Provide Scholarships for Adults with Disabilities

We told you in our last report about an especially trying summer of moving locations.

SPARC has always operated in a lean manner regarding administrative versus service delivery expenses. The BBB looks for a minimum of 65% of funds going to the charity’s purpose. Forbes won’t consider an organization for its top list that spends less than 70% on its mission.

We don’t go below 90% efficiency at SPARC.

We all know someone whose life is touched by a lifelong disability. There are many programs to help children in those situations and still others that help seniors older Americans. But more than 40 years is between is often neglected by federal, state, and local governments.

In our home state of Virginia, thousands of adults with disabilities fill a waiting list for Medicaid services on a list for years until they begin receiving services. The thousands of people waiting years is not an exaggeration.

We pour nearly everything we have into helping more adults with disabilities. People don’t work for SPARC to get rich. And everyone who works at SPARC works hard.

When we last wrote you we said that we had to move of our five service delivery locations and our office within a couple of weeks. That’s because we don’t own or even have a long-term lease at any of our service delivery locations. We often economize by using borrowed or loaned space. That means that we’re not the highest priority occupant for those facility owners.

We’re grateful for property owners like the Church of the Good Shepherd in Vienna, Virginia, that made space for this summer. And we’re thankful that we could double-up in our McLean location to take in our Fairfax members.

But these disruptions make providing services difficult. Last week, one of our groups had to meet in a borrowed classroom at a shopping mall.

We’ll be moving to a new service location in Arlington. We’ve been declared a “core program” in Arlington County, Virginia, and will have year-round space at Arlington Mill Community Center.

Now we need to do the same for other locations. Unfortunately, we’ll only be able to reopen four of the five locations that closed.

Please donate today to help us provide lifelong learning, job training for those who want it, and structured socialization to adults with disabilities.

In a decade we have created a program from scratch that now serves more than 50 members of our community.

With your help, we can keep growing that number because no one should have to wait for their name to be reached on a list before they can enter a day services program.