Relevance

The United Way of the Bay Area (UWBA), in partnership with several of its grantee organizations, conceived of the SparkPoint Center concept out of a desire to fill a gap within the market. Within the Bay Area, no existing family resource center offers all three components of financial stability: debt management, income building, and savings and asset development. The SparkPoint Center will bring together a group of service providers to co-locate their programs, providing an innovative one-stop shop for financial stability services.

Although a handful of similar one-stop prosperity centers run by United Way affiliates and other organizations around the country, design has never been taken into account as an integral component of shaping such a center. Often situated in whatever spaces can be found, they tend to inhabit physical environments no better than the social service offices they seek to replace. Financial stability is in many ways about dignity. Design can be a powerful tool in conveying and advancing that philosophy. The SparkPoint Center model represents an opportunity to not only alleviate a service gap through an innovative program model but to also increase, through design, the capacity of the services to empower low income individuals and families to achieve a better financial future.

Prototype

Public Architecture is working with the UWBA as conceptual design lead and will be engaging one of its 1% firm participants to serve as project architect for the first implementation of a SparkPointCenter. This first SparkPoint Center, intended to be a flagship, will be developed in Oakland. In early 2009, UWBA identified a site in East Oakland, and the City of Oakland is on board as an additional partner in the project. The project will be an interior fit-out of an 8,000 square foot space and is slated to be completed in 2001. Centered around not only the core spaces needed for the program, but how to embrace themes of dignity, community, and access, the physical design is being developed alongside and in concert with the program’s service model.

The Oakland SparkPoint Center is the first of seven being developed by the UWBA and its partners in each of the seven Bay Area counties over the next 5 years. Furthermore, United Way chapters and related organizations are looking to develop more prosperity centers around the country in the coming years. Thus, the Oakland SparkPoint Center is being conceived of as a prototype, with tremendous significance as a comprehensive (programmatic and physical) model. 

Advocacy

As part of helping to create a replicable strategy which can be inform the development of future prosperity centers, Public Architecture intends to package the design strategy developed into a instructional resource. Working with the UWBA and its partners, this strategy will be packaged with a similar programmatic resource to produce an integrated and comprehensive guide to developing centers that are environments of dignity, hope, and financial success.

The United Way SparkPoint Center project was undertaken as a fee for service project by Public Architecture.