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. It started in 2019, after my DECA showcase night where I noticed how many students wanted to learn about business, whether that be finance, accounting, marketing, or more, but had no way to do that in school.
I immediately turned DECA showcase night into Compass's very first program. I built a completely free 6-module financial literacy curriculum covering budgeting, credit, investing, accounting basics, and entrepreneurship, and started teaching it myself.
Once I saw how much others enjoyed learning from me, I tried to impart to them every ounce of knowledge I had, whether that be debate skills, math and science, music theory, and even chess, one of my long-standing hobbies.
With so many subjects to juggle, I decided to recruit other tutors who excelled in these areas to help, eventually scaling Compass to encompass a variety of subjects in addition to our Financial Literacy program.
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.
I see 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 student gets that chance, and even those who do do not always realize how valuable it is.
In my clubs, 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.
"A child's curiosity is not a small thing. The opportunity to follow it should never be treated like one."
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.
Today, Compass has grown through partnerships with local schools and nonprofits into a program that has now reached more than 200 students, and we are actively trying to expand its outreach.
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.