Kristen Ferullo

I measure success by whether I positively impact one military family's life each day. Any time that I have made a positive impact on a military family's life, that's the most important impact. If every day I positively support one military family's life that needed something, then that's a success. That's how I measure success. I'm currently funding this myself personally because I believe in what I'm doing and believe that the impact I can make is meaningful. I always say you have to put the hard work in front of the hard work, and I live my life that way. Every day I put my heart into it. That's the only thing that drives the hard work. That's the only thing that makes you still be working at midnight and doing all of it, because you believe in it. It's not about knowing everything, it's about knowing the people that know what they need to know, the right people. My life is about collaboration at this time.

Kristen urges collaboration over competition, encourages exploration of multiple educational pathways (including technical and vocational training), and emphasizes advocacy finding and using your voice to support yourself and your family.

Some of the challenges I have faced are bureaucracy. The challenges I will face are funding. I think there is a belief that a lot of people are doing the work, and while they are, I think it looks different. I think my challenge is just going to be doing this as a singular person. My hope is to be able to grow and expand so that I can build the plane. Right now I'm building the plane and flying it at the same time. I'm committed to doing this right and not doing it quickly. It's more important for me to be accurate, because I am so tired of seeing websites with inaccurate information, broken links, you name it. I'm committed to building it the right way and maintaining it. The database we've created gets scrubbed every six months. Once scholarship season is over, we'll go back through, check every link for accuracy, see if there's any updates we can make, see if there are scholarships we missed that we can add in. There's a little bit of tediousness to it. But funding is really it. This was never about business for me. That's kind of where I'm having to shift my mindset. This was never about that. It was about handling a need that was out there.

Collaboration is at the center of everything I do. It's named Partners in Purpose for a reason. I want to work with those who have the true depth of character and commitment to make changes. I believe that if everyone's doing great work, we should all be collaborating and working together and unifying voice instead of continuing to do everything on our own. There's a quote by Viola Davis that really resonates with me: your purpose is not what you do, it's what happens to people when you do what you do. That's kind of where I am. At the end of the day, this isn't about me, it's about the impact I can make. Everything that I do helps to build so that I can serve more, I can do more, I can support more. I'm very focused on every individual having their own path. I think we get very narrow-focused on what we think the path should be, and part of the narrative I'm working to change is educating about the many opportunities there are for every path, so that people have choices and autonomy and they feel good in what they are achieving themselves. Anytime women can support women is so powerful, and unfortunately there have been a lot of women that I have worked with that are not that way. There's a seat at the table for everybody. Let's just do the thing. Actions speak louder than words, so if I act, then hopefully others will act as well.