Our Approach
We envision a world where all young people navigate systems designed to support purpose-rich environments that provide opportunities and relationships to encourage the exploration and authentic pursuit of their purpose.
Purpose Commons is building a dynamic learning network where collaborators across the youth development ecosystem work together to ask the questions that matter to young people, apply new approaches, share learnings and highlight new insights into purpose. All so that we can do what matters most: support young people in realizing their full potential.
What We’re Exploring Now
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Design Teams
Design Teams are intergenerational, multi-disciplinary groups of Community Fellows — youth, practitioners, researchers, and systems leaders — who come together not to talk past one another, but to build with one another. Organized around core questions about how purpose is cultivated, each team surfaces patterns from lived experience and co-develops questions that are both community-rooted and research-ready.
Together, they lay the foundation for new insights, practices, and research that can shape how purpose is cultivated, understood and supported across contexts.
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Choose to Be Curious Podcast
TeRay Esquibel joins the Choose to Be Curious podcast for a conversation about maintaining purpose, bridging research and practice, and why the questions we ask matter as much as the answers we find.
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Bringing the Future into Focus
What must learning systems look like to produce engaged, informed citizens for our pluralistic democracy? This living anthology from LearnerStudio brings together educators, researchers, and practitioners exploring what young people need to flourish in the Age of AI — featuring an essay by our own TeRay Esquibel.
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A Launchpad for Life
The Commission on Purposeful Pathways — led by Education First and supported by the Gates Foundation — released its blueprint for transforming how high school prepares young people for fulfilling careers and lives. Our team served as reviewers, helping shape a report that calls on systems leaders to embed purpose, belonging, and social capital into every pathway.
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2025 Design Research Report
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. This work was done in partnership with PSiX at Cornell University and In Tandem. These insights describe the starting point in our quest to understand the conditions under which purpose is cultivated.
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The Contribution Project
The Contribution Project provides young people funding to pursue contributions they value—with no strings attached. Through partnerships with youth-serving organizations nationwide, we're researching how the freedom to contribute on one's own terms fosters purpose development and well-being and catalyzes positive change in one’s community. The Contribution Project has empowered hundreds of young people to research, plan, and create impact.
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Purpose in Action
Our collaboration with This Teenage Life explores purpose through multiple perspectives — from researchers in conversation with teenagers discussing the science, to young people sharing their contribution journeys and documenting their experiences in real-time. Together, we co-created media by, with, and for young people that elevates youth stories in their own voices and brings purpose science to life through authentic, youth-led storytelling.
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Youth/Youth-Serving Organizations Co-Design Lab
We center young people and communities as experts, not just participants. In partnership with In Tandem, young people serve as co-designers—leading research, shaping the questions we ask, making sense of findings, and designing solutions rooted in their lived experiences. This process grounds our work in what matters most to youth and guides future phases of exploration.
What We Do Differently
We don’t claim to have all the answers; instead, we’re creating a network to ask better questions. By connecting the brilliance and collective wisdom of researchers, young people, and those who support them, we’ll uncover opportunities to create the conditions that enable purpose cultivation.
Purpose Commons is dedicated to exploring new ways society can nurture young people’s sense of purpose. Our work follows a collaborative approach that brings young people, researchers, and communities together to change how purpose is explored, understood, and supported. This ecosystem involves:
Engaging young people, researchers, and communities to understand real-world experiences, questions, and expertise.
Piloting innovative approaches in partnership with researchers at the Purpose Science and innovation Exchange (PSiX) at Cornell University to test and refine innovative ideas.
Listening and capturing community-driven insights from young people and their communities to further shape our questions and guide the growth of research.
Scaling and sharing impactful models and approaches to shift how purpose is understood and measured across systems and communities.
Our role is to connect the brilliance of our communities to surface unanswered questions, support novel collaborations, and explore new applications of science and research — all in service of reshaping how systems can better support young people in exploring and cultivating their sense of purpose.
From Questions to Action
We think of our work like tending a community garden — developing distinct plots, each with its own questions, conditions, and collaborators.
Our Plot Development Strategy is how we turn community insight into rigorous, actionable research. It starts with deep listening — understanding the conditions where young people are growing. From there, we surface shared themes and co-design Plot Projects: collaborative studies and pilots that connect local practice with national research, generating knowledge that advances science while strengthening youth-serving systems. The Contribution Project — which explores how the freedom to contribute on one's own terms fosters purpose development — is one example of this process in action.
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