Overview
Brighter Spark Applied Research
Brighter Spark Applied Research is a research, evaluation and organizational change uses cutting edge academic research methods to pressing social problems and those working to solve them. We partner with organizations and governments that are addressing the most pressing needs of our society to help them do what they do better through the power of research and evaluation. Give you everything you need to have a transformative effect within your sector.
Information Box Group
Partner With Us Book a Consultation
Our goal is to build partnerships that will be long and highly productive, so we are eager to meet with potential clients and explore whether this would be a good fit. For any potential client, we offer a no-obligation 45 minute consultation with the Principal Researcher to develop a scope of work with the goals, activities and budget for the partnership that you and your colleagues can consider.
What We Do
Strategy Development
For decades, strategy development involved a grand unveiling of a big plan that a ton of effort went into. It would be exciting and galvanizing for a year, sometimes two, and then began to feel irrelevant and gradually less referenced and considered – until it was time to build a new plan. Some version of this is still operational in many organizations.
We help partners break that cycle. The rate at which major facets of society are changing means those that plan this way are perpetually behind, not leading. Our strategy development approach involves establishing 5 core elements:
- A shared understanding of the principles you operate under
- Who you serve (and who you don’t and why)
- The criteria that separate a good opportunity from an amazing one
- The collective tolerance for risk and uncertainty, and
- the core measures of success in your work.
This approach gives you a set of practical tools to bring strategy into day-to-day operations. Instead of specifying what you should do two years from now, it catalyzes an ongoing process for considering your responses to evolving situations. What is a good strategy changes, and what got you success in the past is in no way guaranteed to make you successful in the future. So instead, work with us to set the foundation for a culture of continuous learning and intentional, evidence-based decision-making.
Our Work:
Salvation Army, Lawson Ministries – Community Access to Transit (CAT)
After over a decade of training young people with disabilities how to safely take public transit, the CAT program was at a cross-roads. Between moving the program online during the pandemic and the end of a stable funding source, it was time to look at new options and opportunities.
Lawson Ministries asked us to offer an assessment of what worked and didn’t over their years of operating the program, search for new ways of supporting access to transit, and convene stakeholders to consider all of this information and help map out a strategic direction. Using an online whiteboard, we created briefing materials and a fun, interactive virtual workshop that clarified how the program could be re-invigorated.
A snapshot of our custom-built strategy workshop platform:
Diversity, Equity and Inclusion
Inequities, both subtle and overt, are perpetuated by discrimination across the myriad systems we all live in. Wages, health, housing, criminal justice involvement, educational outcomes and virtually every other well-being measure shows that not being part of the default for race, gender, ability/disability and other sources of difference is associated with poorer outcomes. It is a fully researched and understood reality that systems perpetuate outcomes that are racist/sexist/ableist, etc.
At the same time, people within those systems may personally feel quite open to the lives and experiences of others. They can care about resolving injustices and in no way want to do harm.
The work of strengthening diversity, equity and inclusion in organizations starts by doing the research to understand the scale, sources and experiences of inequities within the organization and its field. Then it requires doing the hard, emotional work of reconciling that with intentions and recognizing that we operate within these broader systems of oppression. Only then, can DEI initiatives extend beyond positive but tentative steps like employment censuses into being a core consideration in all decisions and a core measure of being successful in your work.
Our Work:
Mending the Chasm – Inside Out Project
Mending the Chasm supports not for profits in the Halton region in building more inclusive, equitable and anti-racist cultures. In 2021 they ran a pilot project to provide training to teams from a variety of local not for profits. We evaluated the impact overall, on individual teams, and by racialized status.
Some of our results are posted on their website: https://www.mendingthechasm.ca/programs
A sampling of diversity, equity and inclusion questions we asked: <Pull together 4-5>
Project/Network/Initiative Start-up
Our team has worked in the not for profit and government sectors and consulted with hundreds of organizations over our careers. The result is a deep knowledge of how the sectors work, how to build smart, and prove early and effectively that your work is important and essential.
