Overview:
Youth mental health struggles and practitioner burnout share a root cause—systems that reward institutional outputs over cultivating purpose—and fixing it requires redesigning how we define and resource success.
We have a youth mental health crisis, and we have a burnout emergency for those serving youth. Provider burnout and youth mental health is often discussed as separate challenges, with separate solutions. But they are two sides of the same coin sharing a root cause: a lack of purpose.
Defined as “a self-organizing life aim”, we know, with mounting evidence, that a sense of purpose is one of the most powerful preventative factors we have against both mental health decline and educator burnout. The research shows people with a strong sense of purpose report higher resilience, healthier behaviors, greater life satisfaction, and stronger ability to navigate uncertainty. That is true for a sixteen-year-old trying to figure out who they are and the nonprofit director struggling to keep up with shifting external landscape and funder priorities. When we share this with the young people and practitioners in the field, you can see the sense of relief on their faces. A relief that says, “I am not alone”.
The gap, however, is that discussions about the needs of young people and the needs of the adults serving them have been separated as if they are not engaging in the same hallways. That separation in our mental model is constraining our ability to design for the cultivation of a sense of purpose.
As an education activist, I have experienced the youth development field from the stage and from the parking lot. The through-line across every seat I’ve held is this: What we measure as ‘success’ for students is tied to institutional accountability systems, not meaningful development of young people and their ability to thrive long term. As a result, ‘success’ in a career serving youth often requires bartering between purpose and production.
Across hundreds of conversations where we asked directly how youth and those that support them define success, ‘a sense of purpose’ was one of the most commonly stated yet least legible metric. This realization is what drove me to my role as the founding Executive Director of Purpose Commons, where I spend every day partnering with the Purpose Science and Innovation Exchange at Cornell University (PSiX) in the gap between the lived experiences of young people, those who serve them, and what the research tells us matters.
To be sure, purpose is not always easily measurable. Yet so much comes down to how success is measured. What gets rewarded. What gets punished. And, ultimately, what gets resourced. Students are measured on test scores and grades, schools on graduation rates and college acceptance rates, nonprofits on dollars raised and bodies served. Yet everywhere you look in youth development spaces you will find an elegantly worded vision of youth wellbeing, purpose, and mental health.
The mission statements say one thing; the evaluations, the spreadsheets, the report requirements show another. It’s not only killing the ability to cultivate a sense of purpose for youth, it is slowly (and efficiently) eating away at the well being of those who dedicated their lives to serving them.
I understand why, in a time of declining budgets and political tension, the instinct is to retreat to what feels safe and throw all of our weight into reactive programs. But we can’t reshuffle staff responsibilities, peer group support, or budget adjust our way out of a fundamental design misalignment.
When we launched Purpose Commons we began by asking more than 130 young people and youth-serving leaders what builds purpose. They shared that purpose is not something that is found, it is something that is cultivated. They named emotional safety, exploration, identity, and taking action as driving forces. But they also stressed that the systems we all operate in can either make room for purpose development or crowd it out.
When practitioners operate inside systems that reflect why they showed up, they do not need to be rescued from burnout. They are sustained by the work itself. When a young person has clarity on who they are and who they strive to become, they are better able to navigate the trials and tribulations that come with navigating the world in front of them. That is not idealism. The science supports it, the practitioners confirm it.
There is no ‘get purpose quick’ scheme that will solve all our challenges. The work ahead needs young people, funders, policymakers, and practitioners in the same room recognizing a shared problem that requires shared investment. Only together can we define what sustainable purpose cultivation looks like in practice, at scale, and across systems.
The question can no longer be whether we can afford to invest in purpose. It is whether we can justify continuing to invest in the same outputs that got us here.
TeRay Esquibel is a Public Voices Fellow on Youth Well-Being and Power with The OpEd Project and Hopelab. He serves as the founding Executive Director of Purpose Commons, where he works at the intersection of purpose science, youth development, and systems change.
