What Drives You?

From navigating early parenthood as a high school student to becoming a nationally recognized leader in youth development and education equity, TeRay Esquibel (BSBA ’15) has always been driven by a commitment to uplift his community and develop the next generation of leaders.

Growing up in southwest Denver, Esquibel was an athlete who had his sights set on playing sports competitively—until a football injury set him on a different path.

“I couldn't play sports anymore. And two months after that, I found out my now-wife was pregnant. I was 16,” he says.

With athletics out of the picture and a family to care for, Esquibel set out to find a new way forward. He had participated in Summer Link to College, a five-day residential experience hosted by the Volunteers in Partnership (VIP) program at the University of Denver that brings local high school to campus to get a taste of college life. When it came time to choose a college, that early exposure—along with receiving a Daniels Fund Scholarship and housing support—made DU the right fit.

When he arrived on campus, he started working as a VIP mentor, and the VIP office became his refuge. “It was a place where you could get your homework done and just hang out. It was a community,” he says. “Honestly, I don't know if I would have finished college without that program.”

He studied marketing in the Daniels College of Business and immersed himself in service and leadership, working in Undergraduate Admission and pulling from his own life experiences to reimagine outreach efforts. Most of the college visits and information sessions he attended in high school were “bland,” Esquibel says, and didn’t really speak to students and their families.

His goal was simple: “I wanted to be able to represent what the college experience could be in a way that would connect with people that were coming from communities like mine.” 

Esquibel accomplished just that, by helping to bring more Denver Public School (DPS) students to campus for visits. “It made me feel like I had a home—like I was contributing to the campus in a meaningful way,” he says. “At the same time, I made an impact on my community, which is the whole reason why I was going to school in the first place.”

After graduation, Esquibel became a fellow at the El Pomar Foundation, a Colorado Springs-based organization that provides grants and programming related to education, health, and human services. He then returned to DU as an admission counselor, continuing the programs he helped shape as a student. But he soon realized the issues he wanted to address stemmed from something deeper—the education system itself. He joined RootED, a nonprofit focused on advancing racial equity and student success in Denver schools by developing investment strategies that uplift community voices in education policy.

He began noticing a troubling pattern: There was a lack of young alumni voices in conversations surrounding policy, investments, and changes to the DPS system.

That disconnect sparked Esquibel to co-found Ednium: The Alumni Collective, an organization that set out to elevate recent DPS graduates as thought leaders and change-makers in the public school system. The organization helped make financial literacy a graduation requirement in DPS schools and expanded access to millions of dollars in scholarships for low-income students.

An important question arose for Esquibel from this work: What exactly does success look like?

It’s not the same for everyone, he says, but there are common themes: financial security, mental and physical well-being, healthy relationships, a sense of self, and a sense of purpose. And while most of them are fairly easy to measure, evaluating purpose is less clear.

What is clear, Esquibel says, is that a lack purpose is widespread. Whether you ask teachers why they teach, or students why they’re studying, “They're saying, ‘I'm doing things because I think that's what I'm supposed to do. And nobody's ever really asked me why,’” he says. “Everybody's asking the same question. Purpose seems to be something everybody's seeking.”

And with a growing body of research connecting a sense of purpose to living longer and having better relationships and more career satisfaction, purpose, Esquibel believes, isn’t a luxury—it’s a human need.

Earlier this year, he put that belief into action by joining forces with the co-founders of Purpose Commons (Jana Haratatos and Anthony Burrow), a national nonprofit that bridges research and practice to support purpose development in adolescence, as its first executive director.

Specifically, they connect grassroots organizations that help young people find purpose with a national network of researchers—with the goal of helping inform their work and turning evidence into strategies that work in real life.

“Purpose isn't something to be obtained and found,” Esquibel says. “It's something to be maintained and cultivated. And if we can match the on-the-ground wisdom and experience to academic research, we might have a real shot at tackling this thing and shifting our systems towards really being about identifying purpose and navigating the world.”