Let’s Get Creative: EngageIRL Spotlight on Spark Central
In a 2019 study, Karol Jan Borowiecki analyzed United States census data starting from 1850 to reveal socio-economic trends in creative occupations. One finding of Borowiecki’s study was that creative workers generally tend to come from families with a higher income and access to education (Borowiecki 10-11). What stuck with me most after reading Borowiecki’s study was a question of access: what is lost when creative expression becomes a privilege few of us can afford?
Spark Central wants to make this question a moot point. They offer free membership and access to a curated selection of creative activities and outlets. When you walk through their doors, it’s easy to get overwhelmed. Everything has its place, but where to begin? The library? The Maker Space? Poetry After Dark? Spark Central has options catered to many interests for adults and children alike.
One afternoon, my colleague Sarah Overholt and I decided to sit down with Spark and get the scoop. In our conversation with Leah Dawdy, Program Director at Spark Central, we learned plenty about the nonprofit, its activities, impact, and how the community can support its work. Passion and potential surround this wonderful organization. We hope that by sharing this piece, you’ll get inspired to engage in some ‘creative chaos’, too.
A Conversation With Leah Dawdy, Program Director at Spark Central
SARAH OVERHOLT AND SAMUEL MCLAUGHLIN: It is 3:04pm on Tuesday, and this is Leah Dawdy from Spark Central. Leah, can you give us a high-level overview of what Spark Central is and what you all do?
LEAH DAWDY: Spark Central is a nonprofit. We ignite creativity, innovation, and imagination so people can forge their path to their best future. There are many ways that we do that through our free programming. We have programs for people of all ages and all different categories. We have arts programs, a robotics program, writing programs– if you can dream it, we can try to do it. That is basically what we are, who we are, and what we do. We have a space full of arts and crafts supplies. We have a small stage area where a lot of little kids go and do dress up and do the jumbo building toys. And then we have a community of volunteers who just really want to give.
What are you looking for in volunteers? What is the volunteer process like?
It depends on what folks are interested in. Some volunteers want to be with the kids, and some are like, “I need no social time today.” We can accommodate [both of those and] everything in between. Some volunteers don’t want to be highly interactive. They want to be more on the back end. So, they might help Nikki with some more descriptive stuff like social media. And we always need help organizing the space because we have so many materials, so much love goes into it. Raw materials need to be consistently checked to make sure we have them. So, yeah, cleaning, organizing, just generally keeping staff sane [laughs].
And then there’s the more programmatic volunteers. Like right now, Heartistry is happening next door. That one is kind of a watercolor, embrace your emotions, kind of a program, [with a desire] to be present, get to know yourself and how you’re thinking and feeling.
We have a volunteer who’s very gifted in watercolor and she’s a graphic designer, so she lends her expertise to the community by running a program like that. We also have our adult writing programs, all run by local writers. We’re hoping to expand that to include the arts more broadly. It’s run by Jenny Davis, Ben Smith and Hannah Ingle. [In these sessions,] the community comes together. They go off a prompt and facilitate a conversation around what people wrote that day.
There’s also Poetry After Dark. That one’s run by Eastern Washington University MFA students currently in the program, and they get their Writers in the Community credits here for volunteering their time. They study poetry together, read it, discuss it, what draws you to it, and then they write based on those themes.
So, we need all different types of skills and help. We even had volunteers put shelves together for us, it’s everything under the sun.
You kept using this phrase when we talked before the interview, ‘creative chaos.’ Can you tell us a bit about what that means?
Yes, I love that phrase. It’s kind of my own little thing. Like, my brain is creative chaos, yeah, and I see it here at Spark: you walk in and there’s the books, the stage, and the computers. It feels like a lot all at once. But you also feel creativity at your fingertips. The potential is there, you just have to reach out.
Can we talk about that cool library that we saw out front? How is that curated?
That’s mostly suggestions from our patrons and our volunteers. People will jot down a book they’d love to see here, and we’ll check it out. Sometimes staff members have recommendations. We go for a lot of local authors– like Jess Walter, who was one of our co-founders– and when we know that they’ve released a new book, we make sure we nab it.
And then there’s the Visiting Writers series we host for Eastern Washington University. They get writers from out of town to come in, and the students and faculty all come in to be a part of this fabulous reading the person does. We try to nab their books for the library as well.
What is Level Up?
Level Up is our afterschool program at Holmes, Audubon, and Garfield Elementary. Mentors work in small groups or one-on-one with the kids– ideally, it’s the same kids all throughout the year. The mentors are there to keep the kids focused, engaged, and building those community connections.
We also do a newspaper in the first trimester of the school year. And then we do the arts edition in the second trimester. So right now, the kids at those three schools are learning different art concepts. They’re building air-dry clay, painting on their 3D models. They’re about to do digital art with me at Holmes [Elementary], so we’re gonna bring Apple pencils in and they’re gonna learn how to use layers.
What kind of changes have you observed in kids going through these programs?
I taught kindergarten, first, and third grade in California before coming to Spark Central, and then I moved out here and taught K-6 computer lab. So, I was teaching pre-COVID, then did the online [learning] pivot, and then moved out here to do more of that.
