Our Purpose
To enable people to redesign their lives to embrace purpose and friendship.
The majority of people today are unfulfilled and lonely. In an effort to fill our lives, we lost our connection to ourselves and others.
Shared Purpose was founded to create intentional spaces for meaningful connection. We are a movement to create events, from dinner parties to retreats, where people can reconnect and take back our humanity.
Our Co-Founders
Aaron Hurst
Aaron has changed the way people around the world work and volunteer.
Aaron is an award-winning social entrepreneur who uses curiosity, courage, and care to navigate the world with purpose and build movements that have truly changed the world. He is the founder of the Taproot Foundation, Imperative, Board.dev, and Shared Purpose. More importantly, he is a husband, father, and friend.
Aaron is an extraordinary facilitator and thought leader who brings a unique blend of brilliance, creativity, and a touch of quirkiness to the journey of purpose discovery.
Award Winning Social Entrepreneur
Lendy Krantz
Lendy is a master operator and strategist who has helped leaders around the world bring their visions to life. From large-scale corporate transformations to budding organizations focused on growth and improvement, Lendy is an expert at distilling the essence of what an audience needs and transforming it into reality.
Lendy combines empathy and structure to develop paths for people to realize their potential together. She co-founded Shared Purpose with Aaron Hurst to build a platform that enables everyone to navigate their lives with purpose and thrive.
Our Story
Navigating Life Together
A Family Business
Aaron's grandfather was one of the first U.S. officers in Hitler's bunk at the end of WWII. In helping rebuild Germany and Europe he saw the incredible human cost of war and made it his mission to prevent WWIII. How? By connecting people with a shared purpose. He went on to develop the idea for the Peace Corps for JFK and to be the founding CEO of the Aspen Institute which he ran for over 20 years. These organizations helped connect the world and build understanding and empathy.
Purpose at Work
In 2001, Aaron founded the Taproot Foundation and changed the way business professionals volunteer. The model combined the power of purpose and connection to address a critical need in society. Working with the White House he built a $15 billion market for pro bono service in America and then partnered with BMW to bring the pro bono movement to the world.
A decade later, he wrote The Purpose Economy, documenting the growing need for purpose in the workforce and among consumers. Through breakthrough research with New York University, the University of Michigan, PwC, and LinkedIn, he helped develop our understanding of the science of purpose and how to truly activate it in the workplace. He became a frequent keynote speaker at conferences and corporate events helping to change the way we think about the role of work in our lives.
In 2013 he co-founded Imperative, a tech platform that has helped hundreds of thousands of people discover and activate purpose in their work. But in the process found that without social support, people didn't change. To truly change work you had to address purpose and connection.
Seeing the rising loneliness epidemic, in 2019, Aaron built and launched the first peer coaching platform that enables co-workers to serve as purpose coaches for each other. When the pandemic ended, it was clear the world had changed. The need for connection and to prioritize well-being was now deeply understood.
Shared Purpose - LIVE
Aaron founded Shared Purpose in 2023 to create live in-person events to help reconnect society and enable friends to support each other as they discover and align their lives with their purpose. It is a movement to bring meaningful conversations with friends back into all of our lives.
In 2023, Aaron personally designed and facilitated the initial Shared Purpose beta retreats and piloted the Shared Purpose dinner model. As we launch in 2024, we will begin to develop a community of facilitators and dinner hosts around the world who can bring this work to their communities.
Our vision is that within a few years, Shared Purpose retreats and dinners will become embedded in communities and become the foundation of a more connected society in which people are no longer disconnected from their purpose or each other.