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This toolkit is designed to help organizations build robust boards and to think critically about function and structure. Descriptive text, workbook components and tools are combined to increase the practicality and usability of this resource.
Organizations and initiatives thrive because of their people. Developing, supporting and renewing the skills and capacities of leaders and teams is a critical goal for Mission Spark.
Social impact jobs are both rewarding and stressful. Mission Spark can help support team members to show up as their best selves, renewed and ready for the work ahead. We support individuals, executive teams, and organizational leadership, including critical relationships between CEOs and board chairs.
Mission Spark partners with our clients to develop strong leaders, build strong teams, strengthen organizational cultures, and help organizations through challenging situations.
Our services include individual coaching, team coaching, team building, board development, leadership development, succession planning, and managing transitions.
Coaching strengthens the individuals leading your organizations, allowing you to serve to your full professional potential, avoiding burnout, maintain balance in your life and realizing personal fulfillment.
Your coach will ask you tough and powerful questions to deepen your self-awareness and your ability to deal with uncertainty and other difficult situations, within your organizational culture and in life.
Your coach will listen to you, work on your agenda and address the issues that are most salient to you. This method is designed to elicit your natural skills, resourcefulness, and creativity. Your coach will help you to develop an action plan or set of steps that help further your goals, and supports you in achieving them. Your coach can also help provide consultative insights on tough organizational challenges.
in a team environment, coaching assists with helping a team set its shared goals and vision, and assisting individuals in seeing how dynamics are playing out. In addition, supportive tools and creative processes to assist a team to strengthen its work together are provided.
Get in touch today and let us know how we can help.
A toolkit for recruitment, training, management & appreciation of your volunteer team.
RedLine is an art center and public charity located in Denver, Colorado with a mission to foster education and engagement between artists and communities to promote social change.
RedLine focuses on supporting artists through a two-year artist residency that provides studio space, community engagement, and professional development, as well as providing innovative programming for communities in the surrounding neighborhoods. Viewing art and arts education through the lens of social issues, the organization ensures equitable access to the arts for under-resourced populations by working to fulfill the bold vision of empowering everyone to create social change through art.
In Fall 2015, RedLine contracted with Mission Spark through funding support by the Denver Foundation. RedLine’s executive leadership team sought both leadership coaching and an organization-wide cultural assessment and plan. The leadership team wanted to develop better ways of communicating with each other, create better systems and processes for handling decisions, and establish better work culture all around for the whole staff to drive RedLine forward in its mission and goals. RedLine sought to define its existing organizational culture and then determine the culture they wanted to build toward, in support of staff, the organization’s mission, and in the context of RedLine’s unique and ever-changing space.
Mission Spark conducted facilitated sessions with RedLine’s executive team and staff to identify critical needs and skills, hone in on outcomes, develop a shared sense of the Redline vision, and identify a desired organizational culture that resonated. Mission Spark also provided leadership and operations coaching for RedLine’s executive team, with skills training as needed. With staff, Mission Spark facilitated a structured and creative, interactive cultural assessment process.
Mission Spark then conducted a board assessment in relation to cultural fit, and supported the board’s executive team as it focused on sharing and reinforcing the culture of Redline. Mission Spark supported the design, documentation, implementation, and evaluation of structures and protocols that emerged as priorities to reinforce RedLine’s culture and mission. Guidance and support was also provided to staff in the development of an action plan to align organizational strategy, operations, and culture.
Mission Spark produced a summary report and set of documents detailing Redline’s desired culture and an action plan to move toward that culture. Mission Spark worked through the findings with the leadership team, and provided individual and team coaching to support around the changes and shared vision Redline had identified, as well as provided a series of tools tailored to address specific needs of the team.
Mission Spark worked with staff to identify and pilot new work approaches over a six month timeline, including things like posting status notes in open work space, using a rolling white board to share what threads of work were taking place in a particular week. In doing so, Mission Spark helped shift the approach to and use of staff meetings.
In the time spent working with RedLine, Mission Spark developed a cultural implementation strategy and coached leadership in how to champion and preserve culture. As a diverse urban laboratory where art, community, and education converge, RedLine’s organizational culture has been bolstered by partnering with Mission Spark.
A toolkit for attracting, developing and retaining your mission-critical staff.
A toolkit to help organizational staff and board volunteer leadership be prepared for planned and unplanned leadership transitions.