The Sempergeist Institute
The Sempergeist Institute (operating as Conway Cultural Development Corporation, EIN: 47-5065116) is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization dedicated to healing through art, ritual, and narrative exploration. Contributions are tax-deductible to the extent allowable by law.
The Sempergeist Institute is a nonprofit research and practice center dedicated to meaning-making and long-term healing through art, storytelling, and narrative exploration.
Founded by Dr. Dennis Stevens, a U.S. Coast Guard veteran, visual artist, and author of Sacred Descent of the Warrior, the Institute collaborates with veterans, educators, Veteran Service Organizations (VSOs), and the Veterans Administration to pilot programs, evaluate outcomes, and develop evidence-informed tools that support resilience, belonging, and sustained orientation within the veteran community.
Poewell
Poewell, the Institute’s flagship initiative, is a digital platform for visual storytelling, emotional connection, and inner world-building. Through guided world-building, visual narrative, and peer reflection, Poewell supports veterans and others navigating grief or major life transitions in giving form to experiences that are often difficult to articulate.
Participants create evolving visual worlds within a safe, facilitator-led environment, offering a grounded way to express, witness, and share the emotional and symbolic landscapes they inhabit, without requiring resolution or performance.
Research & Resources
The work of the Sempergeist Institute is grounded in interdisciplinary research showing why nonverbal, image-based storytelling is essential for many veterans living with PTSD, Complex PTSD (C-PTSD), and TBI. These resources outline how art-based and imaginal practices support expression, orientation, and reconnection—especially where purely verbal or clinical approaches reach their limits.
Mission Statement
The Sempergeist Institute bridges emerging AI technology with trauma-informed care, developing creative healing tools for veterans, first responders, and their communities. Through creative placemaking and partnerships with VSOs and the VA, we translate Silicon Valley innovation into safe, clinically aligned protocols that are HIPAA-compliant, integrate crisis response, and incorporate evidence-based practices. Our goal is to make advanced creative technologies accessible through trusted veteran service networks.
Why This Work Matters
Veterans, law enforcement, and first responders are trained to act decisively and push through crisis. That discipline saves lives, but it leaves little room for emotional processing or repair. Over time, unaddressed trauma can harden into isolation, numbing behaviors, shame, and disconnection from family, community, and self.
Art and ritual offer another path. Art externalizes memory and emotion into images, symbols, and stories. Ritual provides the container where those expressions are witnessed, shared, and integrated. Together, they create opportunities for pause, reflection, and reconnection—both during service, to interrupt the unspoken accumulation of trauma, and after service, to support a return to civilian life with greater presence.
This work addresses the full arc of trauma: sustaining wholeness during service and creating responsive, emotionally intelligent pathways for life after service. It helps individuals move beyond isolation and reestablish connection with themselves, their families, and their communities.
The Sempergeist Institute is grounded in a love-based ethical orientation that treats human dignity as non-conditional and non-merit-based, especially under conditions of moral injury, grief, and irreconcilable loss.
Drawing on religious, philosophical, and humanistic traditions, the Institute approaches love not as sentiment, but as a disciplined ethical commitment: to preserve agency without coercion, meaning without imposition, and relationship without reduction. This orientation shapes our work across art, ritual, narrative practice, and governed technology—ensuring that care, research, and innovation remain accountable to the irreducible complexity of human experience.
For Funders
Investing in this work means addressing the deeper disconnection that undermines resilience. Art and ritual are cost-effective, scalable, and evidence-based, but they are also profoundly human. They create spaces that traditional therapies often cannot, offering new pathways for renewal for those who serve and those who have served.
By disrupting entrenched isolation, this work helps people reconnect with themselves, trusted peers, family, and community. We invite foundations, corporate partners, and individual donors to join us in making these tools accessible to those who have served.
Contact
Dr. Dennis Stevens
Founder, Sempergeist Institute
dennis@conwayculture.org