In the early stages, we can help initiatives get off to the right start by serving alternately as a coach, cheerleader, and honest friend. We work with organizations and leaders we believe in, and use our knowledge, connections, and research skills to help them forge their way.
Our Work:
The AIDS Network, Black Women’s Visions
For those living with HIV and AIDS, community and support can make a major difference in having a healthy, full life. Black Women’s Visions came about through a recognition that the number of black women living with HIV/AIDS within the greater Toronto, Hamilton and Niagara regions was growing disproportionately but still small enough that local HIV/AIDS organizations rarely had tailored support or opportunities to meet and engage with other black women living with the disease.
An enterprising social worker newly graduated from McMaster brought together the local and regional organizations and raised funds to start a community specifically for and by black women, with a particular focus (because of the limited numbers and long distances) on building an online website and community. She brought us on at the beginning of the initiative to build a theory of change and do the evaluation. Yet in our early conversations, it became clear that the details of getting the website up and running were what was consuming her. So, we scaled back the evaluation and brought in our website developer and graphic artist – working hand in hand to build the website and an online community, and then a series of in-person meetings. As often happens with social entrepreneurs running initiatives off the side of their desks, the loss of funding made it to hard to sustain the range of community supports, but the website remains as an ongoing source of information and remaining sources of support and connection.
Organizational Change
In every organization, there are times when it’s clear that something needs to change. But how to get everyone on the same page, and even exactly what page that should be, aren’t always easy to work out. A good external partner can help you assess how things are working now, clarify a vision for how they should be, and systematically work with you to overcome the obstacles to change and build the incentives and infrastructure to maintain a new normal.
Change is never easy work, but we strive to make it intentional, caring, and impactful. We leave organizations stronger, better at listening across levels, and with improved outcomes for those they serve.
Our Work:
Banyan Community Services, Peninsula Youth Centre and Arrell Youth Centre
Banyan Community Services runs two secure-custody residential detention centres for the Ministry of Children, Community and Social Services, one in Hamilton and one in Niagara. Both facilities have schooling and time for exercise plus programs that teach the young men social and emotional skills or introduce them to community groups. But there aren’t enough activities to fill the hours.
We were asked to explore and share with them the constraints on programming and then help establish a new and wider array of offerings. We are currently ending the assessment phase and about to begin the process of gaining internal buy-in.
Performance Indicators and Metrics
Just about every working person has experienced bad performance management processes with indicators that failed to capture all that was accomplished, or hold achievements in the context of the barriers that were presented. At best, bad indicators and metrics get ignored, at worst, they drive efforts in directions that are counter to the organization’s priorities (like spending more time reporting what’s been done than doing it).
We have had lots of experience with bad metrics and are passionate about helping organizations and networks build better indicators that reflect a balance of considerations for what success looks like and that involve intentional exploration and co-learning within teams about what is possible and what challenges hinder progress. This work is iterative – we work with teams to build potentially strong metrics, pilot them and track what happens, and then revise until they are:
- Manageable to track
- Compelling across the organization
- Directly mapped to impacts on service populations
Our Work:
Green Shield Canada – Mental Health Indicators
Green Shield Canada is an insurance provider that operates as a social enterprise and reinvests funds in the community. One major focus of their grantmaking is mental health. In partnership with our sister centre at McMaster, ARMS (Advanced Research on Mental Health and Society), we have been working with Green Shield to build a common evaluation framework for all of their mental health work, with performance indicators that are appropriate across a wide range of program models and populations, and that can collectively be summarized into the overall impact of the foundation’s grantmaking.
The project has balanced having rigorous, quality indicators of improvement in individual mental health symptoms with flexibility for each grantee to select and incorporate the indicators that work with their model.
We produced five primers for the leadership of Green Shield and a guide to mental health indicators, all of which are available here.
