From Safety Net to Springboard: Reframing Human Services
How we talk about human services shapes how we value them. Join HealthSpark Foundation on Friday, October 30 for a Community of Practice event rooted in possibility. We're coming together to explore how the stories we tell shape public understanding, policy, and investment -- and how, together, we can tell a better one.
This gathering will connect the work of human services to economic mobility, wealth gaps, and thriving communities, inviting all of us to see this work not simply as a response to crisis, but as one of the most hopeful investments we can make -- in people, in each other, and in our shared future. Through honest conversation and shared learning, we'll explore the power of language, messaging, and storytelling to drive meaningful change, and draw inspiration from the work of building and rooting power within communities.
Because human services aren't just a safety net that catches people -- they're a springboard that helps us all rise, together.
Registration, breakfast, & networking begins at 8 AM, with our main program from 9 AM to 1 PM. Come ready to connect, learn, and imagine what becomes possible when we change the story -- and recognize human services for what they truly are: an investment in the strength, stability, and shared prosperity of our communities.
Keynote: Amanda Misiko Andere, Co-President of Neighborhood Funders Group
This year's opening plenary asks us to sit with the questions many of us carry but rarely have space to explore together: What does liberation actually look like for our communities? Are the systems we've built truly working, or are we managing symptoms while root causes go unaddressed? And are we honoring the work happening every day on the ground, often without recognition, often stretched thin, but never without purpose?
From her vantage point in aligning movement-building organizations nationally, Amanda will guide us through these questions -- not with easy answers, but with the kind of honest reflection this sector needs if we're serious about lasting change. We'll look at where the field has been, where it's headed, and what it will genuinely take to move from good intentions to real transformation. This is a conversation about liberation as a practice, not just a goal -- and about what we owe the people doing this work every day.
Amanda has spent over twenty years working in the nonprofit and public sectors as a leader committed to racial and housing justice through advocacy for systemic change. She is Co-President, Political Home of Neighborhood Funders Group, a network of funders that mobilizes philanthropy to resource organizing and movements so that Black, Indigenous, and people of color communities and low-income communities thrive. She most recently served as the CEO of Funders Together for Housing Justice for ten years. Previously, she has served as the CEO of Wider Opportunities for Women, a national advocacy organization, and FACETS, a direct service organization in Northern Virginia. She currently serves on the boards of Equity in the Center, Bainum Family Foundation, and Leadership Fairfax, and is an appointed member of the Fairfax County racial equity roundtable.
Past leadership roles include serving as Chair of the United Philanthropy Forum's board and as a board member of Philanthropy DMV. Amanda is a founding member of the National Racial Equity Working Group on Homelessness and Housing and the National Coalition for Housing Justice.
Workshops - Spaces for Learning
This year, we’re thrilled to offer workshops -- less presentation, more discussion, with a purpose to help us move from ideation to action on the horizon. Registrants will receive an invite to pre-select the workshop of their choice.
Each workshop will explore a theme central to the work needed to shift the way we talk about human services and how we value them. Field experts will facilitate each one with workshop components that feature their expert opinions, real-life examples of the work they are seeing and creating in their respective fields, guided group activities, and more.
Board Development: Seeing the Vision, Sharing the Work
This workshop will explore what it looks like to build boards that are curious about the work, willing to learn, and ready to use their leadership to help make that vision possible.
Strong organizations need strong boards. It’s not only about approving budgets or responding to what is in front of them. It’s also about seeing a vision, where an organization is trying to go, and understand their role in helping that organization to get there. In the human services sector, this is especially important: everyday, organizations are navigating growing needs, changing systems, policy challenges, and more.
From Individual Mobility to Collective Movement
This workshop will connect economic opportunity and wealth building to the systems, relationships, and community conditions that shape who has the opportunity to move forward.
Economic mobility is often framed as an individual journey: finding a better job, increasing income, buying a home, or building wealth. But what happens when we look at mobility more collectively? It results in community power. We’ll consider where human services can contribute to creating not only pathways for individuals, but great opportunity for communities.
Shaping Public Understanding
This workshop will bring light to the types of language, messages, and stories we can use to shape public understanding of human services.
Sometimes changing the world begins with changing the way we see it. For so long, human services have been described through the moments when people need help: a crisis, a hardship, a gap that needs to be filled. But there are other stories we could tell: about possibility, belonging, opportunity, and the remarkable things people and communities are already building.
We Are the Common Good Sector
This workshop will engage participants in the idea of changing what our sector is known as, because if we do, we will be able to shine a clearer, brighter light on what is possible when people come together for the common good.
nonprofit (noun): an organization whose most important goal is something that does not involve making a profit; (adjective): not conducted or maintained for the purpose of making a profit
Our sector’s goal is to make things better. Our goal is not ‘to not make a profit.’ Of course, because that’s absurd. And yet, nonprofit is the most commonly used word to describe the type of organizations in our sector, a misnomer that creates confusion and condescension, gives permission to underpay people and to under-resource organizations, and diminishes all the goodness involved in who we are and what we do, buoyed by good people all around us. Our sector has long been defined by what we are not, rather than by what we are: heart and goodness; pillars and fabric of communities and ideas; protectors and advocates; economic engines; caregivers; barrier breakers; sources of inspiration, connection, and opportunity.
We work for the common good, for what benefits society as a whole, which happens when people are deeply connected within their communities – that is who we are as a sector. We are the common good sector. Imagining a better future for everyone begins with lifting up our common goodness.
Where We Live, How We Thrive
Inspired by the Social Determinant of Health - Neighborhood and Built Environment, this workshop will help us wonder what the places people are born, live, learn, work, play, worship, and age in should look like.
There is so much more about our health outside of annual check-ups and doctors appointments. It begins at home. In our neighborhood. At school. At work. And in the places we gather or where we don’t have places to gather. Can we breathe clean air? Find healthy food? Have access to transportation? Feel safe walking down the street? Are we in community?
Once we look at the whole picture of health, possibilities appear. A community can become a part of a health strategy. A human services organization can be part of the infrastructure that helps people thrive. We’ll explore how health equity connects to the neighborhood and social conditions that shape health, opportunity, and wellbeing.