When we asked Joann Chen, Program Director, Spark Ventures, what she’d been up to lately, she mentioned something about some chickens and recent trip to Zambia. We said: Tell us more, please. In this entry, Joann describes Spark’s work with a community in Zambia, including the creation of a community-managed chicken farm. They broke ground on the first chicken house recently—but not before Spark worked with a local organization to build a new schoolhouse with consistent compensation for teachers. (All in a day’s work, right?) The profits from the community-run poultry farm will support the school and child programs. Spark Ventures, which forms partnerships to help vulnerable children around the world achieve their potential, was an EPIC client in summer 2010.

On a plot of land in west Lusaka, a storm is brewing. Not another loud rainstorm of Zambia’s seemingly endless rainy season, but a storm that will transform the lives of children and their communities.

On that four-acre plot, Hope Ministries, a local organization that serves some of the country’s poorest children, is working with Spark Ventures to revolutionize how charity works with a surprising tool, a chicken farm.

How can a chicken farm change the world? Well, let’s start at the beginning.

Instead of following traditional aid models that have fostered dependence and disappointment for decades, we at Spark created a new model, the Partnership Model, that aims to cultivate the developing world’s own leaders and organizations to provide sustainable support to the vulnerable children of a community.

Our three-phase Partnership Model starts with Stabilize and Strengthen, our first two phases. With Hope Ministries, which runs a school for over 300 children in Ndola, Zambia, as well as an orphanage with round-the-clock care for up to 20 children, these two phases saw monumental improvements in Hope’s programs, including everything from the introduction of consistent pay for teachers to training and organizational development for Hope Ministries as a whole.

The Strengthen phase also saw the construction of a seven-classroom schoolhouse, which meant the students no longer had to share their building with the local police department that would often kick them out of the building when an interrogation or afternoon nap came calling.

With this strong foundation laid, Spark is now working with Hope on Phase 3—Sustain. In this phase, Spark works with its partners to develop a local business whose profits will be used to support the child programs. This seems like a small idea, but by giving local leaders and their organizations the ability to support their work independently, we are empowering sustainable change that will impact generations of children in the developing world.

And so enters the chicken farm.

Hope leaders began over a year ago to put together a business proposal of what business they would be able to run profitably. After a year of hard work, weekly calls between Spark and Hope, numerous drafts of the business proposal and advice from lawyers, farmers and businesspeople in both Zambia and the United States, we have signed the contract with Hope for a $100,000 loan to start the poultry farm.

Construction has already begun with the clearing of that small plot of land and the laying of the foundation for the farm’s first chicken house. In an amazingly short two months’ time, the house will see its very first batch of 5000 chickens, and profits will immediately begin to be invested back into child programs.

What’s more, older children from Hope House, the orphanage run by Hope Ministries, will have the opportunity to move to Lusaka during their holiday breaks to learn poultry farming, giving them tangible skills that will be invaluable in a country with over 75 percent unemployment.

We at Spark are thrilled to be embarking on our first foray into Phase 3 with this poultry farm with Hope Ministries, and we are exceedingly hopeful that this chicken farm is only the beginning of a strong and powerful storm.