Serving With Purpose: Thomas Murray in Conversation With the Start Walking Foundation

On Saturday, April 25, 2026, Thomas Murray, Chief Community Officer of Equitech Futures, joined volunteers and community members of the Start Walking Foundation for a seminar on ethics, growth, and what it means to show up in service of others. The session was organized by Collins Otieno Junior, Executive Director and Founder of Start Walking Foundation and an Equitech Scholar from the 2024 cohort of the Equitech Futures Institute, where Murray taught the leadership communications track.

Participants dialed in from across Kenya, South Sudan, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Among them was Gabriel Pawuoi, an Equitech Scholar from the 2025 cohort, whose presence was a quiet reminder that relationships formed through the Equitech Futures community tend to outlast the institute itself.

What Serving Actually Requires

Otieno opened by framing the evening as a reflective space rather than a lecture. The question on the table: what does it mean to serve with purpose, and how do good intentions become responsible practice?

Murray drew on his background in applied theater — documentary performance, work in juvenile justice, teaching in under-resourced classrooms — to ground the conversation in concrete experience. Purpose, he argued, is not a fixed destination. It shifts over a career, and staying purposeful means staying honest about what actually drives you.

He was candid about a trap common in community work: the gap between passion and responsibility. Enthusiasm can become its own kind of harm when it isn't paired with the discipline of listening. Before bringing solutions to a community that isn't your own, there has to be a period of genuine observation — developing the same reverence for the stories you encounter as for the ones you carry into the room.

Murray introduced two exercises he first encountered as a graduate student in the MFA program in Applied Theatre and Public Dialogue at Virginia Tech, where professor Bob Leonard directed the program and served as his advisor. The first, "The Community I Carry With Me," asks practitioners to identify the elements of identity and experience that remain constant regardless of context, and to ground each one in a specific story rather than an abstraction. The second, "The Community I Find Myself Encountering," turns those same analytical skills outward: before doing any work in a place that isn't your own, spend real time learning what matters there. Murray credits Leonard with instilling both, and still uses them with Equitech Scholars today. The exercises are a check against one of the more corrosive impulses in community work — arriving somewhere with a solution that worked elsewhere and assuming it will work again, without first doing the harder work of receiving.

From Dreaming to Doing

When Otieno asked how young people move from good intentions to responsible action, Murray gave a practical answer. The imaginative space matters; without it, you can't see past the options already in front of you. But at some point, the plan has to leave the conference room.

He described his own role at Equitech Futures with some self-deprecation: he's the one who makes people name a date. An idea without a timeline is still just an idea. What moves community work forward is working backwards from a goal horizon, naming the relationships that need to be built along the way, and understanding that the completion of any meaningful project belongs to a "we," not an "I."

Hold On to Play

One of the session's more memorable moments came when Otieno asked what young people in community work should hold on to as they grow. Murray's answer was immediate: a sense of play.

Play, he said, is the condition under which vulnerability and creativity become possible. Innovation requires both, and creativity requires the willingness to be vulnerable — to share the unformed idea, to try something and fail without treating the failure as final. Murray traced that capacity back to childhood and observed that it tends to get suppressed in professional and educational settings, often without anyone intending it. Restoring it, he argued, is where actual organizational change lives.

Finding Your People

Gabriel Pawuoi asked how young people with different passions can find genuine alignment and build toward shared work rather than just parallel effort.

Murray reached for a quote that has stayed with him since graduate school, one that hung on the wall of Bob Leonard's office at Virginia Tech. It comes from Lilla Watson, a Murri visual artist, activist, and academic from Queensland, Australia:

‍"If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together."

The quote, Murray said, gets at the difference between a helper and a partner. Helpers are valuable for a time. Partners — people for whom solving this problem is a personal necessity, whose own freedom is somehow tied up in it — are the ones who stay when things get difficult.

Finding those people means getting out and meeting them, and being willing to say out loud what you care about. It also means being honest about fit: not every admirable cause is yours to join, and admiring someone's work is different from being the right collaborator on it.

The Equitech Futures community is proud that connections forged through our fellowship programs continue to generate conversations like this one, across continents and in service of the communities our scholars are building.