Spark Microgrants: Reflecting on 7 Years of Partnership
After many years of successful partnership, GlobeMed at the University of Southern California and Spark Microgrants are parting ways. Over the last seven years of working for health equity together, these two organizations have effected important change in the villages Spark has worked with.
Spark’s mission is to empower villages to create positive change in their communities through facilitated collective action and microgrants. They train partner organizations to facilitate inclusive community participation in each village, and community members choose what kinds of projects to invest the microgrant in. Through this process, they generate community-driven projects that eventually become independent and self-sustaining. Spark has a 98% self-sustain rate and has worked with villages in Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda, Ghana, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
With its emphasis on sustainable change and empowering local communities, Spark was a natural fit for a GlobeMed partnership and worked well with GlobeMed students. “The community is always the one that’s deciding how to use the funds, when to use the funds, what the project will look like, who’s managing the project,” Shai Fogelson, Spark’s Development Director, says. “It’s the community managing it from start to finish.” From his experience, GlobeMed students are also passionate about community-driven change and conscientious about not imposing on communities, so they’ve worked well in conjunction with the Spark mission.
In their work for Spark, GlobeMed at USC students have taken on projects including fundraising for Spark as well as report-writing and information-gathering for communities that Spark works with. Projects they’ve worked on have included healthcare and livelihood improvements. Shai also highlights students’ dedication to raising awareness and generating excitement about Spark on the USC campus, “The ability to catalyze commitments from fellow students and use that to help support and launch new initiatives in East and West Africa was incredibly helpful.”
Students’ high energy and dedication and willingness to get deeply involved was another component of their presence at Spark that the staff enjoyed. Eager to learn more about certain skills such as grant- and report-writing and fundraising, GROW interns in Uganda and students back in Los Angeles alike were excited to take on big projects in new areas for them. “Students are the next generation of thought leaders and change-makers, so it’s important to get them involved early on,” Shai says.
Going forward, Spark is working on bringing their programs to a national level in Rwanda. “We just signed a partnership with the government of Rwanda to launch the FCAP [Facilitated Collective Action Process], which is our model, in 250 villages over the course of 3 years, which is nearly 2 times of what we’ve done over the last 10 years,” Shai shares. As Spark executes the plan to scale nationally in Rwanda, they’re also working on plans to scale nationally in a similar way in the other four countries in which they work.
Despite this increasing scale, Spark always remains grounded in the needs of the communities they’re there to help. “We’re very much focused on the process and not just the end results,” Shai emphasizes. “We don’t just want to come in as a nonprofit and provide money and that’s it [. . .] We want to provide community members with the tools and resources to decide how they want to better their own community, and ideally with those resources and tools they can continue doing that year after year, even after we’ve stepped to the side.”
