Rising from the Eaton Fire... Now Let Me Re-introduce Myself

If you've been here since the Socially Immersed days, thank you for still being in this inbox. A lot has changed, and I'm ready to tell the story.

We are The Sameritan Project now operating as a 501c(3). Though Socially Immersed is closed, we still own the LLC and name.

I spent years in consulting doing work I believed in. Work that was supposed to move the needle for communities that needed it most. And so much of it just... stalled due to the client's "capacity." I've worked with local government, foundations, large and small nonprofits, corporate social responsibility departments, and still I watched real solutions sit in a Word Doc while real people kept falling through the same gaps.

Money wasn't being sent to those who were actually getting the job done, so I stopped consulting and got back to doing.

Sameritan is a DO tank focused on systems building, not direct service.

We exist at the intersection of both the public and private sectors. We don't just publish ideas about circular economy, economic equity, and resilient infrastructure...we go prove them. We co-design systems with community, test them in real life, and refine the model through lived experience. When something works, we help communities and institutions adopt it so it scales without losing the people and values it was built for.

After the fires in Los Angeles last year, specifically the Eaton fire, we ran our first real pilot focusing on rerouting food waste/surplus back into the food system. We did the ugly work, the bottlenecks nobody wants to touch, the gaps the systems were supposed to catch but didn't. We learned what works and the results were better than anyone expected. Because we focused on circularity, we were able to produce 32 oz - 50 oz of prepared meals and up-cycled snacks, to include beverages, at $7- $11 per person. This includes all overhead and paying each staff member between $23/hr - $30/hr. No-one in the country touches these numbers.

Get ready for a real look inside the work of rebuilding systems.

Next Up: Breaking Down our flagship pilot— Circular Table.