David Sun’s financial education began with a shock. As a sophomore at Neuqua Valley High School in Naperville, IL, he took his first job scooping ice cream. Then he got his paycheck. “When I had to pay taxes on the money that I worked so hard for, I was in disbelief,” he recalls.
In his household, his confusion had nowhere to go for answers. David’s parents immigrated from China, and money wasn’t the kind of thing discussed at the dinner table. “Speaking about finances is really a taboo,” he says. “All they knew was you have to study hard, you have to study math, and you have to study science.”
So David taught himself, devouring videos from financial literacy YouTubers and reaching out to teachers with questions. Then he did something unusual: He taught his family what he learned.
His older sister came first. “I was always spewing this ‘financial literacy nonsense,’ as she liked to call it,” David laughs. Once she opened a Roth IRA of her own, the siblings joined forces to convince their parents that retirement accounts were “not a scam.” Today, David helps manage his parents’ Roth IRA and his father’s 401(k), the kind of account his dad hadn’t heard of when he joined the American workforce.
That reverse flow of knowledge, from child to parent, served as the seed of Build-A-Biz, the 501(c)(3) David co-founded in 2023. The nonprofit has since delivered free financial literacy seminars to more than 1,100 students, many of whom have immigrant backgrounds like his own. Its philosophy is rooted in a metaphor David knows well; he also runs a flourishing gardening business with his mother. “If we plant a seedling of financial literacy when kids are very young, maybe in third grade, they can bring that foundational knowledge into high school,” he explains. “They can use the information that we taught them to teach their parents or teach their younger siblings.”
But who turns to a high schooler for any kind of fiscal education? Credibility, he admits, was the first hurdle. “No one was going to trust me to teach other kids financial literacy if I didn’t know anything,” he says. His solution was volume and persistence: mass emails to some 10,000 professors, bank tellers, and customer service representatives, and recruiting the ones who replied to be guest speakers.
That same persistence traveled with him to Charlottesville. Within a month of arriving on Grounds, David had emailed McIntire financial literacy expert Professor Dorothy Kelly, spoken to visiting students in the AVID (Advancement Via Individual Determination) college and career success program, and pitched biweekly seminars at Henley Middle School. He now teaches budgeting basics at Henley, with the help of quizzes framed on popular touchstones like MrBeast and Pokémon. “I love the kids. I love teaching,” he says. “Seeing them smile on a day-to-day basis makes going through exams and going through the first year of college a lot easier.”
Build-A-Biz’s reach now extends to a boarding school in Zambia, where Naperville-based volunteers run entrepreneurship sessions over video call, sometimes at 5 a.m. Central Time, for African students sharing a single computer. “The connection is going to be iffy,” David says, “but seeing the students smile, seeing the students have fun with us at the end of the day is what matters the most.”
As he begins his Commerce coursework, the second-year plans to study the legal and organizational structures he once navigated blind when he filed a 501(c)(3) and an LLC as a teenager. His guiding phrase, and one he used on his application essays, remains “commerce for the common good.”
“The gap is not that these people don’t have access to information,” he says. “They just don’t know where the information is. That’s where we come in.”
