Introducing Our New Look!

Today is an exciting day for Actua! After months of research, planning, and with the help of our friends at Cinnamon Toast, we are pleased to share our refreshed brand as part of our efforts to evolve as a national voice for STEM education and outreach in Canada.

Actua has now been operating for almost three decades. In that time, we have maintained a relatively consistent look and feel and have been guided by the same mission. While this mission statement still holds, we have grown tremendously, and so have the needs of our various audiences, including network members, partners and supporters, educators, parents and youth. With this in mind, we began asking ourselves, does our brand still resonate? Does it still reflect the organization we have become and aspire to be? The answer was not entirely. So, after 27 years of growth and transformation, we felt it was time to fine-tune and refresh our brand.

Our brand refresh project began with a series of discussions with allies, collaborators and partners to gain their insights into Actua’s unique value, strengths and personality traits. With the insights gained from those conversations, we knew we wanted to evolve our brand to be youthful yet sophisticated, opportunistic yet realistic, rebellious yet reliable and confident yet humble. And above all else, we wanted our brand to represent our work on the ground and at a systems level.

So, with that, allow us to reintroduce ourselves:

STEM has the power to solve the world’s biggest challenges. It is also the driving force behind Canada’s innovation economy. Yet, for many youth, barriers to STEM education and careers still exist.

Breaking down barriers requires bold and unapologetic action. This is where Actua finds its purpose.

Actua was launched in the mid-90s by a passionate group of university students on a mission to inspire more youth with STEM. They knew too many young people were being left behind in STEM learning and education. But, as they began to engage more youth in STEM, they realized engagement alone was not enough. They needed to break down the systemic inequalities creating barriers to youth engagement in the first place. They recognized that doing this work would require collective action among all stakeholders in the innovation economy. So Actua began mobilizing educators, post-secondary institutions, corporations and policymakers around the belief that our future will only be as successful as the diverse perspectives that shape it.

Fast-forward to the present, Actua has become Canada’s largest STEM outreach organization. We represent a national network of 43 universities and colleges that engage youth, ages 6-26, in STEM learning experiences that are anything but ordinary. That’s because together, we believe in being the change we want to inspire. We don’t assume we know what our audiences want – we ask them. We don’t wait for change to arrive – we roll up our sleeves and make it happen. We don’t settle for “good enough” – we set lofty goals and “actua”lize them. And, above all else, we remain relentless in our pursuit to dismantle systemic inequalities so all youth can benefit and participate in STEM.

As we reflect back on our humble roots and embrace our position as a national voice for STEM education and outreach, we remain firm in one thing:

Change requires ongoing action.

And, we’ve got the determination, know-how and community to make this change happen!