Thomas Murphy

I want to create more sweethearts and heroes in our young people.

They are the solution.

We say our kids are the future.

That's a lie.

They're not the future.

They're our present.

I think it's probably better to tell you how I stumbled on this.

I found myself talking to young people after a crazy little reality TV show I did.

And a buddy of mine called me kind of in a panic and said, hey, Tom, I'm in trouble.

I had this speaker in bullying that was supposed to be here.

900 middle schoolers.

I said, can you come and do something on bullying?

And I'm like, eh, I guess so.

So I came up with this silly little concept called Sweethearts and Heroes, which is a big concept.

But after I did that, another school heard about it and said, hey, can you do that at our school?

And it just kind of snowballed and I didn't realize what was happening.

But at the end of assemblies, I'd find myself turning the lights off, packing up my stuff, and a young person would always sneak back in the room and want to talk to me about what was going on in their life, their challenges that they were having.

I started to understand that what they were feeling was a certain amount of hopelessness with what was going on in their life.

And hope for us has always been hold on, possibilities exist.

They were struggling with holding on to the possibilities for their future.