After 8 years of growth throughout California, we brought our successful model to Colorado! 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 Colorado’s community resilience efforts forward
Project Spotlight
The City of Boulder
The City of Boulder has hosted multiple CivicSpark Fellows since we expanded to Colorado in 2022. In 2023-24, two Fellows, Daniel Hanson and Caroline Petterson, supported the City’s Nature-Based Climate Solutions team and Cool Boulder campaign. The Cool Boulder campaign forms partnerships between the City, local organizations, and communities to address the climate crisis and biodiversity loss through nature-based climate action. The Fellows supported the development, implementation, and evaluation of the Cool Boulder communications, partnerships, and initiatives.
CivicSpark's support of the fellow provided perspective and room for knowledge expansion that the fellow needed in order to effectively complete this work. The scale and reach of sustainability efforts within the County government has grown substantially due to this work.
The fellow played a critical role in the internal and external outreach of the plan to make sure this was a highly visible and accessible planning process. The efficiency of accomplishing tasks has doubled with his help, and his ability to quickly learn about new subjects has been invaluable. The effectiveness has also improved, as the fellow brings a different perspective to the project that may have not been considered before, making the plan more amenable to a broader group of people.