Data designed
for change.
See Change in the Heart of Chicago
We connect communities to the collective wisdom of our interdisciplinary faculty, but that’s just the beginning. Our data science, design, and AI teams can model and visualize the history of a challenge—as well as multiple predicted scenarios for the future. This enables us to have a far-reaching impact that benefits local, national, and global communities.
Through storytelling and data visualization, The Strategic Partnerships for the Advancement of Research and Knowledge (SPARK) Center turns research into accessible materials that invite non-experts into informed conversations that shape the future.
Data Vision
Projects
Interdisciplinary projects that convene industry, community, government and academia on community impact through research, predictive analytics and visualization that guides discussion, decisions, and policy.
Our major
initiatives include:
Data Fluency Certifications
Education for nonprofit and community leaders to equip them with the tools and resources to support and empower initiatives. Partners that earn certificates have access to additional project support through DePaul.
Data Support
Institutional for community projects through expert guidance, data resources, meeting spaces, and technology access.
Partner Projects
Beyond the Loan
Community banks are essential to the U.S. economy, providing over one-third of all small business loans despite representing only a fraction of the industry. Beyond the Loan: Community Banks, Small Business Owners and Human Resilience is a research collaboration with leading global professional services firm Aon and NFP, an Aon company. The initiative consists of a national study exploring how banks can better support underrepresented and women-owned small businesses by understanding the human factors that drive resilience. Using elements of Aon’s Human Sustainability Index and NFP’s Insights platform, the three-year project will generate predictive models and data-driven tools to help community banks strengthening small business support and better understand lending gaps.
The Plant
The SPARK Center's is collaborating with The Plant, a living laboratory in Chicago's Back of the Yards neighborhood, that demonstrates techniques for reimagining waste as a resource, achieving economies of scale and incubating small businesses. SPARK will help the plant collect data through an array of sensors that track heat and energy usage. The data will be visualized through a real-time 3D model, also known as a digital twin, to demonstrate The Plant's replicable model, encouraging efficiencies that close loops of waste and energy. The 3D data visualization will be used to educate policy makers, engineers, and students.
Steans Family Foundation: Housing Strategies
DePaul University’s Institute for Housing Studies (IHS), the Visual Informatics and Data Analytics (VIDA) Center, and The SPARK Center are collaborating with the Steans Family Foundation (SFF) on a comprehensive one year project to support the SFF’s development, implementation, and ongoing assessment of its housing portfolio. The team will work with SFF to identify relevant questions aligned to their strategic goals to guide the project and data collection. Guided by these questions and using a mix of publicly available data and data sets provided by IHS, the team will model and test various housing strategies to understand the trade-offs associated with different approaches and make informed decisions on which strategies might provide the most favorable outcomes. This comprehensive analytical support will equip SFF with data-driven tools and insights to clarify future needs and opportunities, illuminate potential trade-offs and synergies, and ultimately support more strategic and effective deployment of resources within its housing portfolio.
DePaul
Faculty
Explore new opportunities for your expertise. Through dynamic data visualizations, research, and collaboration, we can design innovative solutions for community-identified challenges. We provide advanced visualization infrastructure, meeting space, and networks to translate your research into community impact.
Opportunities to Collaborate
Funders &
Partners
Join our interdisciplinary community and drive lasting impact across Chicago. By combining your support with our expertise, tools, and connections, we can tackle critical socioeconomic challenges affecting Chicago communities. The SPARK Center is a new opportunity for you to catalyze innovative solutions in collaboration with community groups and data experts.
Community Organizations
Through The SPARK Center, you can partner directly with DePaul faculty who are focused on income inequality, sustainability, and artificial intelligence. Bring us a challenge to embrace or a complex question to answer. Together we can transform data into real world change.
Our Space
The SPARK Center is both a community and a physical space that’s available for our campus and broader Chicago communities.
Reach out to host an event, class, presentation—or push the boundaries of our big screens. We’re at DePaul University’s Loop Campus, and we’d love to meet you.
News & Updates
Follow our Journey
Sign up to get updates as we explore opportunities for DePaul research to bring meaningful, data-rich answers to challenges identified by our community partners.