After 8 years of growth throughout California, we brought our successful model to Washington! Since 2022, CivicSpark AmeriCorps Fellows have been serving in communities throughout the state, building local capacity to address emerging and entrenched community resilience issues.
Our partners are local, regional, and state governments; universities; nonprofits; and community-based organizations that want to meet their community resilience goals faster with the support of a young professional (who in turn receives professional development training and support from the CivicSpark team, subject matter experts, and AmeriCorps).
Program Design
CivicSpark recruits Fellows through a highly competitive application process.
Fellows spend 11 months embedded in government agencies and community organizations, serving 1,300+ hours implementing a needed community resilience project, while also building long-term capacity to ensure the work is sustained after their service year.
Benefits
- Receive dedicated support for your initiatives
- Access a proven capacity building workforce model
- Increase resources for underserved communities
- Attract, train and retain young leaders
- Reach and exceed your organizational goals
- Move Washington’s community resilience efforts forward
Project Spotlight
Washington State Department
of Commerce
The Washington State Department of Commerce has hosted multiple Fellows for the 2023-2024 and 2024-2025 service years.
In 2023-24, Fellow Amelia Fujikawa supported the Energy Policy Office with investigating the potential design of a Statewide Low-Income Energy Assistance Program (SLIEAP) to better address energy equity issues statewide.
The Fellow assisted with facilitating workshops, gathering stakeholder input, and drafting a framework for SLIEAP program design that was presented to the Legislature in June 2024.
Our CivicSpark Fellow directly contributed to the scale of our City's ability to work on sustainability-related issues. Since our Sustainable Yakima Committee is new, we don't have much capacity to enhance this effort. (Our Fellow) was critical in progressing the committee's work as they worked towards a one-year action plan.”
The CivicSpark Fellow helped with the integration of Climate Action Planning into the City-wide Comprehensive Update in a way that we can reference, utilize and update for years to come. Having this in our Comprehensive Plan will help us to be more organized and therefore more efficient when using our existing resources, and we will have a better standing to seek out grants to improve both our effectiveness and reach.
The CivicSpark program increased effectiveness by adding resources to help us do things we wouldn't otherwise have been able to do. For a smaller jurisdiction like Redmond, this has been a huge value add.