The backstory.

Our co-founder, Neil Silverston, has been an activist all his adult life. During his tenure at City Year, he traveled frequently to parts of Boston he'd never been to and discovered that, despite our differences, it was indeed possible to bring diverse communities of people together to solve big problems. 

The 2012 school shooting in Newtown, CT, marked a critical turning point in his life. In the victims he saw his own community and quickly realized that the problem was about all of our kids, bigger than any single person could confront alone, inspiring him to get to work across communities.

A simple but powerful idea emerged: in order to create a new future of shared responsibility, start with young people and the problems they choose to solve. With this instinct, the seeds for SparkShare were planted.

Listening is in our DNA.

Prior to establishing SparkShare, Neil and a team of advisors set out on a listening tour, talking with teens across Greater Boston who were organizing in schools, faith-based or community based organizations. These youth shared a desire to get out of their neighborhoods to learn what other young people were facing and doing. Over and over, they expressed the absence of opportunities to participate in meaningful ways in their communities. Many of them wanted to develop their skills as problem-solvers and change-makers but didn't know where to begin.

Our model places students at the center.

The SparkShare framework was developed in direct response to what we heard from young people and that spirit of active listening remains a core component of both what we teach and how we engage. Each year, we bring together our diverse cohort of youth teams and their adult allies for a series of workshops and summits. Teams come to us with the issues they choose to solve, and our consulting model is based on what each team needs from us. They share challenges and ideas, develop skills and confidence as problem-solvers, and make valuable connections that enable them to drive positive change in their communities.

We’ve come a long way…and we’re just getting started.

To support this work, we draw on a robust set of organizational partners including employers, universities, healthcare providers and non-profit organizations, thereby expanding the Network and expertise to which our youth teams have access. Over the past 5 years, the SparkShare Network has expanded to 30 teams, including 200 youth and adults. While a majority of our youth teams are Boston-based, a core component of our model is to bring young people together from across backgrounds and geographies to foster connection and provide opportunities to learn from one another. We therefore work with teams from communities as diverse as Dorchester, Quincy, Lexington, Brookline, Needham—and even a team from as far away as Pakistan. Part of the power of our model is the opportunity for youth teams across the state (and beyond) to build social capital through the connections they develop as part of our Network.