What Nicholas Mukhtar learned about systems thinking from public health

I was 22 years old, driving through Detroit, when I saw a group of kids playing basketball with a deflated ball and two construction barrels for hoops. They lived in a major American city and didn’t even have a park. I had ten parks to choose from growing up. They didn’t choose their zip code. That image stayed with me, not as a charity case but as a systems failure. Somewhere between city budgets, federal health priorities, and decades of disinvestment, an entire neighborhood had been designed out of basic recreation.