We designed The Purpose Project to gather and share the wisdom of experienced social leaders to inspire and equip members of a younger generation to respond to the social issues that confront our world. We’re working to facilitate dialogue between different generations of social leaders—those who have spent their lives creating social change, and those who are now emerging and will be responsible for leading us forward. We believe that more interaction between these two groups will allow them to learn from, inspire, and support each other in becoming better agents of change in our communities, country, and world.

Sharing The Stories of Our Predecessors: The first element of our mission is focused on gathering and sharing the stories of accomplished social leaders. We believe that their stories, motivations, and experiences will help inspire more members of our generation to act, and that their lessons learned will help us to build on their foundation of accomplishment.

We’re collecting the stories and reflections of a diverse group of partner changemakers and sharing them with emerging leaders through short articles, Internet profiles, chapters in a forthcoming book, and face-to-face interactions between different generations. Our goal is to help emerging leaders understand what has come before them so that they will be more inspired and better equipped to imagine and create a better future.

Finding Their Relevance for the Challenges of Today: The second element of our mission is to help a future generation engage with the stories of our predecessors to find their relevance for today. We believe that emerging leaders would benefit from opportunities to share their questions, passions, doubts, and ambitions with the now-accomplished leaders who once stood in their shoes.

Therefore, we’re creating opportunities for members of different generations to engage in face-to-face dialogues about the process of creating social change. We’re also developing case studies, discussion guides, and teaching tools based on our partner changemakers’ stories to help others initiate similar discussions in classrooms and community groups across the country. Our goal is to stimulate conversation, thinking, learning, and collaboration amongst different generations of social leaders so that they can develop new and creative solutions to the challenges that confront our world.

Helping Our Generation Develop Our Own “Story:” The final element of our work focuses on helping members of our generation to take action on behalf of the issues that they care about. We believe that many young people have a desire to contribute, but struggle in determining how to become involved and where to start.

Therefore, we are working to connect emerging leaders with opportunities to translate their inspiration into action. We are developing a web-based “action toolkit” which will provide users with access to practical resources about social change, virtual connections to others who share their passions, and volunteer and service opportunities within their communities. Our goal is to help emerging leaders identify meaningful ways to become involved and access the tools and resources that they need to make an impact.

Continue to: Our Key Achievements to Date…