The Spark Prize 2026 Awardees

Charli Cooksey 

Charli Cooksey is the Founder and CEO of WEPOWER, a St. Louis organization building community power to create greater opportunity for children, families, workers, and entrepreneurs. 

Born and raised in North St. Louis City, Charli began her career as an educator and has spent nearly two decades working at the intersection of education, community leadership, economic opportunity, and systems change. Today, much of her work focuses on two ambitious goals: achieving universal access to quality child care and closing the racial wealth gap. 

Through WEPOWER, Charli partners with parents, early childhood educators, entrepreneurs, and other residents to build the knowledge and power to shape the systems that affect their lives. The organization has trained hundreds of community leaders, supported entrepreneurs, and developed new approaches to building an economy that puts children, families, and workers at the center. 

Charli describes herself as a “dreamer and doer,” driven by the belief that communities have a right to self-determination and access to resources to create the futures they envision.

Jessica Gaines 

Jessica Gaines is a real estate developer, construction executive, and community development leader working to strengthen neighborhoods and expand opportunity across St. Louis. Raised in North St. Louis City, Jessica sees housing as more than shelter. She believes a stable home can provide the foundation for health, confidence, economic mobility, and the ability to imagine a different future. 

Through Kendall Developments, Dream Builders 4 Equity, and partnerships across the region, Jessica combines housing development with workforce development and youth mentorship. She has helped young people learn real estate and construction, launch businesses, and become property owners, creating pathways for residents to play a direct role in shaping their own communities. 

Following the May 2025 tornado, Jessica helped mobilize contractors and partners to stabilize hundreds of damaged homes. Her larger vision is to break down silos across sectors and demonstrate what becomes possible when communities invest in the people already living there.

Heather Lyons-Burney 

Heather Lyons-Burney, PharmD, is a pharmacist, professor, and community health leader dedicated to improving health care access in rural and underserved communities across Missouri. 

A Clinical Associate Professor at the University of Missouri – Kansas City School of Pharmacy, Heather helped establish a charitable primary care clinic in Branson and later led the development of My Neighbor’s Charitable Pharmacy, Missouri’s first designated charitable pharmacy. The pharmacy helps uninsured patients access medications while also providing health education, laboratory testing, chronic disease support, and connections to preventive care. Her current faculty role and involvement in establishing the pharmacy are also reflected in UMKC’s description of her work.

Heather believes pharmacists can serve as trusted health advocates, particularly for patients who may have gone years without consistent care. She is also working to make the charitable pharmacy model easier for other Missouri communities to adapt while preparing the next generation of pharmacists to understand and address the unique challenges facing rural communities.

Mike Milton 

Mike Milton is the Founder and Executive Director of Freedom Community Center, a North St. Louis organization developing community-based approaches to violence centered on healing, accountability, and repair. 

A transformative justice practitioner, organizer, and healer, Mike draws from his own experiences as both a survivor of violence and a formerly incarcerated person. Through Freedom Community Center, he and his team support survivors as they pursue safety and healing while also working with people who have caused harm through processes designed to foster responsibility, repair, and transformation. 

Mike’s work is grounded in the belief that communities need more options for responding to violence and that the people most directly affected should have a meaningful role in shaping those responses. He hopes to document what Freedom Community Center has learned so that communities across Missouri and beyond can explore new approaches to safety and healing.

Blake Strode 

Blake Strode is the Executive Director of ArchCity Defenders, a St. Louis-based civil rights organization providing holistic legal advocacy to people navigating poverty, housing instability, criminalization, and other systemic barriers. 

A St. Louis native and Harvard Law School graduate, Blake returned home in 2015 after the Ferguson uprising reshaped his understanding of where he could make the greatest impact. He joined ArchCity Defenders as an attorney and helped expand its civil rights litigation before becoming Executive Director. ArchCity Defenders currently describes its work as holistic legal advocacy addressing the criminalization of poverty and state violence.

Under Blake’s leadership, the organization combines legal representation with community support, storytelling, and advocacy while elevating the expertise of people directly affected by the systems it seeks to change. 

Blake believes lasting change requires going beyond immediate problems to examine their root causes. His vision is a Missouri where health, well-being, and the ability to live a full life are central considerations in how communities make decisions and invest resources. 

Maurice Theriot  

Maurice Theriot is the Executive Director of South Side Farms, a seven-acre urban farm in Cape Girardeau working to increase access to fresh, nutritious food in a federally designated food desert. 

Maurice came to agriculture after a career in finance and accounting, beginning with a single raised garden bed in his Texas backyard. After moving to Missouri, he worked with Lincoln University’s Small Farm Outreach Program and traveled widely helping farmers and communities grow their own food. At South Side Farms, he has helped significantly expand both the amount of locally grown produce reaching the community and the number of weeks residents can access it. 

For Maurice, food access is about more than addressing an immediate need. He wants people to rediscover the knowledge and confidence to grow food themselves, strengthening both individual self-reliance and local food systems. His vision is a Missouri where fresh, healthy food is grown closer to the communities it nourishes.