Compass Rose International was founded in 2021 by Katie Hilborn, a former teacher and founder of Global Orphan Prevention, an anti-trafficking charity in Nepal. 

As the charity was developing programming to help young women at risk of being trafficked or those in the foster care system, it was realized that their programming was so beneficial, that they opened it up to helping all young people, and formed a new charity to benefit American youth.

Ideas for developing innovative programming stemmed from her transition teaching in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam to Denver Public Schools in Colorado. It was a stark contrast adapting from an Eastern educational system rooted in the importance of a body-mind-spirit connection to a Western one where spirit health was completely glossed over. The spirit health (not to be confused spiritual), of a student’s life, included valuing a purposeful life, transcendence, and actualization of different dimensions and capacities of human beings. It focuses on creating a balance between physical, psychological, and social aspects of human life. 

Due to this integral missing component, she found difficulty reaching and helping a large number of the students under her tutelage. Many came from broken homes, and it wasn’t uncommon for students to make death threats, call her swears, or leave the class in the middle of a lesson. Broken herself, she had completely given up on the students midway through the school year and put in her resignation. 

The guilt began to eat away at her, and she knew giving up on the kids wasn’t the answer, and was left feeling like a failure. 

Then an idea came to incorporate some of the ancient practices of exploring “inner space” that she adopted from her travels and teaching in the Asian educational systems. She developed her now-signature technique called Guided Dream Journeying and started a club to reach what the school labeled as the “high flyers” – the kids that staff and teachers felt were unhelpable. Through guided visualization and storytelling, she led the students to receive answers from their subconscious minds. Students emerged from the journey with profound messages of hope, inspiration, and direction; solutions that had to come from within, and answers that any adult could tell them 20 ways sideways, but wouldn’t register because they themselves weren’t discovering the answers. She saw an instant transformation.

Several years later, and long after her tenure as a public school teacher was over, she remembered the technique’s success. She began beta testing the program with the young women under Global Orphan Prevention’s care. Witnessing similar results; prompted her to expand the programming to reach all young people and Compass Rose International was founded.