UCalgary students launch Ascend, a collective for passionate youth

On Saturday afternoons, House 831 on 17th Avenue S.W. Calgary fills with young people carrying crochet needles, sketchbooks, laptops and camera gear. Some are coding, others are painting or designing clothes, many are building startups … the list goes on. 

This is Ascend, a youth collective co-founded by third-year University of Calgary business student Samantha Cruz, in which people collaborate, create and showcase their passion projects. 

“Calgary's doing amazing things and making strides as a city, but, if we want to foster the next generation of innovation here, I think it really starts with the youth and it starts with community,” says Cruz. 

From inspiration to action

The idea took flight when Cruz learned about Socratica, an open collective in Waterloo, Ont., and saw Calgary investor Evan McCann post online asking if any UCalgary students could help open a local node of it.  

“I wasn’t going to wait for someone else to be tagged,” Cruz says. “I reached out right away and said, ‘I want to start this.’” 

She soon teamed up with co-founder Seleem Badawy, BSc (Eng)’25, and six other UCalgary students including Yash Anowar and Izy Ali. In January 2025 they began hosting weekly co-working sessions starting out of House 831, a membership-based clubhouse for entrepreneurs and creators in Calgary. 

Projects at Ascend range from beekeeping and fashion design, to app development, filmmaking and writing. Cruz says the group also organizes PowerPoint nights for storytelling through presentation slides, game nights and late-night co-working sessions.  

“We’re not expecting you to build a billion-dollar startup. The first thing we tell people is to build themselves,” she says. 

A culture for those who strive 

The draw for Anowar, far from his hometown in Dhaka, Bangladesh, is getting to connect with a newfound family consistently. 

“With so many like-minded people who challenge my ideas, conventions and make me strive to be a better version of myself, that’s what Ascend has provided me at the end of the day,” he says. 

Ali says the group encouraged him to push outside his comfort zone as both an engineering student and filmmaker. 

“People have the impression you only get one shot here,” he says. “Ascend establishes a different tone that’s, like, you can try, fail and try again. It’s the perfect place to take a risk.” 

Support has also come from the Hunter Hub for Entrepreneurial Thinking, a University of Calgary community center dedicated to fostering student entrepreneurship. “We’re so grateful Hunter Hub was one of Ascend’s first believers and sponsors,” says Cruz. 

 “Guy often made time to join our sessions, sharing valuable advice and support and we even got to host a co-working day in the space,” she says about executive director Guy Levesque. 

She first connected with Levesque over a shared vision of entrepreneurial thinking in the everyday lives of students and the Hunter Hub sponsorship has allowed them to carry out their weekly activities and special demo events alike. 

Ascending through opportunity  

With a dedicated space and community of people striving for similar things, that approach has already opened doors. The Archive, a fund created by Ascend co-host Rumeza Fatima, helped send both Ali and Cruz to San Francisco.  

Ali joined venture capital firm Founders Inc.’s six-week Off Season program, spending two weeks with its filmmaking team to produce content and support 10 startup teams preparing for a World’s Fair-style showcase that drew 1,500 attendees.  

Cruz used her time at Off Season to host a matcha tea pop-up shop backed by The Archive and also collaborated on video projects with The Residency, a global hacker-house network, and Capi House, a studio supporting immigrant founders. 

“The people at Ascend expose me to more opportunities. That made me have a deeper appreciation for it,” says Ali. 

To read more stories about the people and projects that give Ascend its heartbeat, find more on its LinkedIn. Youth and youth at heart can inquire about attending the event and membership details at ascendcalgary.ca.