Built from the inside of a crisis.
David Kozlowski didn't build Social Health Systems from theory. He built it from the inside of a depression that nearly killed him.
Raised in Carlsbad, California by his Samoan/Hawaiian grandmother — who fought for custody after his biological mother's struggles with mental health and addiction — David earned a football scholarship to the University of Utah. A series of concussions left him mentally and emotionally unstable, and in 1995 he attempted suicide.
What saved him was therapy. What followed was a 26-year career proving a single, foundational truth:
The best suicide prevention is connection.
Connection is infrastructure.
Social connection is not a personality trait. It is not a cultural accident. It is a set of learnable, measurable behaviors that people develop — or don't — based on the infrastructure around them.
We have infrastructure for physical health. We have infrastructure for mental health. We have almost none for social health. That's what Social Health Systems builds — not programs, but infrastructure: a trainable framework, a measurable standard, and an accreditation that makes organizational commitment accountable. What is Social Health? →
David Kozlowski
David is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, the host of the OG Therapy podcast (millions of downloads), a TEDx speaker, and the architect of the first Social Health curriculum — piloted at Herriman High School in 2020 after the community lost seven youth to suicide in a single year. The Four Pillars of Social Health are the codification of that work.
From seven suicides to a national framework.
The framework is the business. The mission is the kids.
Behind Social Health Systems is the Social Health Initiative (SHi), a 501(c)(3) non-profit that has run free teen support groups, community programs, and school interventions since 2011. SHi is where the work started — and where every dollar of donated funding goes. Get involved with SHi →
The gap has never been more visible.
The U.S. Surgeon General declared loneliness a public health epidemic in 2023. A generation came out of a global pandemic with diminished relational capacity. Employers face an engagement and retention crisis that culture initiatives alone aren't solving. The social health infrastructure gap has never been more costly — and Social Health Systems has spent 15 years building what's now urgently needed.