Fostering Networked Communities
to transform
Health, Education & Social Outcomes
Spark ignites and accelerates improved outcomes across the interconnected ecosystems of patients, families, caregivers, students and educators by strengthening three areas:
1) Building a Community, Working Together for Better Results
For more than fifteen years, a dozen learning improvement networks have shown it is possible to dramatically improve health and educational outcomes for patients, families, students, and teachers. Our team has been on the front lines of this work—leading, participating in, and drawing inspiration from these successes. We have seen the kinds of breakthrough results people, teams, and organizations can achieve when they work together to solve challenging problems.
Among networks’ successes:
Protecting Children: They have spared tens of thousands of hospitalized children from experiencing serious harm.
Boosting Recovery: They have increased the rate of clinical remission for children and adolescents with Crohn’s Disease and Ulcerative Colitis from 55% to over 80%.
Saving Lives: They have reduced the interstage mortality rate for children with complex congenital heart disease by 70%.
Improving Community Health: They have reduced hospitalizations from the poorest neighborhoods by nearly 20% for children with chronic conditions.
Increasing Student Engagement in School. They have reduced chronic absenteeism by 6.2% in less than 9 months across 23 school districts and 70+ schools.
We know there is so much more to do, and the possibilities are limitless.
What if it were normal for health professionals to work together to get the best results for people living with any medical condition?
What if schools and communities were set up so every student in every district could reach their full potential?
We started Spark to make this way of working - as networked improvement communities - widespread. We support interested networks and partners, and encourage systems everywhere to help expand these effective, transformative, collaborative approaches to achieving breakthrough results. Our goal is to be a catalyst to ignite, accelerate, and spread networked improvement communities until this way of working is simply how the world solves its hardest problems.
2) Developing People Who Become Catalysts
We are committed to growing the capacity to establish and guide a continuously expanding community of people-centered, improvement-focused networks; networks whose leaders drive change and become catalysts themselves. We share resources and help build connections among network leaders to accelerate learning and improvement across fields and disciplines. We are growing a community of partners who can provide the essential support networks need to thrive: leadership skills, governance approaches, and engagement strategies. We help teach the skills required to collaborate, test ideas, use system improvement methods, make meaning from data, and accelerate change. We promote “co-production” by practitioners, people with lived experience, researchers, and improvement specialists. There is no substitute for having the active involvement, from the beginning, of those most impacted by the problems in our current systems and their sub-optimal results.
3) Building Shared Foundations for Every Network
Every network depends on the same foundations: ways to learn together, shared tools and resources, data and technology, and agreements that make sharing data and knowledge valid, trustworthy, and safe.
These foundations let a network organize itself, operate, and improve its impact over time. Today, almost every network builds them from scratch — at great cost, over many years, against constant friction. It doesn't have to be this way. We share what we have learned and we are working together with others to build a common pool of tools and methods, free to any network, anywhere. The faster that pool grows, the less it costs — in money, time, and friction — to launch the next network and keep it running.
