Community Coaching

Everyone can do something to change his or her own life and this process will be more efficient and sustainable if potential change-makers in any given community are strengthened and empowered to be able to identify with the ‘culture of co’ – cooperation, co-creation, community leadership, caring for the commons and business collaboration. This approach is called community coaching. Through the SARD LEADER/CLLD community, coaching interventions have been employed to ignite the spirit of change in the targeted local communities and encourage them to be active in the implementation of current and future development programmes.

What is community coaching and why is it important?

The impulse to contribute to the ‘common good’ or develop social capital is being lost in many local communities globally for a variety of different historical, economic and social reasons. Community coaching is a development tool that counters this dynamic by encouraging communities and their members to achieve their full potential and build social capital by working together. It is recognized that without active local communities, we lose the energy, knowledge and ideas of those who are targeted by development programmes, running the risk of producing unworkable solutions that people cannot identify with. This can lead to a lack of appropriate development communication and cause further isolation, instead of inclusion and support.

Community coaching takes a holistic view of society, and seeks to balance the economic, environmental, cultural and political forces that shape it. Coaching is based on a bottom-up approach. Every intervention and every project targeting a community is based on a deep understanding of that community’s needs and aspirations. Mainstream public services often neglect the fact that marginalized or isolated communities have more complex needs and different experiences compared to other communities. In this context, community coaching must be integrated with institutional facilitation.

The most widespread understanding and practice of 'coaching' as a tool for creating change is closely connected with sports. Coaching for community empowerment and social change has usually been approached through sporting initiatives — be it baseball, soccer, cricket or even dancing. This holds true both in western (advanced industrialized) countries, as well as in developing countries.

In recent decades, 'coaching' has been used as a tool to develop businesses, confidence, social capital, cohesion and cooperation, and to support innovation and social change.

In various UNDP initiatives since 2003, including the SARD programme, the community coaching method for igniting the spirit of change to make local development inclusive and sustainable has been employed in several unique ways.

• Community coaches enter communities uninvited, and unexpected. They are development professionals, typically selected from among local stakeholders or are familiar with the targeted local development challenges, but they are definitely external to the given communities.
• They begin coaching in a largely passive environment, where there is little community activity or belief in the capacity to change, or in the ability to imagine this change.
• Coaches work to enable community self-organization and reorganization, and foster new partnerships between local development stakeholders. Coaches are not the clients of current community leaders or established groups. Rather, as a result of their work, an empowered change-maker group emerges from among the originally passive community.
• Importantly, the impetus for change is not related to quickly available financial resources. The community coach helps local communities to recognize that funding for development is not the only thing they need, but also identification of the unused local development resources and people's learning how to change.
• The first months of community coaching require very limited financial resources, and are not about infrastructural improvements per se. This nature of the method should be taken into consideration while planning programme budgets.
• This first period is about local community mobilization, creating the first circle of local change-makers, which works on further community mobilization, clarifying and agreeing on community needs, and the community learning to represent itself.
• At a crucial point, this group of these empowered change-makers becomes a local initiator group – a 'local action group' (LAG) – and is able to start planning, preparation of projects and strategy, and the longer-term development process. The change has been born.