We believe waiting until adulthood to understand money isn't tradition. It's a gap nobody's bothered to close.
Why we built Cadre
Most people don't learn how money and business actually work. Not in elementary school, not in middle school, not in high school, and often not even in college. By the time you're expected to make major decisions with it, a first job, a first paycheck, a first investment, a first loan, you're mostly figuring it out on your own. And that isn't easy without someone to guide you through it.
We know because we lived it. University gave us a small piece of the picture, but that was about it. Everything else, how businesses actually work, how money moves, how to make real decisions with it, we had to teach ourselves, without much guidance along the way.
Cadre exists to give students in Grades 7–10 across Vancouver what we wish we'd had, real guidance, during the years they start becoming more independent, thinking about their first paycheck, and being expected to handle more on their own. So they don't have to learn it entirely by themselves.
Cadre gives young minds the financial literacy they need before they're expected to make decisions with money.
Real companies. Real evidence. Not definitions to memorize.
Cadre doesn't teach financial literacy as a list of terms to memorize. Students study real companies and real events like the 2008 financial crisis and the rise of GameStop, to understand how businesses actually make money, how financial systems work, and how public companies report their performance. Then they go further: each student builds their own company idea, develops it phase by phase, and closes the program by presenting an evidence based evaluation of their own business.
Meet Mario.
Mario had questions about money and the economy since elementary school. How it all actually worked. What moved it. But real answers didn't come until university, and even then, it was through examples, not theory, that things finally clicked. Today he works in wealth management, helping families plan their financial futures.
He wished something like Cadre had existed when he was growing up. So he built it, giving young people that same understanding early, through real companies and real evidence, instead of waiting years for it to make sense.