Strengths/Needs/Service Populations Assessments
When programs are new or at inflection points, it can be important to reach out to the community and learn what the priorities are. Sometimes the question is as simple as how many people there are in a given geographic area that would be appropriate for our services and how we can connect with them.
Using a mix of direct engagement and data from the census and other community datasets, we are able to help organizations size, define and understand their service populations. As mixed methods researchers, this ranges from standing in front of grocery stores talking to those coming out; to organizing and facilitating engaging community meetings; to reviewing existing narratives and studies; or pulling restricted census data to gain more complete pictures.
Our Work:
Parkdale Neighbourhood Land Trust – Community Needs Assessment
In the midst of the pandemic, volunteer community researchers with Parkdale Neighbourhood Land Trust went building-to-building in high rises within the neighbourhood. Conversation by conversation, they captured the experiences and needs of residents in light of the rapid gentrification of the neighbourhood.
And at the end of that, they had a big spreadsheet full of numbers and quotes. A community volunteer eagerly offered to analyze the data. But that’s not the easiest thing if you’re not used to doing it. So a handful of hours of coaching from an experienced researcher would really help. And that’s what we did. We helped him do all the basic counts, and then sort through the huge volume of data to find the stories most worth telling. He did a brilliant job, and we were so happy to have a small part in helping a wonderful community research initiative succeed.
Check out the analysis of the Community Needs Assessment in PNLT’s Parkdale Tower Rental Study, Pages 45-62: http://www.pnlt.ca/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/PNLT_ParkdaleTowerRentalStudy_2022.pdf
Evaluation
We do a wide range of evaluations for different clients, customized to ensure that the core concerns of both funders and the organization are built in. We specialize in measuring the impact of programs on those they serve, and including key process measures so we can fully understand why and how the data comes out as it does. We use a mix of methods to ensure that we both have concrete numbers and an accurate reflection of the experiences of those engaging with the program or service.
Our preference is to begin evaluations in the early stages of a program so that we can provide real-time information that helps the program develop and have time to build custom tools and approaches that work smoothly with the program’s operations and don’t add a lot of additional work. But we welcome evaluation projects at any stage and can work with your existing data to clarify what can and can’t be known with it, and the priorities for gathering data that will fill out the picture around the impact being produced.
Our Work:
YWCA – TOP and ?
An enterprising Occupational Therapist (OT) at St. Joseph’s Healthcare in Hamilton Ontario began working with one, then, two, then three employment programs in Hamilton that support youth or those with disabilities. These employment programs typically have a training component and then a period of subsidized work for an employer. Adding an occupational therapist allowed for quick access to mental health and other needed services, and practical supports of both the client and employer to make work placements successful.
We have been working with YWCA of Hamilton to both track the impact of Occupational Therapists they have now hired to work within their two employment programs, and more broadly to build the evidence-base for having OT involvement become a staple across employment programs and directly funded. To achieve that requires proving both that there are better employment outcomes in programs with OTs and showing the broad social costs of not helping youth and those with disabilities find and keep stable employment. We have evaluated the programs using their existing data, and are looking for an opportunity to do a comparison study with programs that do not have OTs.
Policy Development and Evidence-Based Advocacy
Sometimes individuals and organizations recognize that they have an important model or program that deserves broader consideration and to achieving that will require advocacy with government or private sector entities. We have extensive public policy expertise and the ability to customize our evaluations and other projects to align with and address the particular needs and considerations of different audiences. This includes practices like calculating relative costs and benefits for better comparison to existing services, building our approaches to align with existing approaches used by the target audience, and engaging them in the development of the evaluation metrics.
Our Work:
Banyan Community Services’s Self-Understanding and Regulating Emotions (SURE)
Banyan Community Services’s Self-Understanding and Regulating Emotions (SURE) program aims to address emotional and behavioural issues among young people aged 12 to 14 who face barriers to developing strong emotional and social skills, including being at-risk of becoming involved in the criminal justice system. Banyan started the program as a pilot with funding from Ontario Trillium Foundation, in the hopes that they could show the beneficial impact to the Ministry for Children, Community and Social Services that would then support both its expansion at Banyan and fuller evaluation in order to become an evidence-based program that could be replicated across the province.
