After a fun and successful 2014 Thai Burmese project ( please see the summary report here not he website for details! ) Spark Circus a taking a year long break!
We be temporarily focusing our energies solely on refining our vision, planning future outreach, and expanding our grant writing.Our intention is to come up with some fresh and exciting social circus for January 2016!
We are thrilled with what we have accomplished in Thai Burmese border regions, working with refugees, migrant children , disadvantaged youth and their communities. Our project has grown and thrived over the years, as have the communities we work with. We now reach well over 6,000 children each year with our playshops, workshops, fun day shows and dramatic fire shows. The kids open up and shine with exposure to creativity and the possibilities of play. It has been beautiful to watch them grow as their surroundings in general become more safe and stable. Not for all of course, but for many, the progress has been heartwarming. We feel that though our work there will never be done, there is enough of a foundation for us to shift some of our focus elsewhere too…
Spark Circus now would like to expand into other regions now that things are more stabilized for the majority of children on the Thai Burmese border and in the regufee camps. Don’t worry– we LOVE those communities and will continue to run projects there! Just a bit changed in nature– shorter time frames, more focus on teaching the teachers and children who would like to know how to perform… So we will still have a presence in the area, and also increasingly entering Burma, to reach the disadvantaged children there too!
But we are also recognizing the desperate need for PLAY opportunities, imagination , silliness and smiles in other areas of the world currently hard hit by war, economic and social crises. We have learned so much through our work in Thailand, and would like to begin to share it with other organizations. collaborating on some bigger long term sustainable visions. Specifically we are interested in seeing if we can offer some joy to children suffering form the Syrian civil war, and also to work with youth within some of the remote the First Nations communities of northern Canada.
Another plan we have been developing is a website, a social circus manual of sorts– kind of a “how to: guide about running social circus programs. Free, sharable, and open for contributions, so we all can learn from each other, share our resources! We look forward to taking some time to dedicate to this.
In order to do these things we need to focus our efforts on researching, organizing, planning, grant and grant writing!So we decided to spend the next year doing that sort of behind the scenes work.
We will resurface with a new plan, new NGO structure with an official board of directors and charitable status, and a fresh fun project format by June 2015. At that time we will begin collecting applications from interested volunteers for the Thai Burmese Border project running January 2016.
We will also announce new projects in other locations at that time!
So, please stay tuned!
More to come as the fun develops!
As always, we remain so very grateful for all the support and enthusiasm Spark Circus has received from our circus community world wide.All our amazing volunteers, fundraisers and donors, all the amazing kids and communities we have worked with over the last 8 years. It has been so heart expanding to see what is possible when we all come together . The smiles, multiplying, throughout the world… all because of YOU!
Thank you so much!
Andrea Russell
Please Note:
We will be accepting expressions of interest and applications beginning JUne 2015. Ones sent before then may not get a response– we have our hands full ! So please if you have sent one recently do resend closer to that date. We will be responding to email communications in general, of course, though due to travels in regions with poor internet reception, responses may take a while. Please be patient!