Student organization strives to help students ‘thrive’

“We are young, we are naïve and we do have these crazy thoughts that other people might not even consider,” Kyle Nacci, president of the student group Thrive, said. “And maybe 99 times out of 100 it turns out that we can’t actually do it, but that one time that we can do it, that’s special.”

This is something that Nacci stresses the most in each of his club meetings. As the founder of Thrive, originally called Big Thinkers, Nacci said he wants to show everyone that they can do anything that they want to do in the world.

“I was kind of struggling to connect with students at URI who were really passionate about something and making a positive impact in the world,” Nacci said “You meet people who might be passionate but you don’t automatically know.” Nacci created his organization so that students have a place to go to with their passions and do something positive. “I thought it would be really interesting, instead of creating an entrepreneurship club or activism club, to have all different types of people together with different backgrounds, different interests and to have that level of diversity,” he added.

Students with all different perspectives are coming together to combat problems around them, according to Nacci. In this way, someone with a psychology perspective can work together with someone who has a business perspective or maybe even a sociology perspective. “We want to be the club where anyone who has any sort of passion to do something can, they don’t need to feel like they need to fit into any type of prototype,” Nacci said. “On some level we all do have some sort of dream, something that we want to do with our lives that’s bigger than the day-to-day stuff we’re doing. But we don’t know where to start and we don’t want to do it by ourselves. What we want to provide is a community of people that are going to help people to make something very powerful together.”

The group is still gaining many new members, including Elana Rivkin who joined Thrive last fall and has had an amazing experience with it already. “I went to one meeting, and as soon as I went I felt that everyone’s projects really resonated with me just because of the sole fact that these students were taking their free time to work on something that they were passionate about,” Rivkin said. “It spoke to me that these people were working on something bigger than themselves.”

This spring, Thrive will try something entirely new called Change Fest. This event will truly embody everything that Thrive strives to accomplish. Referred as something along the lines of “Ted Talks meets Shark Tank”, this event will bring people together and sort them into groups based on the problems they are passionate about solving. After a day of brainstorming and researching this problem the group is all passionate about, they will be able to present their solutions to a panel of judges.

Nacci said his hope for Change Fest is that “students will be able to see what they’re capable of accomplishing in a day… and in the future when they have an idea they would love to do they realize they have the resources and capabilities to do it.”

Though Thrive is still growing in numbers, their message is clear and strong. “It’s difficult to go to a meeting and not feel empowered with the people that are in the club and the people that are leading the club. I feel like in college we have so many outlets and we all have so many capabilities to do something… but some people just don’t know where to start or don’t know where to go. I see Thrive as almost a platform to actually launch these ideas.”

Thrive’s meetings are every Thursday at 3:30 p.m. in the Student Senate Chambers in the Memorial Union.