From the Design Table: Introducing Design Teams!
Where Purpose Becomes Practice
At Purpose Commons, we often say that purpose isn’t something you find, it’s something you cultivate.
Cultivation doesn’t happen in isolation. It happens in community. In conversation. In the space between lived experience and research.
Design Teams are where that cultivation comes to life at Purpose Commons.
Who Is Involved? Meet Our Community Fellows!
Each Design Team brings together a group of powerful Community Fellows (youth, practitioners, researchers, and systems leaders) committed to bringing their lived experience, their expertise, and their questions into a shared space where new insights can take shape together.
Meet the inaugural cohort and learn more about their backgrounds HERE!
What are Design Teams?
Design Teams are a 9-month collaboration that brings together youth, practitioners, researchers, and systems leaders to explore how purpose is cultivated and sustained.
These teams are not traditional research groups. And they’re not tasked with building more traditional programs. They are shared spaces for sense-making, co-creation, and discovery, where different forms of knowledge come together to generate new insights, reconnect with old wisdom, and dream of new possibilities.
To kick things off, we started with a simple question: What does purpose actually mean to us?
What emerged wasn’t a single definition, but a range of lived experiences. They were fluid, evolving, and deeply personal. Even in these early conversations, it’s clear that purpose isn’t something static. It’s shaped over time, through experience, relationships, and reflection. To be sure, this seems to be consistent with what the literature has identified as well.
In short Design Teams are:
Surfacing patterns from lived experience
Engaging research in more accessible, meaningful ways
Co-developing questions that are both community-rooted and research-ready
Exploring ideas that could evolve into real-world pilots and studies
Why Design Teams?
Across our work, one thing has become clear: there is no shortage of insight about purpose, but too often, those insights live in silos.
Research stays in academic spaces. Practice happens in isolation. And lived experience is rarely treated as expertise.
At the same time, purpose science, although growing, often lives far from the everyday contexts where purpose is actually experienced and shaped.
Design Teams are our response to that gap.
They are designed to connect what’s known with what’s lived, bringing research into the world, and the world into research.
Our bet is that bringing these perspectives together, something new becomes possible:
not just understanding purpose, but innovation in building the conditions that allow purpose to grow meaningfully and intentionally for all youth.
What We’re Exploring First
Our first Design Teams are focused on two areas that have consistently surfaced from the field as key aspects of young people’s experience when it comes to Purpose. These themes emerged from our Design Research Report.
Identity & Lived Experience
How do young people’s identities, cultures, and lived experiences shape the way purpose develops over time?
This theme explores how meaning, belonging, and self-understanding influence what feels purposeful, and what feels possible.
What are the conditions that build a sense of identity? There are a lot of people doing amazing work in this arena. How might better understanding the ways in which purpose is tied to identity development help strengthen, expand, or bring innovation to this important work?
Exploration, Exposure, & Failing Forward
What opportunities do young people have to try, stretch, and discover what matters to them?
This theme focuses on access, experimentation, and the role of failure as a critical part of developing purpose over time.
How do we embed purpose and exploration in everyday moments? What are young people exposed to, who they see themselves becoming, and do they feel supported in trying, failing, and trying again.
Together, these themes help us identify opportunities to unveil the conditions that actually make purpose possible.
And more importantly, help us ask: How do we build systems that sustain it?
This Is Just the Beginning
Design Teams are not a finished product, they are a starting point. A way to build together, learn together, and ask better questions, together.
Each month, we’ll share what we’re learning in real time with reflections, insights, tensions, and the questions that are still unfolding–through this substack series titled “From the Design Table”.
We invite you to follow along as this work continues to evolve.