We worked with SURE to both analyze all of the existing data and work with the program leader to develop a new supplemental evaluation tool. Our team and Banyan then co-presented the results to officials from the ministry which has now supported the continuation of the program at Banyan.
How We Work
Utility Focused
There is nothing worse than a report that nobody reads, let alone acts on. We produce something better. We focus on collecting data that directly answers pressing questions and needs within your organization and can be acted upon. When organizations have advocacy goals, we build arguments with the target audience in mind. And we understand that attention is limited so we use beautiful, clean visuals and simple explanations that support engagement with the material.
Projects are built collaboratively with clients and directly in line with the phase of program development, information needs, how much time the program can devote to data collection, and your budget. Ultimately, we fail if our work isn’t profoundly useful. And we don’t like to fail!
Community-Centric Services
When it comes to research and evaluation, Brighter Spark digs deep . Many teams can collect data. Our commitment is toengage in community-centric research that not only generates vital statistics but also captures the nuanced experiences, strengths and needs of your service populations and stakeholders.
So, what does this mean for you?
Imagine not merely relying on numerical data but combining it with real-world applications and genuine community feedback. We aren’t just another run-of-the-mill research firm; we help you both collect and utilize information, creating actionable insights. In a world drowning in data, Brighter Spark offers practical, real-world support.
Our process doesn’t end when the data is collected. We immerse ourselves in the community to better understand its needs, challenges, and aspirations. We talk to real people—your potential clients or beneficiaries—and hear their stories, aspirations, and struggles. This is an ongoing, interactive relationship, not a one-off transaction. We maintain an open dialogue with community stakeholders, keeping the lines of communication perpetually open. The result? Richer, more meaningful insights that drive not just organizational success, but societal impact.
Commitment to Equity
At the core of our approach is a resolute commitment to equity. We recognize that not all voices are equally heard in traditional research paradigms, a fact we aim to rectify. We ensure that underrepresented communities have a seat at the table and that the impact of programs and services is not assumed to be the same for all.
As a matter of course across our projects, we explore who is being served and differential impacts of services; working with clients to address any inequities that may emerge. We do not merely gather data; we foster relationships, build trust, and work towards a more equitable future.
Social Innovation
The Brighter Spark Team and our many collaborators at McMaster University are deeply committed to enacting social change. We know that research done well has a profound impact on policy and practice and are savvy about making that happen. By integrating deep knowledge of social issues and approaches to innovation into our research methods, we do more than offer data. We offer pathways to change.
So, whether you’re a business, a not-for-profit, or a government office striving to make a real impact, consider Brighter Spark your committed partner in both in-depth research and actionable insights. We don’t just work for you; we work with you. It’s not just about servicing your immediate needs; it’s about pioneering transformative pathways for social progress.
We offer a comprehensive range of offerings tailored to fit your unique objectives. We don’t just support your team; we elevate your work to new heights. After all, we’re here for one thing and one thing only: to provide incomparable value that amplifies the transformative power of your work.
Brighter Spark Applied Research
Brighter Spark Applied Research
Brighter Spark Applied Research
Brighter Spark Applied Research is a research, evaluation and organizational change uses cutting edge academic research methods to pressing social problems and those working to solve them. We partner with organizations and governments that are addressing the most pressing needs of our society to help them do what they do better through the power of research and evaluation. Give you everything you need to have a transformative effect within your sector.
Information Box Group
Partner With Us Book a Consultation
Our goal is to build partnerships that will be long and highly productive, so we are eager to meet with potential clients and explore whether this would be a good fit. For any potential client, we offer a no-obligation 45 minute consultation with the Principal Researcher to develop a scope of work with the goals, activities and budget for the partnership that you and your colleagues can consider.