Casey Pettit

Growing up in Topeka, Kansas, Casey is proud to come from a family of wayfinders: entrepreneurs, pilots, and artists. She arrived at the University of Kansas feeling out of place, but when she walked into Dr. Rick Snyder’s Positive Psychology class, things changed. Casey discovered she could devote her life to studying and elevating what is “right” with people. She has done so as a mental health clinician and an educator at Brown University in a course called "Designing your Life on Purpose."

During her undergraduate and graduate studies, Casey worked alongside leading Positive Psychology researchers Dr. Rick Snyder and Dr. Shane Lopez to maximize people’s strengths and assets instead of pathologizing challenges that come from broader systemic injustices.

Casey then spent seven years applying her learnings at Summer Search - an intensive whole-person mentoring program in Boston. There, she trained a team of 25 to apply the theories of purpose development as they built 1:1 long-term relationship with first generation college students. Casey loved watching the students expand their comfort zones through wilderness-based experiential education programs and international service experiences. Helping students find their own alignment with a sense of purpose became her calling that led her to the purpose-learning movement and Project Wayfinder.

Casey holds a Bachelors of Psychology and a Masters in Clinical Social Work from the University of Kansas. She spends her free time playing basketball, running, road biking, painting, hiking, and traveling — any excuse to soak in the beautiful world around us.