Urban Sparks

Mission

Urban Sparks empowers citizens leading charitable work by leveraging their talents with our nonpfit knowledge gained from past projects, our network, and fiscal sponsorship.

We also lead projects of our own, primarily parks, trails, greenways, art, vegetable gardens, and public buildings, as well as education programs in health, ecology, technology, and community organizing.

Description

We plant and nurture the seeds of service in the most fertile ground we can find: people.
Urban Sparks empowers high-performance citizen leaders to bring their talents to public and charitable work. We coach, connect, and provide fiscal sponsorship as well as build coalitions and lead projects of our own. Our goal is to efficiently accomplish results without creating new nonprofits. The JP Patches Statue and the Alki Statue of Liberty Plaza are two of our biggest finished physical projects. We are also fiscal sponsor for Seattle CoderDojo, Seattle AmeriCorps Collaborative, Transit Riders' Union, The Urbanist, Complete Streets Bellevue, Kirkland Greenways, and Just Garden.

To encourage more people to serve in the nonprofit sector, we provide fiscal sponsorship so that a variety of organizations may do charitable work. This also enables foundations to support important charitable work being done by non-501(c)(3)s.

Our founder launched and led the $2,000,000 Fremont Peak Park project, and then founded Urban Sparks. Since 2002, we've led or facilitated more than 30 public projects: a transportation plan, park designs, building improvements, plazas, statues, traffic-calming improvements, time capsule in WA State Capital Rotunda, mountain bike skills parks, p-patches, maintenance funds, and educations projects, all with a minimum of overhead.

To engage even more top quality people in service and philanthropy we are developing Service House, a living/learning center for full-time volunteers like AmeriCorps members. It will be an annually-refreshed community of volunteers in their 20s who live together while in service and who will learn about nonprofits and philanthropy what most people don't learn until they're 50-70 years old.