Northwest University
Northwest University sits on a quiet hill in Kirkland, WA, just across Lake Washington from downtown Seattle and next door to Microsoft’s main campus. The contrast is striking. On one side, glass towers and billion-dollar campuses. On the other, a small school with fewer than a thousand students, where the work feels rooted in something older, and if not simpler, seemingly smaller by contrast.
I spent several days there, meeting with faculty, staff, and administrators. Many of them had resumes that could have carried them anywhere: PhDs from the Ivy League, long careers in Seattle’s tech industry, years of scholarship and service. But they chose to be at Northwest, at this little campus, out of a sense of calling. That was what struck me most. And it did so right away.
When confronted with the opportunity to utilize these grant resources for travel with the concurrent need to do so quickly, I reached out to a friend of mine who serves as a dean at Northwest. After he graciously accepted my offer to visit him on my listening tour, I organized my visit principally around learning what I could there. I have taught in large, public university systems for years, and designed Lingwell with their scale and reach in mind. In this early stage, however, I need to learn how to see where its touch points make most sense at a system-wide level.
Thus, my trip. A small university where I could talk to the heads of different programs, departments, and colleges, all in the same day, and often in the same building, to discover how to make Lingwell accessible to those who might benefit from it while establishing funding pathways through resources already allocated for student, staff, and faculty support. From there, I planned to make use of connections I still had from my days as a graduate student in the area to engage with, learn, and train from.
As I began speaking with the personnel at Northwest, and sharing Lingwell with them through one of the tablets I have been training with, I first encountered the reactions I have learned to expect. Reactions that often reflect both a consideration of Lingwell’s practical applications and an indication that its potential benefit may apply to the individual-with-whom-I-am-speaking’s personal wellbeing. I also began hearing about something else. I should have anticipated that coming to a small school, founded on principles of Christian doctrine, my conversations would gravitate towards the insistence of service. And surely enough, as I met with faculty, staff and administration, what I heard was not ambition or credentialing, but service. These were people who could have conceivably lived in the towers of wealth just a few miles away. Instead, they gathered here. Their sense of vocation seemed less about prestige than about responsibility.
When I introduced Lingwell to them, that spirit of service was the lens through which they heard it. Not only did they help me envision it within the bounds of their intimate community, they reflected it outwardly to those they serve in the community. Conversations turned toward people who are seldom listened to: laid-off tech workers living out of their cars, young adults straddling the gulf between what they are told and what they see, those who feel they either cannot be heard or should not be heard. There was an immediate recognition: Lingwell as a tool for these voices, a confidant that can absorb what otherwise goes unsaid. Several people connected Lingwell to their experience of therapy and medicine and how difficult those settings can be when you walk in cold, with no chance to rehearse what you need to say. Therapy can be life-giving. Medicine can be life-saving. But they are also fraught.
The simple act of practicing language beforehand, of hearing yourself work something out, of naming what is often unnamed, changes the encounter. It can make the difference between silence and speech, between a doctor misunderstanding you and a doctor finally seeing you.
When I finished my time at Northwest, what I left with was not just validation, though I felt that strongly. What I left with was a sense of how people there framed Lingwell: not as an app, not as an AI tool, but as something aligned with their deepest callings: to teach, to serve, to attend to what is sacred. The language they gave me will stay with me. It gave me new ways to see what Lingwell might become.
I came to Seattle to listen. At Northwest, I heard Lingwell reflected back through the voices of people who understand what it means to sacrifice in the name of service. For this first real engagement of Lingwell as a product, they did not see its cost in that way. Instead, like me, they saw it simply as work worth doing.
Learn more at lingwellhealth.com.