Bridging Innovation and Healing for Those Who've Served
We translate frontier AI into trauma-informed tools that help veterans rebuild meaning, connection, and purpose after service.
Our Mission
Sempergeist Institute (Conway Cultural Development Corporation, EIN: 47-5065116) uses creative placemaking to strengthen communities by translating frontier AI into trauma-informed healing tools for veterans and service communities. Our platform Poewell uses AI-powered storytelling and image generation to help those navigating PTSD, CPTSD, and moral injury transform internal experiences into visual narratives, processed in peer-facilitated cohorts.We bridge Silicon Valley innovation and VSO/VA infrastructure, developing the field's first therapeutic AI protocols with HIPAA compliance, crisis integration, and evidence-based outcomes—making advanced creative technologies accessible through trusted veteran service channels.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.
What We Do
1. Governed AI Storytelling
Veterans and others navigating moral injury or profound transition use constitutionally governed AI tools to translate internal, often nonverbal experience into visual and narrative form. The technology structures attention and pacing without interpreting, diagnosing, or directing meaning.2. Peer-Facilitated Cohorts
Narrative and visual work is held within trauma-informed, facilitator-led cohorts that emphasize witnessing over resolution. These groups support connection and belonging without requiring performance, disclosure, or closure.3. VSO and VA Integration
Sempergeist develops HIPAA-compliant platforms designed to operate within existing VSO and VA ecosystems. Programs are piloted collaboratively, evaluated responsibly, and aligned with evidence-informed practices—without displacing human care or peer support.The Gap We BridgeAdvanced AI tools are rapidly entering domains of meaning, identity, and care. At the same time, veterans’ organizations and the VA serve millions of people whose experiences cannot be reduced to optimization or outcome metrics.Sempergeist bridges these worlds by translating frontier technology into governed, dignity-preserving systems by creating tools that support meaning-making without instrumentalizing suffering or replacing human presence.
Contact
Dennis Stevens, Ed.D., Founder/Managing Director
Conway Cultural Development Corporation
(dba Sempergeist Institute)
82 Nassau St., #61562
New York, NY 10038501(c)(3) Nonprofit | EIN: 47-5065116Links:warriors-return.com
dennis-stevens.com
poewell.com
"Sacred Descent of the Warrior" on Amazon
"Memoir of an Esteemed Dipteran" on AmazonContact:[email protected] | tel: 843.331.6020© 2025 Conway Cultural Development Corporation
The Love EthicAt Sempergeist, love is not understood as sentiment, reassurance, or emotional warmth. It is treated as an ethical discipline—a commitment to the dignity of persons when certainty, resolution, and moral clarity are unavailable.Across religious, philosophical, and humanistic traditions, love has functioned as a moral force that precedes judgment and resists reduction. It names an obligation to remain present to the other without collapsing their experience into explanation, diagnosis, or performance. In this sense, love is not opposed to rigor or truth. It is the condition that makes ethical rigor possible when human experience exceeds any single framework.The Love Ethic grounds Sempergeist’s work with veterans and others navigating moral injury, grief, and profound transition. These experiences are not problems to be solved or wounds to be optimized away. They are realities that must be endured, witnessed, and held with care. A love-based ethic refuses to instrumentalize suffering in the name of healing, efficiency, or coherence.In practice, the Love Ethic functions as a set of constraints:Non-conditional dignity
Human worth is not contingent on recovery, productivity, coherence, or growth. Belonging is not earned through improvement.Presence without coercion
Care does not require resolution. Participants are not pushed toward closure, reconciliation, or meaning before they are ready—or at all.Agency without abandonment
Individuals retain sovereignty over interpretation and pace, while being held within relational and communal structures that prevent isolation.Care without simulation
Especially in technological contexts, love requires restraint. Systems must not impersonate authority, intimacy, or understanding they do not possess.This ethic shapes how Sempergeist designs programs, conducts research, and builds governed technologies such as Poewell. Love in this sense becomes a boundary condition: it sets limits on what may be claimed, automated, interpreted, or optimized when working in moral, imaginal, and sacred domains.To take love seriously is to accept that some forms of suffering cannot be neatly resolved. The Love Ethic commits Sempergeist to staying with human reality, refusing technological determinism and performative or instrumental responses that promise resolution at the cost of dignity.