From Sparks to Light - Inspiring Stories for Challenging Times

When Sandy Holman was a teenager, she watched as the Klu Klux Klan burned a wooden cross on her high school soccer field. This wasn’t in the deep south, but in the Sacramento, California neighborhood…

Back on the podcast this week is my dear friend Gregg Cassin. Gregg is an HIV/AIDS activist, a public speaker and someone I’ve known since our college days back in Boston.  He is also someone who has…

Bill Glenn, a retired therapist and author, spent 18 years preparing to be a Jesuit priest before he realized he was being called to something else.  “I knew my work was elsewhere," he says, although…

“[The poverty] was a really big shock,” said Koen Van Rompay, an infectious disease researcher who was in India to speak at a conference.  Seeing all the people on the streets of Chennai begging for …

“I was in a crisis," said Joey Garcia, author and writing coach. "I’d done all the things I was supposed to do to be successful… but the corporate life was not at all what I imagined it would be.” It…

When he was just 23 years old, Juan Pablo Romero Fuentes opened the doors of the family home in his little village of Jocotenango, to give the children of his Guatemalan community a chance at a diffe…

When her eldest son became a victim of gun violence, Nicole Gardner knew she needed to make a change. She left behind family and friends and the Boston neighborhoods she’d called home and moved with …

Spending a month volunteering at Mother Theresa’s Home for the Destitute and Dying in Calcutta, India was a life changing experience for Wendy Voet, a public health advocate and professor at the Univ…

“Ninety percent of the efficacy of the transformation of activism is relational. It’s how we look after each other on an everyday level… It’s the everyday things that keep us loving each other.” says…

Hi. I’m Suzanne Maggio, the host of From Sparks to Light —the podcast about ordinary people doing extraordinary things. Our third season begins Thursday, September 28. In this new season we’ll be mee…

Sometimes a long walk makes all the difference. After her marriage broke up, Leigh Brennan, a longtime yoga and meditation teacher, found herself alone. Faced with an overwhelming sense of grief for …

“My role is not to eradicate pain but to walk alongside people who are in it,” says Heidi Pidcoke, a licensed clinician who specializes in somatic, or body centered, therapies.  It is these experienc…

“With what I have learned, it’s my turn to pass on the knowledge to the next generation,” says Rose Hammock, a  wise young member of the Pomo, Wailacki and Maidu tribes. 

Despite Rose Hammock’s young …

Trevor Gardner believes that all students deserve to be treated with dignity, even when they make mistakes.  Our school discipline system dehumanizes students, banishing them from the classroom and i…

You have $80 dollars in your pocket and two suitcases. and you’re ready to take on whatever comes your way, or so you thought. At 18 you’re ready to spread your wings and try something new. Before yo…

“When the world becomes too difficult, you make that difference–with the way you hold yourself and the way you treat the person at the grocery story and at the post office … and it builds out from th…

Michael Pritchard personifies compassion. As an army medic tending to wounded patients, his big heart and warm spirit earned him the praise of the doctors he served under. “Even from early childhood …

Joe Cuddemi’s mother never went to college, but she instilled in him the value of education. Raised in an Irish Catholic family in Boston, the path was clear. “I grew up in an era when I could be a d…

Elizabeth Quiroz spent 12 years addicted and trafficked on the streets of San Francisco. Arrested and incarcerated multiple times, she lost custody of her three-month-old son. It was more than she co…

As Gregory Ramkissoon walked to work at the university in Kingston, Jamaica, he encountered a community of squatters living in such poverty he felt sick to his stomach. Shacks made of cardboard and s…