A child's curiosity is not a small thing.
My name is Steven Lu, and I'm the founder of Compass Learning Collective. I'm currently a fourth-year at Vincent Massey Secondary School, but I founded Compass as a first-year. In 2019, I was the sole tutor for Compass, imparting every ounce of knowledge I could to students who were interested — whether that was financial literacy I'd learned in DECA, my music experience, math and science, or even chess, one of my long-standing hobbies. Now, we have a group of dedicated tutors teaching 10+ subjects, serving multiple schools across the Greater Essex County District School Board.
What inspired Compass?
I've come to believe that the chance to learn — to discover what excites you, pursue it, and imagine where it might take you — is one of the greatest privileges a child can have. It is also a privilege that is easy to take for granted.
That realization changed the way I thought about education. Learning stopped feeling like something students simply had to do. I began seeing every class, every new skill, and every curiosity as an opportunity: the chance to find something you care about and have the time, resources, and encouragement to pursue it. Not every child gets that chance, and even those who do do not always realize how valuable it is.
I started organizing showcase nights where younger students could explore different interests and communities. I remember watching one student light up while describing her first debate, and another talk excitedly about a business idea she had never shared before. What stayed with me wasn't just what they were interested in — it was the moment they realized their curiosity could become something more.
"A child's curiosity is not a small thing. The opportunity to follow it should never be treated like one."
That belief eventually pulled me into tutoring. I started small — helping students with math and science and teaching violin and chess on the side. Again and again, I saw how much could change when a student had someone willing to take their interests seriously. Sometimes all it took was one lesson for frustration to become confidence, or for a subject they had written off to become something they wanted to keep exploring.
Word spread between families. A handful of students became a roster, and that roster grew into a network of high school and university tutors across Windsor-Essex who were willing to give their time and knowledge to students they might never otherwise have met.
Compass Learning Collective grew from a simple conviction: every child who has the opportunity to learn should be able to make the most of it, regardless of what their family can afford. I want students to recognize that their education is more than an obligation — it is a chance to discover what they love, develop their abilities, and pursue possibilities that may not always be there.
Every match we make is one more student given the support to do exactly that — to treat their curiosity as something worth following, and their opportunity to learn as something worth embracing.