The Missouri Foundation for Health’s Spark Prize is back for its second year, and St. Louis is well represented: four of the six winners call the region home. Each takes home $200,000 in unrestricted funding to keep pushing their work forward, on their own terms.
The local honorees are Jessica Gaines, founder of Kendall Developments and chief construction officer of Dream Builders 4 Equity; Mike Milton, founder and executive director of the Freedom Community Center; Charli Cooksey, founder and CEO of WEPOWER; and Blake Strode, executive director of ArchCity Defenders. They are joined by Heather Lyons-Burney of Branson and Maurice Theriot of Cape Girardeau.
For Gaines, the prize validates a belief she has carried into every build: that where you live shapes how healthy you are. A clean, beautiful home, she says, matters to how a person develops — the connection felt obvious to her, and she’s glad the foundation sees it the same way. She’s still deciding how to deploy the money and plans to lean on mentors to make sure it lands where it counts. Much of her recent energy has gone to North St. Louis, where she has been deep in recovery work after last year’s tornado — and where she’s pushing the many organizations involved to stop working in silos and start moving as one machine.
Milton’s Freedom Community Center, founded in 2021, practices what he calls transformative justice: working with both survivors and perpetrators of serious violent crime to repair harm in ways the survivors themselves design. He’s watched people who committed murder sit down with victims’ families, apologize, and make repairs — the kind of change he says no 15-minute conversation can explain. Part of what he wants from the prize is the space to write it all down, in the long form it deserves, the way books like The New Jim Crow and Until We Reckon reframed the national conversation on criminal justice.
The award’s power isn’t just the money, says Diego Abente, president and CEO of Casa de Salud and a member of last year’s inaugural class. The Spark Prize put Casa on the radar of the Integrated Health Network — months later, the two made their collaboration official. And because the prize goes to individuals rather than organizations, winners can stay nimble and answer to their communities instead of a grant’s fine print. It’s also, he says, a way of telling strong local leaders: we want you here, doing this work, in this region.
