Asad is deeply thoughtful, with an eye on equity, inclusion, and impact. His ability to co-design, catalyze teams, synthesize complex information, and share insights would strengthen any effort or organization he joins.Marie Zemler Wu Executive Director & Co-Founder, Foster America
Strategic Consulting · Qualitative Research · Co-Design
Is your strategy stuck on paper?
Move from strategy to action, grounded in the people you serve.
A Spark Consulting is a qualitative research and human-centered design firm. We work with mission-driven organizations — foundations, governments, and service providers — to move from intent to readiness, ground decisions in users' lived experience, and strengthen the conditions required for real change to take hold.
We help turn it into action.Trusted across sectors
Child Welfare
Health Care
Homelessness & Housing
Education
What we do
Three outcomes mission-driven teams come to us for.
Sharper diagnoses, decisions that stick, leaders who can deliver them.
Every engagement starts with listening — to your team, your data, and the people your work is meant to reach. From there, we co-design what's next.
Program Assessment
Know what's working, what's stuck, and where the leverage is for your next phase of investment.
Delivered through a three-month qualitative research sprint grounded in stakeholder interviews and community voice.
Guided Planning & Co-Design
Shared decisions your team will actually execute.
Built through facilitated workshops, co-design sessions, and planning sprints that get stakeholders onto the same page about what to do first.
Leadership Development — Friction Lab™
Leaders who can read a system, hold tension between competing interests, and still ship what their teams need.
Built through Friction Lab™, our experiential cohort program for managers and practitioners working in public-sector and mission-driven environments.
Friction Lab™
Build leaders who can hold the tension between policy, program, and the people on the receiving end.
An experiential program for managers and practitioners whose decisions ripple into public services. Built for cohorts of 8–20.
Request a Cohort →8–20leaders per cohort
6 wksstructured program
3live working sessions
1:1coaching included
Selected work
What it looks like in practice
Three engagements — one for each service — where research, co-design, and leadership development turned strategy into action across child welfare, family support, and healthcare.
Designing flexible financial systems to prevent family crisis
A multi-state redesign of how at-risk families access emergency support, grounded in qualitative research with 80 parents and caregivers across five counties.
Read the case study (PDF) →Diagnosing barriers in kinship care to catalyze a kinship accelerator
Multi-county research across California (Sacramento, San Bernardino, Butte, Stanislaus) that surfaced root barriers and informed a national Kinship Sprints accelerator program.
Read the case study (PDF) →Empathy-driven leadership training to improve healthcare access for non-English speakers
A Friction Lab™ engagement for a U.S. health insurance leadership team — built around an immersive Medical Hub simulation in Spanish.
Read the case study (PDF) →
By the numbers
Where the work has shown up.
350+
Participants engaged in qualitative research — including tribal nations, families, kin caregivers, and frontline staff
15 leaders
Senior healthcare leaders coached through an immersive Medical Hub simulation that put them on the patient side of language barriers
$1M+
Raised for nonprofit partners through strategic planning and grant writing
Previous clients & partners
Network
Senior collaborators we partner with
A Spark scales by drawing on a trusted network of senior strategists and lived-experience experts — matched to your project's friction points.
Asad Bandeali, Founder of A Spark Consulting at WISE 2025, Doha, Qatar.
About
We bridge the gap between strategic intent and operational reality.
A Spark Consulting was founded in 2021 to help mission-driven organizations move from intent to readiness. Government agencies and foundations frequently struggle to translate high-level strategy into functioning services, because oftentimes these systems were built without the needed understanding of the people they serve.
Our consultancy deploys experienced researchers, facilitators, and designers to aid organizations in the decision-making process — informed by the populations served, aligned with the overall mission, and ready to move. We serve as strategic advisors building the internal capacity that allows organizations to sustain transformation independently.
In 2025, Asad was part of a Bloom Works team awarded a Service Design Award by the Service Design Network for designing kin-specific foster home licensing standards. The co-design work drew on 430+ participants and 50+ child welfare agencies across U.S. states, territories, and tribes. The standards are now being adopted nationally — an example of designing services with, not just for, the people who use them.
Start the conversation
Move from plan to action.
Book a free 30-minute discovery call or message me on LinkedIn. I'll listen, ask a few sharp questions, and tell you whether A Spark is the right partner for what you're working on.
or follow along
Send a message
Tell me what you're working on. I'll respond within two business days.