From the Design Table: What Makes Purpose Possible?
When we launched our Design Teams this spring, we started with a simple yet deceptively complex question:
What does purpose mean to us?
We knew there wouldn’t be a single answer. Purpose is deeply personal, shaped by our experiences, relationships, identities, and the communities we move through. Still, we hoped that by bringing together youth, practitioners, researchers, and systems leaders, we might begin to uncover some common threads.
Over the last several months, that’s exactly what we’ve been doing.
Through conversations in our Design Teams and our Youth Advisory Board, we’ve been listening closely for patterns, tensions, and questions that continue to surface.
And while we haven’t landed on definitive answers, we have found ourselves returning to one idea again and again:
Reflection.
Not necessarily reflection as an activity. Not simply thinking about the past. Something deeper.
A condition.
A process through which experiences become meaningful.
A way of making sense of who we are, what we’ve lived through, and who we are becoming.
Identity & Lived Experience: Is Reflection Part of Identity Development?
The Identity & Lived Experience Design Team began by exploring questions about culture, belonging, self-understanding, and the ways our lived experiences shape us.
As stories emerged, so did a new line of inquiry.
Community Fellows and youth from our Youth Advisory Board shared experiences of immigration, family expectations, faith, community, leadership, hardship, and transition. Yet what stood out wasn’t necessarily the experiences themselves. It was how people talked about them.
Again and again, people described realizing something about themselves because of an experience.
They spoke about understanding themselves differently after something happened.
They described moments of looking back and making meaning.
This has led us to explore questions such as:
What are the conditions that make identity development possible?
Is reflection one of those conditions?
What role do agency, sovereignty, and freedom play in developing a sense of self?
Do people need dedicated spaces for reflection and identity development, or can these processes emerge independently?
How do major life transitions create opportunities for identity shifts and self-discovery?
As we listened across conversations, we began noticing a pattern. The experiences people described were incredibly different, but the process they used to talk about those experiences sounded very similar. Whether someone was reflecting on family expectations, faith, leadership, or a major life transition, they often described a period of sensemaking. Looking back, interpreting what happened, and connecting those experiences to a deeper understanding of who they were. This led us to wonder whether experiences alone shape identity or whether identity develops through a process of reflection and meaning making from those experiences. In turn, that prompted us to explore the conditions that make this kind of reflection possible.
Exploration, Exposure & Failing Forward: What Helps People Learn From Experience?
Meanwhile, the Exploration, Exposure & Failing Forward Design Team has been focused on how exposure, opportunity, and the ability to try and fail safely shape purpose development. Many conversations have centered around access: access to opportunities, exposure to new possibilities, supportive adults, and environments where young people can try new things without fear that one mistake will define them.
What actually happens after an experience?
Over time, the team began to push beyond access alone. Having an experience is not the same thing as learning from it.
Exposure alone does not guarantee growth. Failure alone does not automatically become resilience. Trying something new does not always lead to greater clarity about who we are or what matters to us.
The team began wondering whether the missing piece is the opportunity to process what happened — to name what was learned, what shifted, what felt possible, and what still felt out of reach.
One thread that surfaced in these conversations is that young people’s “container for belief” can be shaped by the adults, systems, and material conditions around them. When that container is too small, exploration can feel risky or unrealistic. When it expands, young people may have more room to imagine, try, fail, reflect, and choose again.
That has led us to explore questions such as:
What helps young people learn from exploration?
What allows failure to become growth rather than discouragement?
How do young people make sense of experiences that challenge or stretch them?
What role do adults, relationships, and systems play in creating the safety needed to explore?
What role does reflection play in turning experience into insight?
A Theme Emerging Across Teams
Perhaps the most interesting development has been seeing similar themes emerge across entirely different conversations.
Whether discussing identity, belonging, exploration, failure, transitions, or purpose itself, people often return to the same idea:
Experiences matter.
But what may matter just as much is our ability to make meaning of those experiences.
This observation became even more pronounced during recent Youth Advisory Board conversations.
When youth described the experiences that shaped them, they spoke about immigrating to a new country, joining sports teams, becoming older siblings, finding community, navigating family expectations, starting businesses, preparing for college, and experiencing major life transitions. Yet they rarely described the experiences alone as the thing that changed them.
Instead, they talked about “discovering strengths they didn’t know they had,” realizing they were “more resilient than they imagined,” understanding how different environments shaped who they were, and navigating the tension between “their own aspirations and the expectations placed upon us.” Several youth reflected on how experiences helped them better understand themselves, while others described how opportunities, relationships, and challenges gave them new perspectives on who they were becoming.
In many ways, the stories were less about the experiences themselves and more about the meaning they made from them.
Their stories echoed what both Design Teams have been exploring.
Looking Ahead: The Next Phase
As we prepare to enter Sprint 2 of the Design Team process, our focus will begin shifting from broad exploration toward greater clarity.
Our goal over the next several weeks is to identify a central theme within each Design Team and develop a set of exploratory questions that are both community-rooted and research-ready.
Those questions will travel with us to the Translational Research Summer Institute Convening (TRSI) later this month, where we’ll partner with a broader group of purpose researchers, practitioners, and community partners to further refine these ideas and begin developing experiments that can help us better understand these questions at scale.
We don’t know exactly where these conversations will lead.
We’re still in the middle of the discovery process.
We don’t yet know where these conversations will lead. As we move into Sprint 2, our focus will shift from broad exploration toward identifying the conditions that make purpose development possible and testing those ideas alongside youth, researchers, practitioners, and community partners.
If we’ve learned anything from this first phase, it’s this: reflection may be central to how young people make meaning of their experiences.
And if that’s true, what does it take to make reflection possible?
That’s one of the questions we’ll carry with us into the next phase of this work.