Exploring Deep Narratives: How three Colorado organizations are changing the narrative

How we see the world matters. Narratives, which are the underlying themes that hold together the stories we tell to make sense of our worlds, shape what possibilities are possible. According to the Narrative Initiative, narrative change strategy is everything from articulating both the new narrative you’re working to shift to and the existing, dominant one you’re trying …

Keeping Youth Out of the Juvenile Justice System: Creating Policy and System Change

  By Lauren Gase, Spark Policy Institute and Taylor Schooley, Los Angeles County Department of Public Health Each year, roughly one million young people are arrested in the United States. Contact with the justice system is not only a public safety issue – research shows that it can lead to a range of negative health …

Collective Impact Study Sites

Site/Initiative Name Location Issue Area Contribution Site Equity Site Alignment Nashville Nashville, TN Education – Multi-Issue X ARISE Anchorage, AK Education for Indigenous Students X Aspen Community Foundation Cradle to Career Aspen, Basalt CO Cradle to Career – Education Coalition for New Britain’s Youth New Britain, CT Cradle to Career – Education, Early Learning Colorado …

Making real change that impacts real lives

By Kyle Brost, CEO, Spark Policy Institute When I was a young boy my father moved to a remote island in Alaska. I spent some middle school years and every summer after on this remote island. At one point I was fortunate enough to get a job with Ounalashka Corporation, the Alaska Native Village corporation …

November SparkNews: Keeping the Momentum

Our original plan for this month was to write about thankfulness – how thankful we are for you, our partners, who are the best part of what we do. We are grateful and humbled every day that we get to work alongside such inspiring people and organizations, whose efforts and initiatives are making a difference …

Our Commitment to Addressing Inequity

Complex problems are just that: complex. They stem from complicated interactions among multiple actors, against the backdrop of history, systems, and institutions. Within these interactions, we cannot overlook the way race, ethnicity, gender identity, sexual orientation, country of origin, religion, economic status – all the things that make us unique, and the “isms” they engender …

June Spark News: Changing the World, One System at a Time

This month, we’re looking at how organizations can support large-scale systems change, either as a backbone, partner, evaluator, fiscal intermediary, or through many other roles. But we would be remiss if we didn’t take a moment to talk about what happened in Orlando. Earlier in June, we witnessed the worst mass shooting in our country’s …

April SparkNews: It’s about People

Sometimes, it is all too easy to get caught up in the how of work that we forget the why. How do we identify the leverage points that will cause a systemic shift? How do we sustain change? These are important questions and they constitute the bulk of what we DO, but they don’t answer …

Sparking Social Change

By Laura Trent, Esq. and Alison McCarthy, MSW For many of Spark team members, their commitment to social change finds its way across their professional and personal life. For Laura Trent and Alison McCarthy, project managers at Spark, this commitment means volunteering for organizations that support survivors of interpersonal violence.  Laura is on the Board of The …

Healthy Schools Collective Impact: Reaching the Bold Goal, Together

One of the things that has become clear in our work with systems change broadly and collective impact specifically is that no one program or organization can address large-scale issues on its own. Put another way, our impact goes further when we work together toward a common agenda. Over the past nine months, Spark has …

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