Actionable insights and strategies
Meaningful impact and results
Our Services

Strategy

Strategy is often a reference to all the big decisions that organizations and collectives need to make. At Spark, we’ve found that strategy is actually about the small decisions. To be strategic isn’t only to make the big decisions, it’s to put each small decision into the context of your goals and impacts.

Evaluation

Evaluation is insight in action. That’s why when we partner with you, we emphasize obtaining reliable, meaningful insights that drive impact. We’re not satisfied if you’re not moving forward because of what you’ve learned through evaluation.

Capacity Building

You don’t have to change (or grow) but you live in a world that does change and grow. We want to help you keep pace with change, growth, and impact through Capacity Building services. Whether at the impact, organizational, team, leadership, or individual level, our Capacity Building Services will help you outpace change by not only preparing for it, but by creating it.

Technical Assistance

We often say that partners come to us for our heads, our hearts, and our hands. Technical Assistance Services involves a strong combination of all three. We support and expand your capacity by offering our expertise and hearts, along with our hands.

Spark Impact and Service Areas
Spark supports our clients and initiatives through consulting, facilitation, development, and evaluation of complex environmental and social sector strategies.

We work across a broad range of topics, from nuclear security to homelessness, and sexual assault to entrepreneurism. We work in local, state, national, and international settings with foundations, government agencies, nonprofits, and for-profit corporations. Most of our projects cross sector boundaries with an aim toward systems change.

IMPACT AREAS
Some of the impact areas we work in include:

Youth Success & Education

We believe that for a society to be vibrant now and in the future, there is nothing more important than to support our youth, from womb to workplace, in being healthy, safe, educated, and to have social-emotional skills needed to succeed – regardless of background, race, ethnicity, gender identity, or class. Spark staff work with a broad range of nonprofit, foundation, community-based and governmental entities to support a future where youth have the opportunity to succeed.

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Improving Health and Health Systems

Health, health choices, and healthcare access are critical to living a healthy and productive life. We work with our clients to develop, facilitate, and evaluate strategies to address a wide range of health-related topics, including reducing infant mortality; improving services for people with disabilities; supporting healthy families and neighborhoods, testing innovative behavioral health practices; advocating for healthy eating, active living; and increasing access and ability to navigate the health system. We draw upon our work in other areas to inform our approach to addressing social determinants of health.

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Juvenile & Criminal Justice

Keeping individuals out of the justice system and preventing their further penetration into the system is a charge that calls upon the entire community. Spark facilitates cross-sector dialogues and conducts system-level evaluation to support initiative and community partners to identify and implement strategies to work better together and improve outcomes for young people, families, and communities.

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Equitable Impact

Spark’s ongoing commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion internally extends to our project work. Focus, responsiveness, and intentionality are critical to bring strategies and resources where they are needed the most and help overcome disparities. Across Spark’s projects, we have an eye to help our clients target strategies to be equitable in order to make a true impact, and our staff are committed to ensuring the way we do our work (evaluation, facilitation, etc.) is explicitly with an equity lens.

Environment and Climate Change

We believe that the health of the environment and climate are important to protect in and of themselves and that, because everything is connected, they are also necessary for human-kind to flourish in the long-term. Unfortunately, environmental degradation negatively impacts some communities much more than others, often due to class, location, race, ethnicity, or background. Much of Spark’s strategy facilitation, development, or evaluation is in the realm of environmental justice and environmental racism at the intersection of environmental and community sustainability and improvement.

Food Systems and Agriculture

Healthy, equitable and sustainable food systems can serve as fundamental building blocks for human health, education and economic vitality while safe-guarding environmental impact. Spark’s food systems work links a number of other focus areas, including environment, health systems and youth success, by providing needs assessments, initiative evaluations, and capacity building resources. Spark team members have been engaged in work across the food system from equitable and safe employment, to food policy at the local, state and national levels, to community food security and food justice (ensuring communities have access to affordable, fresh, healthy, culturally-appropriate foods and the ability to make decisions over their food system).

Building Community and Organizational Capacity

We spend our lives predominantly within the communities we live in, and the capacity of community members often drives our ability to make positive change – whether through eliminating homelessness or increasing navigators to connect residents to basic human needs like food and safety. Spark’s work through capacity building, strategy development and evaluation activities help communities build the skills and tools they need to create and successfully work toward a common vision. Those same principles apply when building the capacity of organizations to create the impact they intend, and Spark is here to help.

Entrepreneurship and Corporate Social Responsibility

Entrepreneurship serves as a powerful equalizer of opportunity and creator of solutions when made available to all and leveraged in meaningful ways. Spark’s work in entrepreneurship and corporate social responsibility leads with a focus on creativity, strategy, and equity – ensuring that healthy economies can thrive, scale, and sustain in every community. Spark supports this work through strategy planning and design, context and sense-making through data, and evaluation of efforts, implementation, and impact.

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