Speaker A lost his brother to suicide and founded the Covenant of Education to help others transform pain into purpose. Dimash, a disengaged teenager in Kazakhstan, found direction through the program. His mother said, "I got my son back."
My life really didn't start to take this massive spin until I was 20 years old, where my brother had taken his life after having suffered from a brain injury 10 years prior. There is nothing I can do to change anything that had happened. And I was filled with guilt, felt shame, anxiety. I had spent about half a year trying to get into this closed retreat out in Oregon. It was standing for hours on end singing hymns. Everyone starts singing and I open my mouth. I want to sing along, but no words come out of my mouth. I feel in that moment that my brother's spirit is right there with me. As if all of the years of pain, anguish, guilt, and just this hate inside me, this pain of why did he go and why didn't he tell me what he was planning on doing just goes away in an instant. It's replaced with empathy, love and understanding. He was my guardian angel who protected me for so many years. He was always there, and I never focused on that part. I always just focused on how he left, but not how he lived. I realized I had to do something in his memory to honor how he lived. To be that same guardian angel for others the way he was for me. And that's how COE was started.
There's a mother in Kazakhstan I think about often. She called me about her son Dimash going to one of the best schools in Kazakhstan at the time. She told me that he has everything, every advantage, and just watching him throw it all away. Dimash didn't believe there was anything special about him. He went through our program And by the end, he'd found something he couldn't name before. A purpose he could build his life around. His mother called me after and said, "I got my son back." At the moment he could have been broken, you helped him find his spirit. Someone truly believed in him and saw something special. And that's what we do. We help teenagers see the extraordinary thing inside them before the world convinces them it's not there.
And so if I have one message or one takeaway from sharing my story is it's not about where you come from and it's not about what you've been put through. It's about how you're able to transform those experiences into something meaningful for yourself and find new ways to contribute to society, to your community.
And I'm looking for people who believe that purpose finding shouldn't be an accident of privilege. So if this moved you, if you know what it feels like to be lost, or to watch someone you love lose themselves, I'd love to talk. My name is Izzy Kiver, and this is the Covenant of Education.
