What is SPARK Curriculum?

FosterClub’s SPARK curriculum is built for young people, powered by young people, and founded on our evidence-based and trauma-informed framework. Leveraging our twenty years of youth engagement expertise, SPARK curriculum is designed to meet the unique needs of youth affected by foster care. SPARK curriculum equips young people and supportive adults with tools to reduce the impact of trauma, enhance resilience, and improve outcomes for foster youth. 

SPARK curriculum is designed to be:

• Facilitated by near-peer leaders with coaching from one or more supportive adults to form healthy youth-adult partnerships.
• A guide for crowdsourcing information - ensuring diverse and equitable information sharing
• Strengths-based to promote self-determination and jumpstart intrinsic motivation to increase capacity to improve longer term outcomes 
• Flexible enough to meet the needs of youth at various developmental stages and abilities
• Trauma-informed by meeting youth where they are in healing from trauma 

SPARK represents the five growth areas or competencies for youth who experience foster care:

Why SPARK?

Child welfare educational interventions for foster youth have largely focused on reversing negative trends in long-term outcomes related to education, employment, housing, and risk-avoidance (e.g., substance abuse, incarceration, early pregnancy). The result is that many life skills programs use a “hard skills” curriculum, often neglecting to develop soft skills that contribute to a young person’s ability to put hard skills into action. 

SPARK workshops focus on active and engaged learning. Regardless of the topic, SPARK brings fun to learning about topics important to youth in care. Designed to inspire and empower young people, our curriculum provides space for young people to become informed and gain tools for their success.