Strength With Purpose
For Jonathan Young, gratitude means remembering where you started and using what you’ve been given to serve others.
For Jonathan Young, strength has never been only about what a person can lift, endure or accomplish. These days, it looks more like knowing when to reset, remembering why the work began and recognizing the people who have helped carry you along the way.
It has been a remarkable season for the Gulf Coast native. Young recently returned from Survivor 50, where he made it all the way to the final three and finished as runner-up to Aubry Bracco. After pushing himself physically, mentally and emotionally through another season of the competition, Young admits coming that close to winning was difficult.
“It was a hard loss, but it was a learning experience,” he says.
Still, Young is not looking backward for long. He has received opportunities for future television projects and continues making podcast appearances, but he is being intentional about what comes next. Rather than rushing toward the next spotlight, he is taking time to reconnect with the purpose behind the platform he has been given.
“The main thing that’s happening with me is I’m having a reset so that I can remember my roots and remember what I’m doing here and what all the Young Strength is for,” Young says.
That reset keeps bringing him back to Young Strength Missions.
The nonprofit has continued expanding its work in Honduras, where Young and his team have previously helped build homes for families in need. One experience remains especially meaningful to him.
During a past trip, the team built a home for a mother raising several children. The house cost approximately $5,000 to construct, but Young watched something relatively simple by American standards completely change life for the family.
While the team worked, the mother would bring them coffee and bread. She had very little herself, yet she continually looked for something she could give to the people building her home.
“She had barely anything, but she loved us so much and was so thankful that she would give the little bit that she had,” Young recalls.
It is an image of gratitude that has stayed with him.
Now, Young Strength Missions is preparing for work that carries an even greater sense of urgency. Young says the organization has begun working with Silent Night on efforts addressing child exploitation and trafficking in Honduras, including plans connected to La Mosquitia.
According to Young, severe poverty can leave vulnerable families and children exposed to exploitation. The developing mission includes plans to help provide safe housing for children moved from dangerous circumstances into safer areas of Honduras, where they can have stability, care and opportunities for a different future.
For Young, the growth of the mission is also intertwined with the visibility Survivor has brought him.
“A lot of this publicity that God has gifted me has put me in the presence of some people that can really help,” he says.
That is where Young’s definition of strength becomes especially clear. Fame, physical ability and opportunity are useful, in his view, only when they become tools for something beyond himself.
As his public profile has grown, so has the support surrounding Young Strength Missions, including from the community that has watched his journey from home.
During Survivor 50, local watch parties at The Wharf drew hundreds of supporters. Young says more than $20,000 in Young Strength Missions shirts, created through a partnership with Shades, were sold during the gatherings.
For someone accustomed to being the one trying to lift others, being on the receiving end of that support made an impression.
“The people locally have really held me up,” Young says. “I didn’t know how much people cared. And they do. They really, really care.”
That realization feels particularly fitting in a season centered on gratitude.
The hometown support did more than encourage Young during a demanding television experience. It translated into resources and momentum for the mission work that remains closest to his heart.
Young is also exploring new partnerships that can extend that impact. He has also been sharing his organization’s story through podcasts and social media, creating opportunities to introduce its work to audiences well beyond the Gulf Coast.
Yet growth comes with responsibility.
Young is candid about the importance of keeping the mission grounded as attention and opportunities increase. When television, partnerships, social media and public recognition begin moving quickly, he says it becomes even more important to remember what the work was supposed to be about in the first place.
“It can’t be me, me, me,” Young says. “It’s got to be Him, Him, Him. It’s gotta be God first.”
That perspective has shaped Young’s Strength from its beginning. The organization’s mission centers on using individual gifts and abilities to serve others, and Young Strength Missions works to provide practical resources in communities facing poverty and instability, including housing, schools, feeding centers and other forms of support.
For Young, service is not separate from strength. It’s the point of it.
His next chapter may include another television show. He even leaves open the possibility of another Survivor adventure someday. There may be new partnerships, bigger audiences and opportunities he cannot yet predict.
For now, though, he is allowing himself to reset.
After an extraordinary year, gratitude is giving him a place to stand while everything else continues moving. He is grateful for the people who filled The Wharf to cheer him on, for every person who bought a shirt, for the partnerships helping Young Strength Missions grow and for the platform that has opened doors to serve people thousands of miles away.
For the people who have followed Young from the beaches of Baldwin County to television screens across the country, that evolution offers another way to understand his story. The goal is no longer to see how far strength can take him, but how many people that strength can reach.
Most of all, he seems grateful for the reminder that strength is rarely an individual accomplishment.
Sometimes strength is building a house for a family you have just met. Sometimes it is a mother with very little bringing coffee and bread to say thank you. Sometimes it is a hometown showing up by the hundreds. And sometimes it is stepping away from the noise long enough to remember why you started.
Young may not know exactly what comes next, but he knows what he wants to carry forward: faith, purpose and a willingness to use whatever comes next to help someone else.
That is a kind of strength worth holding onto.
“It can’t be me, me, me,” Young says. “It’s got to be Him, Him, Him. It’s gotta be God first.”
“The people locally have really held me up.”