The Beginnings of Sparkt
The Beginnings of Sparkt
From Harm to Healing
Sparkt began in 2016 on a bathroom mirror.
I wrote my mantra: "Connecting with others from the heart and working together to make this world a better place. Sparkt.org"
After ten years raising my three children, I returned to teaching with fresh eyes and a mother's heart.
What I saw concerned me. Children being pushed through standardised testing before they were ready. Kids suffering through work designed for a bell curve, not for them. The joy of learning replaced by the anxiety of performance. Teachers doing their best inside a system that had quietly shifted its focus from the child in front of them to the data point on a spreadsheet.
I knew there was a better way. I had watched my own children learn, messily, beautifully, at their own pace, and I knew that every child has strengths worth building on. That curiosity is not a problem to be managed. That connection between teacher and student is the whole point.
That conviction became Sparkt. Sparkt’s early mission was to create a strengths-based model of learning and teaching, one that celebrated each unique child, modelled respectful relationships and true equality, dismantling oppressive hierarchies. The goal was simple but radical: to restore critical thinking, creativity and curiosity; and bring joy back into education.
What I hadn’t fully named yet in 2016 was that I was also trapped in a coercively controlling marriage. Building Sparkt, writing blogs about education, violence free homes, schools and communities, finding my voice, claiming something of my own, was the beginning of finding my way out.
When #MeToo broke in 2017, it broke something open in me too. It gave language to thirty years of normalised abuse I’d endured. I didn't just want awareness. I wanted structural change. For my children. For every woman living what I was living.
I escaped domestic, family and sexual violence in January 2018. What followed was a second violence; the smear campaign, the weaponisation of the children, financial destruction, family court abuse, homelessness, systems that replicated everything I had just escaped.
And slowly, through all of it, my advocacy evolved.
From education reform. To feminist advocacy. To ending coercive control. To running for federal parliament in 2022 to put post separation abuse on the national agenda. To co-authoring the Victim Survivor Statement in Australia's National Plan for Women and Children's Safety. To peer support work, public submissions, and petitions that keep growing.
None of it was the plan. All of it came from the same place, the mirror. The mantra. The refusal to stay silent. My lived experience of post separation and systems’ abuse.
The name Sparkt was born from a simple truth: education, change, and justice are not about the filling of a vessel. They are about the lighting of a fire.
Each of us carries an ember, a fragment of truth, courage, and authenticity. When we face and share our stories and reclaim our voices, that ember glows and gives others the courage to share their light. When those sparks connect, one by one, story by story, heart by heart, they become a wildfire of collective transformation.
The world won't change through control, isolation and silence.
It changes when we all, together, GET SPARKT!
Sparkt is where that fire continues.
