Have you ever asked yourself the question? What do I want to be when I grow up? Many people have, and over time our answers can change and usually do. As we move through life many times we have goals, and then once we achieve those goals we still seem to want more. I know I sure have, and I believe this experience might also be true for many of you.

In October of 2024, I personally was reaching the same transition point. My status was the following: Through God's grace, I had managed to re-imagine and re-build my career pathway and oh had it been a challenging journey filled with a re-discovery of all the wonderful things we tend to have inside. However understated these things might be. I'm talking about things like lived experience, some might even call it "wisdom." Publicly my peers had also identified my work as an example. I was playing a key role in helping make real behavioral health transformation on the ground in partnership with federal and state entities.

It was around this time where I started re-visiting the question of "What's next?" I believed that I had many lessons that I could share with others and more than anything I was interested in lifting up youth, teens, and young adults. This has always been where my heart resonates most.

Fast forward to today, this new step has now impacted many people far beyond what I could have imagined. Even more exciting it appears to work with all types of people willing to set aside 2 to 3 hours a week to have real conversations with others in small group and one to one settings. This has led to global conversations with people, leaders, and agencies that also impact many types of people in meaningful ways. The aspect that is even more unexpected is that I literally tripled my earned wages while truly pursuing a solution I know can elevate others towards their purpose.

This is Voice Up. We connect people to purpose.

In the early days (October 2024), within about 30 days this initiative began to receive interest at an unprecedented clip. So much so I had to figure out a way to slow the interest and uptake down. Throughout the process I implemented a variety of strategies to screen people out but even with these strategies in place people still kept coming. At one point I was personally receiving one application every 15 seconds of the day for a free internship position focused on improving your health and connecting to your purpose. I received so many applications that two of the larger job boards (global brands) actually stopped posting my opportunities because I was getting too high a response rate for an unpaid internship. It was literally disrupting their business model.

This in itself represents the type of need that exists today in our society around the true experiences of improving our mental health and reducing our collective isolation from each other. We have all the technology we need but we don't have those true relationships that sustain us and make our lives better. Those relationships require a safe space and a supportive community that's willing to embrace patience, precision, and humility.

I knew that the information I was collecting represented something unique. However, I did not know the degree to which this dataset had the potential to open the door to a potentially new line of evidence based inquiry focused on studying how people connect to purpose, and even a new way to measure purpose within individuals and communities.

Many times people use the word purpose in the context of a theoretical or abstract type of thing. At Voice Up this is not the case. We actually are able to measure, track, and predict things focused on what people actually do and how they go about creating real steps that clarify what their purpose might be and how it evolves over time. We believe the applications have the potential to uncover several significant truths about our collective journey as humans (especially in this age of artificial intelligence). We are using this insight to launch an entire new field and entirely new institution dedicated to that discipline. All are welcome. We connect people to purpose. One conversation at a time.