Meet Beverly Davis of SPARK! in South Dallas

Today we’d like to introduce you to Beverly Davis.

So, before we jump into specific questions about the business, why don’t you give us some details about you and your story.
In the early 90’s, I became an Aunt. My desire to awaken a world of opportunity in my nieces and nephew lead my husband and I to take them on “field trips” to art museums, history museums, magic houses, sculpture parks, and more. In 2003, something totally unexpected happened. We visited the City Museum in St. Louis for the first time. It’s truly an amazing creative place, and it engaged our whole family for the entire day. It also ignited in the children, a desire to invent and create.

Shortly after this, I experienced a truly defining moment in my life. My life’s mission became crystal clear. It was December 2009. Six years after our first visit to the City Museum. I remember the moment the idea of SPARK! came to me. My husband, Devon, and I were driving back to Dallas after spending the Christmas holidays in St. Louis with my family. It was freezing out. There had been a bad ice storm in Oklahoma, and we had to reroute ourselves through Arkansas to get home safely. It was cold. It was grey. It was boring. Driving was difficult.

Devon was at the wheel. I was talking to God about the next chapter in my life. I was nearing 50. Should I carry on as-is? Or should I do something different with my life? Just like that, the idea to build a bigger, better creative facility in Dallas was fully developed in my head. I saw a place where the children of Dallas could develop their creativity. That would include all disciplines of creativity and allow children the opportunity to explore visual arts, music, theater, architecture, engineering, and culinary arts. A place where they would receive hands-on education by actual practitioners. I saw an awesome, fully immersive creative environment open to children of all means.

The idea was so wholly formed in my mind it actually scared me. Was I really going to close my business, derail my career, tank my income and become a crusader for developing creativity in children? I needed to take a step back. I needed a better understanding of why creativity is so important. I understood it emotionally; I needed rational justification.

I dove into the research of creativity. There’s a large and growing body of research out there. I spent three years studying dozens of research projects, read a pile of books. I annotated all of it. I synthesized it. I understand it.

Children who identify as creative have:
-Higher self-esteem
-Better problem-solving skills
-Go further in their education

They are:
-Less likely to get into trouble
-More likely to graduate,
-Grow up to become “productive citizens.”
-They get jobs, pay taxes, participate in politics, arts & culture, and volunteerism.

Every two years, IBM conducts a study of global CEOs to forecast leadership needs. In 2010, they interviewed 1,500 CEOs from around the globe. They wanted to understand what characteristics these business leaders thought were the most important to develop in the upcoming workforce. Far and away the number one characteristic they seek is creativity. Creativity fosters innovation. Creativity has remained at the top of the list since.

The research also shows that there is a lack of creativity being taught in schools. Schools provide little or no opportunity to innovate. Failure is viewed as catastrophic. There is no trial and error. Our children are afraid to fail, to try. If we don’t give children a safe place to explore, to fail and try again, they will not be able to innovate. We must develop their creativity.

I discovered an irrefutable fact: creativity is inherent. We are all born creative. But it has to be developed. We learned two important lessons from our adventures with the nieces and nephew. First, when we taught them to solve for themselves, they were happier with the results. They had pride in their accomplishments. Their self-esteem grew. They felt empowered to tackle the next situation.

We also realized the importance of teaching them how to think creatively. This meant teaching the creative process which gives them the problem-solving skills they need to be successful in school, work and life. With these understandings, we now comprehended the remarkable value of children self-defining as creative. We committed to building SPARK!

Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
I don’t believe anything of great value is achieved via a smooth path. It took 4 years just to create a nonprofit organization. Admittedly, I was working full-time in my marketing career, and building SPARK! in my free time. I wrote the business plan, developed the proforma and recruited an architectural firm to create concept boards to share the vision. Then it was on to the IRS to obtain the 501c3. These steps went fairly smoothly.

Even attracting the first 6 volunteers for the initial board of directors wasn’t terribly daunting. Networking and my passion for the vision of SPARK! drove my activities and successes in this first year. Taking the leap of faith to close my business and dedicate myself fulltime, unpaid, to building SPARK! took mental fortitude and financial planning. God stepped in to help with the funding to build SPARK! He directed my networking efforts through the proverbially six degrees of separation.

Locating the space in which to build was a fortuitous introduction through yet another networking contact. After that progress, both seemed to take forever, and at the same time moved remarkably well. I was now in the building phase, an undertaking completely foreign to me. Dealing with the city for building permits to create something they could barely imagine was an interesting process.

Thankfully, we had experts on the team who guided us through those meeting. It took another 15 months to get the permits, recruit the team and build the facility. There were times that I really wanted to cry, to quit, to throw in the towel. We even endured a flood during build-out. Yet, there were inspirational times that showed me God was opening doors to make this happen. SPARK! opened in south Dallas in June 2015.

We’d love to hear more about what you do.
As children move into adolescence, they become less confident in their creative abilities. This is compounded by the fact that there is a significant decrease in creative, educational opportunities following elementary school. By age 16, most children intrinsically believe that they either “ARE creative” or “ARE NOT creative.”

The hands-on learning and total creative, immersive environment of SPARK! provides students with individualized learning that helps them to embrace their full creative potential. By giving students the confidence to be creative, access to creative programming, and educating them in the creative process, SPARK! leads the way in helping more students acquire creative skills to excel in school and compete in the workforce.

SPARK! offers a unique approach to education by providing children in 2nd grade through high school with a fully immersive environment and hands-on creative activities. Part of the interactive and unique environment of SPARK! includes a climb, crawl, slide sculpture that gets children physically engaged and gets creative juices flowing. Made out of recycled and repurposed materials, the sculpture spans 6,000 feet and climbs 26 feet toward the ceiling.

Children can scale up a capsized ship, walk over wavy bridges of car hoods, crawl through rebar tubing, glide down spiral slides, and climb across a 200 square foot spider web suspended 18 feet off the ground. Exploring the environment gets the children’s adrenaline pumping and jump-starts the creative learning process. While many organizations exist to teach music, or theater, or even computer programming to children, SPARK! is the only place where children have the opportunity to explore a vast array of creative disciplines.

Our offerings are endless and are designed not only to teach the creative process but also to help children identify their interests and develop their skills. SPARK! opened its wildly creative, fully immersive facility in June of 2015. In just 3 years, SPARK! has engaged over 35,000 children in creative programming, welcomed over 65,000 visitors and offers over 40% of programming capacity to children from low-income homes.

What moment in your career do you look back most fondly on?
My proudest moments come when witnessing the incredible impact SPARK! has on children. When we built SPARK! our mission was to ignite their creativity by helping them overcome fears, engage in creative programs, problem-solve and boost their self-esteem.

Watching the kids at SPARK! and seeing the facility and our programming have that impact is what evokes pride for me. Examples include the young boy who finally conquered his fear and made it through the Spider Web (ropes course) and down the giant slide.

The girl who saw her creation hanging in SPARK! and beamed from ear to ear with pride or the kids who collaborated to build a castle complete with thrones and a table. Pride for me is seeing the incredible, positive impact on the kids.

Pricing:

• $5 per adult
• $10 per child

Contact Info:

• Address: 1409 South Lamar St. 004 Dallas, TX 75215
• Website: www.sparkdallas.org
• Phone: 214-421-7727
• Email: info@sparkdallas.org
• Instagram: www.instagram.com/spark_dallas
• Facebook: www.facebook.com/SPARKDal
• Twitter: www.twitter.com/SPARKDallas

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