One Year of Working on Purpose

It’s fitting that I found myself back at my alma mater, Wesleyan University, leading a workshop on Work on Purpose last week. After all, it was almost a year ago to the day that I led Echoing Green’s first Work on Purpose workshop, which just happened to be at this same school I know so well. That day, I nervously ran a workshop about aligning your heart with your head. At the time, the Work on Purpose book hadn’t even been released yet. I had high conviction, but didn’t yet know how the content would be received, or how best to deliver this message that I felt so strongly about. Would it work? Could this program help people develop a life that matters to them and to the world at large? And further, could Echoing Green expand its programmatic offerings beyond that for which we have been known for over twenty-five years—a seed funding Fellowship for social entrepreneurs—and make a home for a second program?

It is with great joy that, one year later, I can now say "Yes, it's possible." And we have more work ahead of us.

As I approach the one year anniversary of the release of the Work on Purpose book, and reflect on the development of this new program within Echoing Green, I pause to reflect on three crucial learnings from the past year:

1) Emerging professionals are hungry to find their higher social impact purpose. Unfortunately, the career pathing process provides them very few opportunities to do so. Big questions around our social purpose are simply not baked into the crucial conversations around big life decisions. Even those of us who are lucky enough to have found our purpose too often did so as a result of bottoming out, feeling empty, and out-of-whack first. Times of crisis forced us to ask ourselves what we wanted, but young people are ready to ask and answer these questions now: What would an impact-driven life look like? How can I matter more? What steps can I take to live up to my highest potential as a changemaker? And more.

2) More than ever that there is a call for more stories about other people’s impact-driven careers and lives. Not the pretty stuff. Not the hero stories. But the real deal.

3) In talking with thousands of young people around the country, I hear too many college grads report that the education system has failed them, in that it has not appropriately equipped them to find a job, let alone a meaningful career. They are asking those of us with access to best practices in the social sector to pass our secret sauce on in the form of competency-based models rooted in individual and peer-to-peer learning.

We're intrigued by these insights, and continue to shape Work on Purpose to better meet the needs of you, our community, everyday.

Over the last year, I am proud to say that we have reached over 23,000 people in classrooms, lecture halls, and through the fifty workshops we held across the country. Over 100,000 people have checked out our Work on Purpose online platform, and we partnered with sixty extraordinary organizations that work with Millennials who are actively asking, “What do I want to do with my life?”

While we have so much more work to do, I am inspired by Echoing Green’s work developing a world where we all claim a public purpose and life up to our highest potentials as changemakers, no matter our role.

If this inspires you half as much as it inspires me, I invite you to join us on the Work on Purpose online platform.  Ask and answer a few questions. Take a creative challenge.  And don’t settle for work that doesn’t matter to you.