What We Do
Forging new pathways to
solve youth homelessness
We believe that the answers to the most pressing challenges in youth homelessness will come from the brilliance of young people and direct service staff. Spark Action Lab leverages youth and community-led research and organizing to highlight the creativity and connections among youth and service providers in the Pacific Northwest, turning emerging possibilities into reality.
Spark Curiosity
Our team is endlessly curious, and want to build capacity for communities to take their inquiry even further. We center participatory action research methods to explore critical questions in youth and homelessness systems, elevating new ideas for how we can transform systems region-wide.
Project Highlight:
We are partnering with Skagit Valley’s Communities For Functional Zero team to add action-inquiry academic research capacity to evaluate not only the impact of their unique Host Home pilot on young people, but the effects of their radical mutual aid approach on the community.
Spark Creativity
We use creative methodologies throughout our projects to unleash the brilliance of young people and direct service staff, fostering new directions in policy, practice and system building.
Project Highlight:
Our Social Dreaming Series is the first of its kind in our sector. Social Dreaming is a practice of bringing our individual dreams into the collective, making shared meaning through the offerings, associations, visions and feelings that emerge. Dreams and associations are shared without attachment to the dreamer, with the goal of identifying patterns, themes, and dynamics within the group's collective unconscious, revealing insights, new ideas, and emerging possibilities.
Our Summer 2025 series brought together more than 40 dreamers from around the US and internationally to use our dreams to think differently about the challenges facing us in the sector.
Spark Connection
Our sector needs community now, more than ever. We cultivate a dynamic, creative, youth centered youth homelessness culture through accessible training, strategy support and relationship building.
Our Schemers Book Club is a radical space of connection for our sector to deepen the theory of why and how we do this work. It is an open, flexible, free space for people committed to system change to connect and think as humans on a shared journey to build communities that young people and families deserve. Some of the books we are reading in 2026 are:
All About Love, bell hooks
We Will Not Cancel Us, Adrienne Maree Brown
Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, David Graeber
Imagination, A Manifesto, Ruha Benjamin
Spark Courage
We need to build the bench of courageous, strong, justice-driven, collaborative leaders in our sector. We activate BIPOC, LGBTQ and lived experience leadership, developing the field’s capacity to adapt, connect and create through dynamic change.
Project Highlight:
We believe that many outstanding young leaders with lived expertise need a new form of leadership development to meet the sector's enormous challenges. The Sparking Emerging, Empowered Dreamers (SEEDs) Fellowship program is envisioned as a year-long adaptive leadership development program for full-time staff leaders, aged 18-30, with lived experience of homelessness and/or housing instability. This program will equip participants with adaptive leadership skills, systems theory, and radical imagination to build healing-centered organizational cultures and foster a regional community of leaders.
We are currently fundraising for this project