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Helping Communities Succeed:
Community Coaches and What They Do
Contents
The Four Rs of Community Coaching
Relationships
Results
Reflection
Reach
What Makes a Good Coach?
How Coaching Adds Value to Community Building Strategies
Benefits for communities
Benefits for funders
Benefits for nonprofits and intermediaries
New opportunities for extension agencies
Growing Success Around the Country
Resources
About the Contributors
From Vince Hyman, former Publishing Director, Fieldstone Alliance:
This issue of Tools You Can Use is adapted from Coaching for Community and Organizational Change by Mary Emery, Ken Hubbell, and Priscilla Salant, published by W. K. Kellogg Foundation. The booklet summarizes the thinking of 28 roundtable discussion participants in the Coaching Roundtable in Boise, Idaho, October 2005, which was held with major support from W. K. Kellogg Foundation, Northwest Area Foundation, and the Ford Foundation. Our thanks to the authors of this article for allowing us to adapt it.
The Four Rs of Community Coaching
Today, coaches work with more than athletes. Personal life coaches work with individuals, executive coaches work with leaders in the private and public sector, and community coaches work with local leaders and social change organizations. Working with a coach is a strategy to set goals, take action, make better decisions, and develop natural strengths.
Coaching for community and organizational change is attracting increasing attention within the world of community development and social change. And it is producing promising results.
A community coach is a guide who supports communities and organizations in identifying and achieving their goals.
Coaching for community change is comprised of four domains: relationships, results, reflection, and reach (or the discovery of new possibilities). On any given team you will have some people who frame the work of change through a lens of relationships, and others who are results oriented. Blending these perspectives is what makes the practice of coaching an art, as the coach helps generate clarity, alignment, and a sense of shared purpose or commitment within the change process and across these domains.
Let’s explores each of the four Rs.
Relationships
Helping communities create and support new and lasting relationships is often at the core of coaching. Coaches help communities include more people and build new relationships with disenfranchised populations. Coaches help people feel secure discussing divisive issues and developing consensus and commitment. They also assist teams in accessing opportunities to use, develop, and respect the gifts and talents that are present in the community. Successful coaches build the capacity to trust, share leadership, and cooperate.
Results
Coaches ask thoughtful questions that help groups identify the barriers (real or perceived) that keep them from making progress and capitalizing on opportunities. Coaches bridge the gap between the funder and community in ways that reinforce the community’s ability to make progress toward its goals. Coaches clarify goals, help identify steps and milestones, identify and access resources, and monitor the pace of the community's change efforts.
Reflection
Coaching for reflection helps groups move from "being stuck in the rut" to seeing possibilities. Coaches help community members adapt to each other's ways of talking and, thus, learn to reflect as an inclusive group. Coaches help the community understand its progress, develop consensus, weave stories, appreciate the expected and the unexpected, use evidence, and initiate new ways for group and individual learning.
Reach
Coaches help groups develop vision and reach out into the community to engage diverse, often unheard community members. Coaches help reveal the hidden dimensions of social problems. Coaches also help groups sustain passion and action around their vision, while creating higher levels of individual self awareness that lead to transforming the mind-set of the entire team.
What Makes a Good Coach?
Each community is unique, requiring flexible approaches. Successful community coaches focus on both outcomes and process to build skills in individuals, teams, and across the community. Roundtable participants identified six competencies that all coaches should have. These are the ability to
- Improve communication
- Resolve conflicts
- Strengthen relationships
- Identify and connect to resources, both internally and externally
- Provide opportunities for individual and collective learning
- Respond to change
Improving communication, resolving conflicts, and strengthening relationships speak to coaching for relationships. Identifying and connecting to resources relates to coaching for results. Providing opportunities for individual and collective learning relates to coaching for reflection. Responding to change leads to coaching for reach. Coaches use all of these competencies in addressing common challenges like encouraging inclusion and respecting diversity and helping communities stuck in pause to hit the play button again.
Coaches succeed in communities because of their respect for the implicit wisdom emerging from local people. Successful coaching also requires that all four elements of the equation (funders, intermediaries, coaches, and community team members) be in harmony on the goals and the processes involved in the project. Coaches need to balance their own personality and skills with the personality, skills, and assets of the community leaders and the agenda of the funders of a community project.
How Coaching Adds Value to Community Building Strategies
Benefits for communities
Coaching is a valuable nutrient and catalytic agent to any group efforts that require innovative ideas, shared leadership or participation, and comprehensive or integrative approaches across boundaries and economic sectors. Effective coaching enables community collaboration, problem solving, and shared learning.
