By Josh Siatkowski | Staff Writer

Most student-led organizations are lucky to sign up a few new members and get funding for an occasional meal. But one group, led by a network of college students across the country—including a Baylor freshman—has already gotten hundreds of students to sign up and received commitments for over $1 million in charitable donations. And they don’t launch until next month.

Founded by Ryan Hanson and his sister Julia, both students at TCU, the Bellwether Leadership Institute connects college students with highly successful professionals for mentorship, conversation and scholarship opportunities.

“In universities, everything we’re learning is great, but a lot of [Bellwether’s] content is stuff that you can’t necessarily get on a consistent basis,” said co-founder Ryan Hanson, a sophomore real estate finance major.

Launching in January, the Bellwether Leadership Institute is virtual-only and open for free to all students of any college, and even non-students. Events are organized into biweekly “Titan Talks,” which are interviews and Q&As with highly successful businesspeople. Confirmed speakers for the series include Ray Wirta, the former CEO of CBRE, the world’s largest real estate brokerage, and Glen Stearns, a billionaire mortgage lender and star of Discovery’s “Undercover Billionaire” TV show.

Bellwether will also include monthly mentorship meetings where students can interact with older and younger professionals alike. But this highly structured, highly funded endeavor all started “by accident,” Hanson said.

“I had a group of friends that knew my dad had done well in his industry,” Hanson said. “They came to me and they asked if we could hop on Zoom calls. … My dad would break down the verticals within commercial real estate, and then from there he’d also break down personality profiles, and he’d talk about which career path is most suitable for each.”

Jeff Hanson, Ryan and Julia’s father, is a commercial real estate professional and the chairman of American Healthcare REIT, a real estate investment trust with a market capitalization of over $9 billion. After a few meetings with Hanson’s friends and his father, conversations continued to grow.

“I mentioned [the meetings] to my friends, and they mentioned it to theirs,” Hanson said. “And the next thing you know, we have a ton of students from all across the U.S. on these Zoom calls. And then my dad started bringing some of his friends on for more of a diverse perspective.”

As the attendance of the meetings increased, Hanson sought to add more structure to the program, and he reached out to his family and friends to build an organizational plan.

Now the organization has lined up over a dozen high-profile, high-net-worth speakers for “Titan Talks,” who have collectively committed over $1 million to fund scholarships for Bellwether members. The program is run by 22 students across 14 different colleges who lead outreach at their respective schools. One of those students is Ladera Ranch, Calif., freshman Michael Ahern, who grew up with Ryan Hanson.

“What Ryan asked me to do for Baylor was … present [the mission] as much as I can,” Ahern said. “I’m reaching out to different people here and presenting to a ton of people, which I never thought I would ever do.”

Advertising Bellwether to business school clubs, Ahern said Bellwether “fills a gap” that many business students risk having in their education.

“A lot of people want to be successful, but few know how to be successful,” Ahern said. “I think Bellwether really fills in that gap, not just showing successful people, but through the leadership and mentor sessions, showing what it means to be successful and how you really do that.”

The outreach done by Ahern and other founding associates has been effective, with awareness and involvement growing rapidly. Even though the organization does not officially launch until January, pre-launch marketing has attracted almost 1,000 prospective members.

“Every time I check our Excel page, the numbers just continue to go up,” Hanson said of the registration count.

As Bellwether prepares to launch its first official “Titan Talks” in January, interested students can register here. While the list of speakers is currently dominated by real estate professionals because of Hanson’s background, Logan Hill — Bellwether’s operations manager and a student at Mount St. Jacinto College in California — said the value of the conversations extends far beyond industry knowledge, as a participant in the first meetings with Hanson’s father.

“Eighty percent of the content within the ‘Titan Talks’ is really going to transcend any one particular industry,” Hill said. “It really changed my perspective on what success looks like. Not just how to get there, but how to retain it and how to share it with others. [Hanson’s father] really helped tailor my thinking to be more specific and directional, to the point where now I have a clear idea of what I want to do over the next five to 10 years.”

He called the conversations “an example of something really powerful that I … was really excited to share with other people,” and now, he and the rest of the Bellwether Institute’s founders are doing just that.