Christine Fortune Guthery

Christine Fortune Guthery is the founder and Executive Director of SPARK Kindness, Inc. After earning her law degree, she worked briefly as a civil litigator and then for the Circuit Executive’s Office of the United States Courts for the First Circuit on a study of Gender and Racial Bias in the courts. In 2010, though none of her three children had been bullied, Christine saw a need for parents and schools to work together to support a positive school culture. By 2011, this movement had expanded beyond parents and schools to the whole community, and became known as SPARK Kindness. Christine recently (from 2019-2023) served as the first Director of Workplace Relations for the United States Courts for the First Circuit. In this role, Christine oversaw the implementation of employment dispute resolution policies for all courts within the First Circuit, which include the Court of Appeals and the federal trial and bankruptcy courts in the Districts of Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Puerto Rico, and Rhode Island. Now that SPARK Kindness has grown to over 9,000 members and is working in a number of communities, her passion remains in empowering people at the grassroots level to connect with each other over core values to create more kindness, inclusion, respect and justice for all.