Coaching is an extremely effective tool for helping groups reframe their operating systems, unleash new ideas, transition to new leadership, and negotiate partnerships. Most of these are critical competencies for successful community building.
Benefits for funders
Coaching augments investments in training, such as leadership development, because it assists communities in successfully adapting best practices to their unique place. Coaching also provides a way for funders to invest in change strategies that are grounded in the locality, owned by the local people, and sustainable over time.
Benefits for nonprofits and intermediaries
The addition of coaching to the array of programs and tools offered by a nonprofit not only expands their repertoire of services, but also increases the success of other technical assistance and training strategies.
New opportunities for extension agencies
Coaching may be a variation of extension agency work that aligns with other kinds of expertise—a kind of educational delivery system which might be called "facilitated learning." For these coaches, connecting leaders and teams to external resources, particularly those connected to the land grant system, plays an important role.
Growing Success Around the Country
Initial research for the roundtable discussion upon which this article is based generated a list of more than 220 North American communities where coaching had been used as a strategic support for organizational development or broad-based community development.
The practice of community coaching dates to the mid-1980s when MDC, a nonprofit research and development organization in North Carolina, began providing community-based technical assistance as a support intervention to increase the pace and success rates of local committees that were reshaping educational reform across the South. Impressed by the early benefits, MDC began incorporating coaching into other change initiatives: reshaping the workforce development system in the mid-South and expanding the capacity of rural community colleges to guide economic and education reform in highly distressed places. Several major foundations supported these efforts: Ford, and W. K. Kellogg foundations, Lilly Endowment, Foundation for the Mid South and the Pew Charitable Trusts, among others.
During the 1990s, many rural development and college extension faculty were also bringing a coaching approach to this work. As more community colleges in the South, Midwest and Southwest joined the Rural Community College Initiative, the Southern and North Central Regional Rural Development Centers brought extension specialists into the practice of community coaching.
Since 2000, other foundations have used coaching to expand leadership, education reform and sustainable community development initiatives: These include Northwest Area Foundation, Lumina Foundation for Education, and The Duke Endowment. Both the Ford Foundation and W. K. Kellogg Foundation also have continued to support rural development models that drew upon coaching to guide the local change efforts.
Resources
The following resources will aid people involved in community building efforts.
"Coaching for Community and Organizational Change" By Mary Emery, Ken Hubbell, and Priscilla Salant. Available as a free PDF from Kellogg Foundation. This is the booklet upon which this article is based.
The Community Leadership Handbook by Jim Krile, Blandin Community Leadership Program, published by Fieldstone Alliance, Inc. This in-depth handbook contains numerous tools that help community leaders frame ideas, mobilize people, and build relationships. Contains numerous resources for those who currently coach communities.
Community Visions, Community Solutions: Grantmaking for Comprehensive Impact by Jay Connor and Stephanie Kadel Taras, published by Fieldstone Alliance, Inc. This lays out the case for foundations to deal with change on a community-wide basis, and to fund accordingly.
The Creative Community Builders Handbook by Tom Borrup, published by Fieldstone Alliance, Inc. Research and tools to help communities uncover their key assets and leverage them to improve economic and social conditions. Includes ten proven strategies, twenty case studies, and a detailed process guide adaptable for any community-driven planning endeavor.
Community Building: What Makes It Work by Paul Mattessich, published by Fieldstone Alliance, Inc. The quintessential research on the factors required in successful community building. Consultants involved in community building work will find research to back up their intuitive understanding—and to support funding requests.
The Community Economic Development Handbook by Mihailo Temali, published by Fieldstone Alliance, Inc. Helps community groups identify critical pivot points for rebuilding and improving their assets.
About the Contributors
Mary Emery is the associate director of the North Central Regional Center for Rural Development at Iowa State University. Ken Hubbell is the president of Ken Hubbell and Associates, and Priscilla Salant is the University of Idaho Coordinator for Outreach and Engagement. This report and the Community Coaching Roundtable received major support from the W. K. Kellogg Foundation, Northwest Area Foundation, and the Ford Foundation.
A special note of thanks to Gordon Goodwin of Northwest Area Foundation (now a consultant with Fieldstone Alliance) for bringing the work of these community coaches to my attention, and to Jennifer Henderson of Strategic Interventions, a community coach who is part of the team working on this concept. If you have suggestions for future topics, please send them to me!
Sincerely,
Vince Hyman
Publishing Director
Fieldstone Alliance
March 21, 2007
Copyright Fieldstone Alliance. For reprint permission, click here.