(LifeSiteNews) — A University of Notre Dame graduate launched a nonprofit that seeks to help college-age men break their addiction to pornography.

Josh Haskell was one of five valedictorians for the Indiana-based institution’s class of 2024. He spoke at commencement ceremonies this past spring. Fox News Digital recently highlighted Haskell and his newly founded organization, Ethos National.

“I definitely felt called more to expanding this and making a franchise model that can really just be replicated at universities around the country,” Haskell told Fox as he ramps up efforts to expand the organization across the U.S.

Haskell, a native of west Michigan who won a pro-life award in high school, says he was exposed to pornography at 15. He hit “rock bottom” just three years later.

“Months after I started, I began to research and understand the consequences of porn use. I learned about how it hurts people in the industry and how it was changing my brain,” he has said.

While enrolled in Notre Dame’s honors business program, Haskell published a tell-all article titled “Escaping Porn’s Prison” in The Observer, the school’s student-run newspaper. Haskell says that the response to his essay was “overwhelmingly positive” and that more than 100 of his fellow male students signed up in a matter of weeks for the program, which was started in the summer of 2023 as AsceND or “Ascend.” By March 2024, the school’s campus ministry office had adopted it.

Haskell has since turned down a lucrative finance job in New York to dedicate himself full time to Ethos National. He says the way the program works is that small groups of five students meet once a week for half an hour for the semester. Participants reflect on various books and are given an accountability partner. An app that will include training and additional resources is in the works.

At present, Ethos’ Board of Directors is composed of pro-chastity speaker Jason Evert, Magdala Ministries founder Rachel Killackey, and businessman Dan Fredericks of Grand Rapids, Michigan. The organization’s vision statement is to “build a world where every man can love his wife like Christ loves the Church.”

A Common Sense Media report released last year found that “73% of teen respondents from ages 13 to 17 have watched pornography online — and more than half (54%) reported first seeing pornography by the time they reached the age of 13.” Another study revealed that “10% of pornography views are by children under the age of 10.”

More than a dozen states across the U.S. have enacted age-verification laws over the past year that have had the effect of forcing porn sites to shut down altogether, including Georgia, Florida, Virginia, Mississippi, Texas, Kentucky, Utah, Arkansas, and Virginia.