because the idea had failed, but because the system couldn’t hold it. That was my wake-up call.

The nonprofit model, as it currently exists, is not built for rapid, scalable innovation. It’s built for service delivery, for compliance, for managing complexity, for doing the best it can within constraints. Government is even more constrained — slower, politically entangled, chronically under-resourced. These institutions are necessary, and they do critical work, but they are not designed to solve problems of this scale, speed, and complexity. Pretending otherwise is costing us time we no longer have.

So if not nonprofits, if not government, then what? The answer isn’t to abandon them. It’s to build something alongside them that can do what they cannot. And that’s where the private sector enters the picture.

For decades, we’ve treated profit and purpose as opposing forces — you either make money or you do good. But that binary is collapsing, because the truth is the private sector already has what we need: infrastructure, capital, speed, scale, and distribution. The question isn’t whether business should be involved; it’s how.

This is where social enterprise changes the equation. Social enterprises are built differently — designed to generate revenue and impact simultaneously, closer to the problem, more agile, more experimental, and willing to take risks that large institutions cannot. What they often lack is scale, and that’s precisely where partnership becomes powerful.

Homeboy Industries is the benchmark of what social enterprise can accomplish. What started as a small bakery in 1992 is now one of the most successful social enterprise models in the world: thirteen businesses, nearly a quarter of their $50 million-plus budget generated through enterprise, and thousands of lives transformed. The turning point was Thomas Vozzo, a former corporate executive who stepped in, applied private sector discipline and strategy, and helped scale the model without losing its heart. That’s the blueprint — not charity replacing business, not business overpowering mission, but integration. The analytical rigor of a corporation paired with the soul of a social movement.

The uncomfortable truth is that homelessness is not an accident. It is the result of a series of economic decisions about who benefits and who doesn’t, decisions that are now embedded in the very systems we continue to rely on to fix the problem. We are not going to solve this with more of the same — more funding into the same pipelines, more pressure on systems already at capacity, more incremental change. This is not a tweak-the-system moment. It is a rebuild-the-system moment.

What if businesses didn’t just donate to causes, but built them into their operations? What if supply chains included social enterprise partners by design, and investment wasn’t just about maximizing return but about stabilizing communities? What if profit still existed — but was measured over a longer horizon, with a broader definition of value?

This may sound like idealism but it’s already happening. Companies are being forced to rethink their impact by consumers, by investors, by reality itself. The question is no longer whether this shift will occur — it’s whether we move fast enough to meet the moment. Because the problems we’re facing are not slowing down, and the systems we’ve relied on to solve them are.

The future isn’t nonprofit versus business. It’s collaboration, integration, a new economy where impact isn’t a side project — it’s the strategy. And we don’t have the luxury of waiting for permission to build it.