Cultivating Purpose Together
Introducing Purpose Commons to Substack
Across the country, young people are being told to find their purpose in a world that rarely helps them cultivate it.
Purpose Commons was founded to change that—We are a national initiative working to ensure that purpose is nurtured by every system and community young people navigate.
We bring together youth, researchers, funders, and practitioners to bridge the gap between what science knows about purpose and what communities can do to grow it.
At our core is a simple belief: purpose should not be left to chance or privilege. It’s something we build—and sustain—over time, together.
Our Vision: A world where purpose is nurtured by every system and community young people navigate.
Our Mission: To unite generations in co-creating a purpose movement grounded in research, practice, and story—to ask better questions, and embed purpose cultivation in the systems shaping young lives.
Our Values:
Youth-Centered Design — Young people aren’t participants in our work; they’re co-designers.
Authentic Partnership — We build with communities, not for them.
Evidence & Rigor — We ground our work in strong science.
Continuous Learning — We stay curious, reflective, and responsive to what we learn.
These values keep us aligned with our guiding principles: start with lived experience, uphold scientific rigor, translate insight into practice, and design for both local relevance and national impact.
Why This Work Matters
We’re living in a time of rapid and uncertain change.
Young people are growing up surrounded by constant information, shifting expectations, and an unclear sense of what the future will hold.
As the world evolves faster than our institutions can adapt, purpose has become one of the few steady forces we can cultivate—and a shared responsibility across generations.
The science is clear: purpose isn’t abstract. People with a strong sense of purpose report higher life satisfaction, healthier behaviors, and greater resilience.
Communities anchored in shared purpose also show higher civic trust and belonging.
Taken together, these findings reveal that purpose strengthens both individual thriving and the social fabric that connects us.
Purpose, in other words, is one of the most powerful protective factors for well-being.
In a moment when institutions feel stretched and social bonds feel fragile, that matters more than ever.
A generation connected to its “why” will be better prepared to navigate uncertainty, build community, and shape the future with intention.
Yet, cultivating purpose can’t be left to individuals alone. It’s a systemic challenge.
Now here’s the problem: our systems weren’t designed to cultivate purpose—they were designed to produce outputs.
We track grades, attendance, and test scores, but rarely whether young people feel connected to what they’re learning—or why it matters. We teach skills for achievement, but not always the habits of reflection, contribution, and belonging that sustain meaning over time.
The environments that shape young lives—schools, families, organizations, and policies—must be designed and resourced to value growth not just by what they produce, but by who they’re becoming.
That’s the challenge Purpose Commons was created to meet.
The research paints a clear picture of why purpose matters.
The next step is understanding how purpose is cultivated.
To do that, we connect directly with youth and communities who live this work every day. Together, we ask better questions, co-design studies, and build the evidence needed to turn insight into meaningful action.
How We Do It: A Partnership Between Science and Design
Purpose Commons partners with the Purpose Science & Innovation Exchange (PSiX) at Cornell University—our sister organization that anchors the academic side of the work.
PSiX advances the science of purpose—research, measurement, and theory that explain what purpose is and why it matters.
Purpose Commons applies design thinking and community research to explore how purpose is experienced and sustained in practice. Then works with communities to embed purpose cultivation into the systems they rely on.
Together, we create a dynamic loop of discovery and application: community insight shapes research questions, and scientific insight translates into programs, systems, and policies that help purpose flourish.
Our Strategic Framework
Our work is organized around three reinforcing pillars:
Activate: Mobilize youth-serving systems to embed purpose measurement and cultivation practices.
Advance: Generate rigorous, community-driven science through co-designed studies and collaborations.
Amplify: Shift public understanding and collective commitment to “cultivating purpose” as a shared public priority.
Together, these pillars make Purpose Commons both a bridge and a catalyst—linking community wisdom with academic rigor, and turning insight into impact.
The Plot Development Strategy
We think of our work akin to tending a garden. A gardener doesn’t work the entire garden at once—they develop distinct plots, each with its own crops, conditions, and care requirements. But before any planting begins, a gardener must first understand the soil, the climate, and what the community needs to grow.
Similarly, our Plot Development Strategy begins with deep listening—understanding the conditions where young people are growing via human centered design research. We identify shared themes across communities about what helps purpose take root. This provides us with Plot Themes From there, we co-design Plot Projects—community-benefiting studies like The Contribution Project or supporting our partners at PSiX with the National Purpose Survey—each cultivating different aspects of purpose science in partnership with specific communities.
Each project connects local practice to national research, generating knowledge that advances science while strengthening youth-serving systems.
Design Research Findings: The Foundation
In 2025, we engaged more than 130 young people and youth-serving leaders to understand how purpose shows up in real life and what helps it grow.
Four interdependent conditions consistently rose to the surface: emotional safety, exploration, identity, and action.
Surrounding these are the systemic forces that shape the environment where purpose unfolds—language, framing, and structural barriers.
These aren’t static backdrops; they form a living system that continuously influences how young people and those who serve them experience and cultivate purpose.
Our language and framing shape the values we hold and the behaviors we reward, while structures and incentives feed back to shape that language and belief. This feedback loop—between values, language, incentives, and structures—sets the conditions in which youth either thrive or struggle to cultivate purpose.
Together, these insights describe the starting point in our quest to understand the conditions under which purpose is cultivated.
These six core themes now guide our collective research and action agenda:
Language & Framing – How we talk about purpose matters.
Emotional Safety – Belonging and trust are prerequisites.
Exploration & Exposure – Purpose grows through experimentation and reflection.
Identity & Lived Experience – Purpose is grounded in who we are.
Purpose Through Action – Purpose becomes real through contribution.
Structural Barriers – Systems must evolve to reward meaning, not just performance.
Where We’re Headed
This fall, we’ll host the Purpose Jam in Denver, bringing together youth, researchers, funders, and practitioners to co-design the next wave of Plot Projects and shared research questions.
What we capture from the Purpose Jam will lay the foundation for a set of multi-generational and diverse design teams who will lead in developing new national scale plot projects.
By 2028, we aim to:
Reach at least 10,000 youth through systems that intentionally measure and cultivate purpose.
Implement purpose practices at institutions collectively serving at least 10,000 youth.
Produce community-designed publications and reports that bridge science and lived experience.
Shift public language so cultivating purpose becomes the norm—and a shared public priority.
Building in Public
Purpose Commons is more than a project—it’s a movement in motion.
Here on Substack, we’ll be sharing stories, insights, experiences, and reflections from the field as we grow this work together.
You can expect to read about:
What we’re learning from youth and practitioners across the country.
The questions and tensions shaping our next phase of research.
Reflections from our team and partners across the ecosystem.
Real-world examples of purpose in action inside classrooms, community programs, and policy spaces.
This space will evolve alongside the work itself.
Our hope is that you’ll not only follow along, but contribute your own experiences and questions as we learn, build, and imagine together.
Because purpose isn’t something we find alone. It’s something we cultivate—together.
We’re still figuring this out, and we want you in the conversation.
What questions does this raise for you? What have you seen work in your community?
Couldn't agree more; this piece rigorusly articulates the systemic imperative for cultivating purpose, echoing your consistent, insightful vision.
I love this vision. I’d love to hear more about how you’re defining purpose. Beyond this, while I heard how belonging is a subtheme, I want to hear more about the research/science behind the connection between authenticity, belonging, and purpose.