It’s been interesting because at first, I thought, “I don’t remember my childhood being like this.” Kids won’t even sit and watch a movie at school for more than 20 minutes.
That was my first year of teaching. And then the second year, I tried it again, and I was like, “Oh, this is not unique to that class.” This is the attention span we have to work with. [At Spark Central] we’re trying to curate activities that are exciting, that don’t feel repetitive– short bursts of energy, and those intentional breaks in between. That’s what we’re trying to do with these programs, and then we can work on like the attention span slowly lengthening.
The kids just had their newspaper publication party last Friday, and they made all the decorations. Of course, having their attention to do that [was challenging.] At first it was like, “Okay, everyone plan what you want to do,” and then the next week, because we had two weeks to do this, I was like, “Okay! I’m putting you all into committees.”
And then they were able to [focus] all their different personalities in one cute project. So yeah, just finding ways like that to hold their attention and keep them going. Spice it up a little.
So, it’s not a lack of drive, just maybe a lack of focus.
Absolutely. The kids I work with are very, very creative. They just want that outlet. They need help fine tuning its direction.
That makes sense. How many kids are in the programs right now?
We have about 10 at each school. We aim for 20.
Why do you think creativity is important?
Speaking for myself, creativity is important because as an adult, I feel like I’ve really lost it for a long time. And not just creativity, but creativity through that sense of play. I lost my sense of play in art, and I became so perfectionistic: if it wasn’t good, then it wasn’t worth making. It wasn’t about the process anymore. It wasn’t about the experimentation or the creativity. It was about the product.
And so, I stopped making art, which was the one thing through COVID that really made me feel like I was still human. I started binge watching and, you know, just not making anymore.
[But] then I started playing Dungeons and Dragons, and I would journal and draw the adventure as it was unfolding with this group of friends. That brought back that sense of play for me which inspired all of these other creative projects, like making a temperature blanket, because I feel more creatively driven. I’m doing some shrinky-dink projects with the kids. We’ve got that Pro-Create project. I’m relearning all these skills that I thought I lost, but I really just lost the joy of them.
That feels like an excellent pitch for potential volunteers. Hint, hint, if you feel like you’ve lost your creativity, come to Spark Central, guaranteed you’ll get it back.
We want the adults who come into our space want them to engage their inner kid. Get dirty! Make a mess! Do the air-dry clay and play with the Qixels and grab a puppet and just express yourself.
What drove you to come to Spark Central?
Teaching during COVID kind of [wrecked] me. It was a lot of the expectations and the “Where are we going to get that support?” And the answer is, “You just got to figure it out.” I was so tired. I literally Googled ‘fun jobs in Spokane’ because I wanted out of the classroom—not out of education. I loved and still love education and educators. I just needed something different. I felt stuck, like teaching was all I knew. It was my first career, my first love, and I did not feel like I could physically do anything else.
Yeah. So then when I Googled that, Spark Central came up. I got my resume together and notified my principal, applied with her letter of recommendation. And the rest is, you know, three years of history.
What’s the history of Spark Central?
I know a little bit about the history, but not all of it. From what I can remember, the history is that Jim Frank– head of Greenstone, or I think his son is now, maybe– but [his company] Greenstone developed Kendall Yards. Jim wanted a library here in Kendall Yards because it’s tough for kids to get a car and Monroe Street Bridge is a bit scary.
Meanwhile, Jess Walter had INK, which stood for Inland Northwest Kids Art Space, and he was doing programs for the youth to engage them in the arts, specifically in writing. That’s the root of Spark Central: this developer who wanted a library and this guy who had a programmatic dream. So, they came together and merged their organizations into what became Spark Central in 2016. We moved into the space next door that we call The Station and hit the ground running with volunteer power that exceeded anyone’s expectations.
What do you see as barriers to getting kids involved in your programs?
We don’t have a great way to provide food and other critical services for the kids who desperately need it, and that’s tough. [The kids] come in hungry, and we have snacks. And that’s great when it’s functioning and works and everything, but [some] kids have certain allergies or whatever, and it’s hard makes to make sure that we can provide what is needed.
[Another challenge] is that some kids and their families feel that Spark Central is far, on the edge of their neighborhood, and so it’s difficult to access. That’s why we brought our programs to the schools. But then the issue becomes staff availability. We’re trying to keep stability for the kids, the familiar faces, the rapport, the relationships. We’ve been doing okay, but it would be nice to have more staff and the capacity to get out into the community.
What’s the future of Spark Central look like?
We’re always looking for where we can go next, and then kind of staring at our budget, going, “Will you let us?” [laughs] We’ve always had dreams of mini hubs in the neighborhood, or in other neighborhoods. Like mini-Sparks, kind of satellite locations, bringing more community people into Spark, supporting more partnerships and those kinds of things.
In the short term, Spark has summer camps coming out, and that’s very exciting. For the first time, we’re doing a fiber art summer camp called Rip and Reclaim. It’s going to be run by a coworker of mine, Willow: just kind of this punk style, upcycling, mending, all of that genre. We do eight weeks of camps, so it’s a very exciting time at Spark in the summer. We’re all creative chaos, all the time!
Sarah Overholt and Samuel McLaughlin are Program Associates at LaunchNW.