Providing well-being resources through social entrepreneurship

Connor Toohill ’14

Co-Founder & CEO, Ritual

MAJORS: ECONOMICS AND POLITICAL SCIENCE

Almost since he first stepped foot on campus, Connor Toohill ’14 has been putting his entrepreneurial and innovative mind to work toward solving society’s most pressing issues. As a first-year student in 2010, he co-founded and became editor-in-chief of the NextGen Journal, an online platform that offered his generation a space to have a voice on matters of national importance. Over two years, he built and directed an editorial staff of 150 students from more than 70 universities, publishing more than 2,000 articles and collaborating with the likes of MSNBC, the Washington Post, and Facebook. This endeavor was where the seeds of a calling to social entrepreneurship were planted.

After graduating from Notre Dame, Toohill pursued a three-year service stint as a teaching fellow at African Leadership Academy in Johannesburg, South Africa. During this time, he began to experience bouts of intense anxiety, learning to cope and function in order to fulfill his service work. It was in this time of personal doubt and unfamiliar circumstances that he found the inspiration to blaze a path towards social entrepreneurship. 

In 2019, Toohill co-founded Ritual, a start-up that provides a central mobile platform for proven well-being practices — some of which he utilized when in South Africa to manage his own anxiety. He came to understand that he was not alone in dealing with such issues and that these practices could have broad appeal and value if made available through the convenience of mobile devices. 

Partnering with Notre Dame professor Matt Bloom and leveraging Bloom’s groundbreaking “Wellbeing at Work” research, Toohill led Ritual’s first rounds of fundraising to garner $2.5M to launch the company, and runs day-to-day operations while spearheading partnerships with content providers. His work builds off his time as an undergraduate, when he worked with Bloom and Rev.. Dan Groody, C.S.C, ’86 to create the ground-breaking elective course at Notre Dame known as “The Heart’s Desire and Social Change.”