Welcome back to One Bright Idea, a series where partners shine a light on one idea from the field that’s fueling them forward.

We recently welcomed the nXu team to our Seattle office for a learning session, modeling how they walk young people through an exercise of articulating their purpose. A Bezos Family Foundation partner since 2018, nXu has developed a comprehensive purpose, SEL, and college and career readiness model that catalyzes students to develop their purpose, invest in their future, and live thriving lives. nXu recently announced that it has earned CASEL approval as a SELECT Program, the highest designation for SEL providers.

nXu’s founding Executive Director, Yutaka Tamura, shares how helping young people clarify their purpose, or unique identity and aspirations, is threaded throughout nXu’s school-based curriculum, educator training and development, assessment system, and direct student programming.

One thing that is bringing me, and nXu hope, is that over the past few years, there’s been a paradigm shift in education; a growing number of educators across the country are realizing that to ensure that young people can live thriving lives, we must anchor each and every young person in a meaningful sense of purpose that can serve as an internal North Star as they navigate the multitude of decisions, choices, and uncertainties that lie ahead.

nXu’s initially focused on building a curricular experience that not only cultivated purpose but also ensured that young people fostered connection and a sense of belonging. When we launched in 2017, we started as a youth-facing program model that eventually operated in multiple cities. In each city, we recruited students from about a dozen or more high schools, which meant that students came alone or in pairs, not knowing the rest of the cohort. So, from the get-go, we had to intentionally build connection and community across lines of difference.

We’ve also intentionally integrated career readiness content into our curriculum, and along the way, young people learn about their purpose. We believe social-emotional learning should be connected to career exploration and is core to purpose or identity development.

There are organizations working to help people develop social capital and support career exploration. But we don’t know of any other organization in the country that has explicitly anchored around five developmental areas—purpose, identity, social-emotional learning, social capital, and career exploration—that are often introduced to young people in discreet ways, if at all.

In the fast-changing workforce, purpose development is at the nexus of identity development, social-emotional learning, social capital development, and career exploration. Purpose is a deeply active part of who we are as people. Our operating definition of purpose asks young people to identify a few things to clarify their purpose:

• What brings you joy?

• What are your strengths?

• What are the needs in the world that activate you?

There are an infinite number of careers that a young person can consider. For young people to thrive professionally, we must support each of them to identify a career pathway that uniquely resonates with them.

Watch Yutaka share more about what’s bringing him hope right now:

Bezos Family Foundation is proud to support nXu in its development of a comprehensive purpose implementation model for schools and out-of-school time programs.