Who We Are
Our Story
Our journey began in Jakarta, Indonesia in 2015, when two development professionals connected over a shared passion for education and youth programming for marginalized communities. After years of working together, developing and implementing initiatives that provided vulnerable youth with training programs that resulted in requisite skills and livelihood opportunities, we saw the profound, lasting impact on individuals, families, and local communities. These impacts remain the driving force behind our work.
In 2026, we launched Orange Spark to focus our mission: supporting youth to flourish within the creative and cultural industry. Drawing on more than two decades of experience, we now are on a mission to build targeted youth human capital development programs and forge strategic partnerships to ignite their creative spark and build bridges to harness their skills and talent toward gainful employment.
Our Values
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We prioritize honesty and honor, and operate with open, visible decision-making. The organization aligns its mission statement, purpose, and strategic objectives with trustworthiness, and doing the right thing at every step. We ensure that our board, fiduciary, organizational structure, management, and implementation consistently align with our overall core values.
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We accept responsibility for, and will be held answerable for our strategy, decisions, actions, outcomes, and impact. We are guided by objectivity, integrity, ownership, and transparency, which will foster trust, improve performance, and prevent ethical lapses across the organization.
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We value, encourage ongoing learning, innovation, and development, and promote a culture of continuous improvement, leveraging data/evidence and investing in staff development to enhance capacity, efficiency, and we encourage management, employees and stakeholders to continuously challenge the status quo, embrace change, and think creatively.
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We believe everyone deserves the opportunity to live their full potential by embedding equity and inclusion throughout our organization and the ways we carry out our mission. Our internal operations, programs, policies and external leadership facilitate equity by treating all people fairly, justly and equally, without either discrimination or favoritism. We prioritize inclusion by ensuring that all individuals feel welcomed, respected, and empowered to fully participate and contribute to our mission.
Our Team
Shannon Stone
Executive Director & Co-Founder
Shannon L. Stone is the Executive Director of Orange Spark, where she leads the development and implementation of entrepreneurship and mentorship programs designed to open doors for young people in the creative and cultural industries. With more than two decades of experience working at the intersection of education, youth empowerment, and community development, Shannon brings both a deep passion for learning and a proven track record of turning vision into lasting impact.
Shannon's love of education is woven into everything she does. Her professional journey began in a Wisconsin elementary school classroom, where she designed an innovative curriculum for students with learning disabilities and discovered that every young person, given the right support, is capable of extraordinary things. That foundational belief has guided her career ever since, from the Philippines to Indonesia, Jamaica to Jordan, and now back home in the United States.
Before joining Orange Spark, Shannon spent nearly two decades with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), where she managed development portfolios totaling hundreds of millions of dollars across multiple sub-sectors. But for Shannon, the work was never about the numbers, it was about the young people and communities behind them. Whether expanding education access for Syrian refugee children, building workforce pipelines in Jamaica, or launching entrepreneurship programs tied to real market needs, she has consistently centered youth voice and community ownership in everything she builds.
What sets Shannon apart is her gift for building authentic partnerships. She has a rare ability to bring together governments, academic institutions, private sector leaders, and local communities around a shared purpose and to make each partner feel genuinely invested in the outcome. She believes that sustainable change only happens when communities lead, and she has spent her career creating the conditions for exactly that.
Shannon holds a Master's in International Education from The George Washington University, a Bachelor's in Special Education from the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh, and is currently working toward a Certification in Nonprofit Leadership from the University of Wisconsin Eau Claire . She is fluent in English and conversational in Spanish.
Marunga Manda
Chief Operating Officer & Co-Founder
Marunga Manda is the Chief Operating Officer of Orange Spark and Co-Founder of Orange Spark, where he provides strategic and operational leadership across organizational performance, financial accountability, and results measurement systems to measure and document impact. He brings more than 20 years of experience leading strategic development; stakeholder engagement and management; inter-agency and multi-sectoral coordination; monitoring, evaluation, and learning (MEL) initiatives across Africa, Asia, and the Middle East.
Marunga has served in high-level advisory and leadership capacities for development initiatives in Zimbabwe, Iraq, Bangladesh, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Uzbekistan over the course of his development career. He is a technical expert in strategic planning, project design, stakeholder coordination, government engagement, budget management, outreach and communication, field logistics, and performance oversight. Furthermore, his experience in facilitating evidence-based results covers a wide range of sectors, including, youth empowerment, education, health, governance, economic growth, private sector development, climate change, renewable energy, evidence-based decision-making, learning, food security, conflict mitigation, stabilization, and humanitarian assistance and construction.
An artist himself, Marunga is a gifted singer and a proud member of the music group Faith Moves Mountains (FMM). For Marunga, his development work and his music are two sides of the same conviction: that when individuals are brought together with purpose, they can create something truly extraordinary. He brings this same collaborative spirit to Orange Spark, where he works at the intersection of talent development, institutional strengthening, and equitable access to ensure that culture and creativity become a sustainable driver of opportunity for youth.
He holds an MSc in Social Research Skills from the University of Ulster and a BSc (Honours) in Economics from the University of Zimbabwe.