By: Daniella Stewart
There are books that exist to sell ideas. There are books that exist to build platforms. And then there are books that exist because someone saw something they could not ignore and decided a meaningful response was to bring 21 people together and ask them to tell the truth.
Wings of Purpose: How Vision and Intention Propel Success is presented as the third kind.
M Teresa Lawrence, founder and Executive Director of The Trueness Project, has spent years working in communities where young people are seeking, not just resources, but permission. Permission to believe their inner life matters. Permission to take their dreams seriously. Permission to understand that their truth is worth living, even when the world around them may not be set up to reflect that back.
When she stood in front of more than 12,000 students in Kenya over ten days and watched what happened in those rooms, something became clearer that had been forming for years.
This book is the result.
A Mission in Multiple Forms
The Trueness Project is not just a nonprofit connected to an anthology. The anthology is one expression of a mission that, according to the organization, reaches across Africa, Nepal, Wyoming, and beyond, through book donations, youth mentorship programs, and a commitment to building Butterfly Libraries in communities around the world.
According to The Trueness Project, 95 percent of proceeds from Wings of Purpose go directly to that work. Each book sold is, in M Teresa Lawrence’s words, a vote for the idea that inner transformation and outer impact are connected.
The contributors in the anthology understand that. The students in The Trueness Project’s programs live it. M Teresa Lawrence describes her role simply as building the bridge between them.
A Global Conversation About What Purpose Can Mean
One notable aspect of the curation process was navigating different cultural understandings of what purpose, vision, and success mean across 21 contributors from multiple countries and backgrounds.
A Western narrative of purpose can tend to be individual and goal-oriented. Contributors from Africa and Asia brought a more communal understanding, where purpose is connected to family, ancestors, and the collective. Rather than smooth those differences over in the editing process, M Teresa Lawrence made a deliberate choice to let them stand in conversation with each other.
That productive friction between different ways of knowing is part of what helps the anthology become more than a collection of personal essays. It is presented as a cross-cultural dialogue about what it means to be alive and to matter.
Why This Moment Specifically
M Teresa Lawrence is direct about the timing of the book’s arrival. She believes many people are living through a crisis of meaning. People have been climbing ladders for years and arriving at the top to discover the ladder may have been leaning against the wrong wall.
Wings of Purpose is for people who have stood at that top rung and asked: now what?
It is not a book about hustle. It is not a book about optimization. It is about the quieter question underneath all of that: what is my life actually for? M Teresa Lawrence believes answering that question honestly can be both a personal act and a broader one.
The Child at the Center of Everything
M Teresa Lawrence has written a children’s book, Gloriousness, designed to help young readers embrace identity and creativity. She runs a global nonprofit. She curated an anthology of 21 transformational voices. And she describes the through line connecting that work with simplicity.
The child who needs to hear that they are enough. That is the through line.
Gloriousness says it to a five-year-old with pictures and wonder. Wings of Purpose says it to a forty-five-year-old who has forgotten. The Trueness Project says it in classrooms in Nairobi and community centers in Wyoming.
The work she creates asks the same question: What would you do if you believed you were enough? She has continued asking it because she believes many people still need to hear it.
Readers interested in a book connected to Butterfly Libraries in Kenya, youth mentorship across Nepal and Africa, and questions of purpose can find Wings of Purpose on Amazon. According to The Trueness Project, each copy sold supports the idea that inner transformation and outer impact are connected.
