The Purpose Program
A facilitated journey that helps young people discover their strengths and values, make sense of their story, and design real pathways toward a contribution beyond themselves.
Schools can arrange in-school programs through the Life-wide Learning and Sister School Grant or the Student Activities Support Grant.
A long-term intention that is meaningful to you and reaches toward the world beyond yourself.
Researchers find it has three parts working together.
Purpose connects to what you genuinely care about, and to why you want to make a difference in the first place.
Purpose is a long-term goal orientation: a direction to move toward and an impact you want to have over time.
Purpose contributes to others: your community, your school, the wider world. It goes beyond personal success.
Five steps from who you are to what you'll do.
Each step builds on the previous steps: beginning inside, moving outward into the community, and returning with a purpose to act on. Select a step to see what it involves.
Explore Who You Are
Using positive-psychology tools, students map their signature character strengths, the values that guide them, and the passions that genuinely spark them. Everything starts from what's strong, not what's wrong.
Identify their signature character strengths
Surface the values that guide their choices
Name the issues and passions that energise them
Hear their strengths through the eyes of others
Cultivate the strengths most linked to purpose: spirituality, hope, love of learning, perseverance and curiosity
Describe their strengths and values with confidence
Recognise what they genuinely care about
Grounded in positive psychology.
Three principles shape every session, drawn from the science of how young people flourish.
We build on each student's character strengths and values rather than fixing deficits, drawing on positive psychology.
Real community engagement, not worksheets. Students discover purpose by contributing, then reflecting on what it meant.
When students mentor peers and contribute to others, they feel they matter, and that sense of impact deepens their own wellbeing and purpose.
Only about one in five young people report a clear purpose (Damon, 2008). A wandering search is healthy early on, but by emerging adulthood, those still without a pathway toward their purpose tend to report lower well-being (Bronk et al., 2009).
The character strengths most tied to purpose are spirituality, hope, love of learning, perseverance and curiosity (Schwartz et al., 2025; Russo-Netzer et al., 2023).
Purpose is linked to higher resilience, motivation, academic engagement and well-being, and to lower anxiety and distress.
Amid Hong Kong's results-focused schooling, purpose gives students a meaningful direction of their own and the agency to navigate pressure with confidence.
The Purpose Program runs as a school-based cohort across one to two semesters. We co-design scheduling, facilitation and outcomes with your team, and build a youth-impacts-youth model where students mentor students, so purpose carries on beyond the program itself.
Before you bring it in.
It's designed for secondary students and runs as a school-based cohort. The activities are strength-based and adapt to different year groups and starting points.
Help your students find their why.
Tell us about your students and we'll shape the program around them, with scheduling, facilitation and outcomes designed to fit your school.