Margaret Mead, an American Cultural Anthropologist is famously quoted as saying, "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has". When a group of people come together and make changes as a collective, nothing can get in their way.

This book has stories of the Compassionate Crusaders. That's our nickname for our group of thoughtful, committed citizens who are changing the world. Thirty individuals chose to go through the same leadership and emotional intelligence workshop in the winter of 2019-2020. The workshop consists of three experiential courses put on by Next Level Trainings. The last installment of the three part course is what Next Level Trainings calls the VIP program, also referred to as the Vision Impact Program. The goal of the VIP program is to stretch yourself and, as a team, raise money for a non-profit that the team chooses. In our VIP experience, we collectively raised $86,000 for Chester County Futures based out of Chester County, Pennsylvania. Our VIP experience created ripples in this world that we are all still exploring.

You will find that the following stories are set up in the form of what we call Domains of Life. There are 8 domains: Health and Wellness, Career, Inner Life/Spiritual, Finance/Money, Fun/Recreation, Love, Contribution, and Friends/Family. Next Level Trainings introduced Domains to us so that we could organize, measure, and achieve our goals in life. Each chapter of this book is a different domain and within each chapter there are stories within it from one of the Compassionate Crusaders. We shared a life changing moment to hopefully inspire you, the reader, to go out there and make some waves in your own world.

Whether it's Kapil talking about the Wild Elephant or Stew deciding and declaring to reshape his life, there is a story in this book for everyone. We have mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, explorers and lovers sharing just one moment in time with you.

Our collective experience through Next Level Trainings brought 30 people together. In the beginning we were mostly complete strangers from different states of the US and 3 of us being from Switzerland. The journey we all chose to take together was profound. Once we said yes and chose to do this intensive workshop together, we found ourselves and our community. Getting to know one another, we knew that we all had some amazing life experiences to share and that Kapil Patel dreamed of one day putting into a book.

So here we are few of us sharing our stories written here for the world to see. Who knew that a group of thoughtful, committed citizens would be changing the world one story at a time?

Enjoy!