INNOVATIVE LOCAL INITIATIVES FOR INCLUSION
Community coaching
A basic tool for inclusive local development
Marta Marczis
Where does the impulse for change come from? Through UNDP’s interventions between 2005 and 2014, a successful approach has been developed and employed to igniting the spirit of change in disadvantaged communities, and involving these communities in the implementation of subsequent development programmes. This approach is called community coaching.
“Everyone can do something to change his or her own life tomorrow,” says Marta Marczis, former project leader of a number of UNDP area-based development initiatives and current president of AEIDL. Experiences from many different interventions provide compelling evidence of this.
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 communities. 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 recognises that without local involvement in development interventions, we run the risk of providing unworkable solutions, with which people cannot identify, leading to further isolation instead of inclusion and support. Community coaching takes a holistic view of society, and seeks to balances the economic, environmental, cultural and political forces that shape it.
Our work, therefore, takes 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 communities that are marginalised, isolated, and discriminated against have more complex needs and different experiences than those of other communities. Thus, the aim of this bottom-up approach is to open a common space for local institutions, the marginalized community and the wider community, to promote cooperation and social inclusion. In this context, community facilitation must be integrated with institutional facilitation.
A comparative view of coaching
The most widespread understanding and practice of community coaching as a tool for community development is closely connected with sports. Coaching for community empowerment and social change has usually been approached through a particular sport or sporting initiatives — be it baseball, soccer, cricket or even dancing. This holds true both in Western (advanced industrialised) countries, as well as in developing countries, where in recent decades community coaching has been used as a tool to develop confidence, social capital, cohesion and cooperation, and to support innovation and social change.
It is easy to see why coaching, which mirrors the sports world approach to focusing on a goals and results, enjoys wide and increasing recognition. In the Western context, we have recently seen the growing prominence of life coaching, where coaches work with individuals in setting and achieving personal and professional goals. In addition, a number of community coaching initiatives for social change have also been implemented. In the United States, Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and others, these take the form of consultancies, whereby the community invites the coach and is itself the client. In such cases, coaches work with established community leaders to transform themselves and their communities.
In the pilot ABD initiatives, the community coaching method for capacity-building and social inclusion of disadvantaged communities such as the Roma, is different and unique in several ways.
- Community coaches usually enter communities uninvited, and unexpected. They are typically selected from among local stakeholders in the given city and are familiar with the targeted disadvantaged settlement, but external to it.
- They begin coaching in a largely passive environments, where there is little community activity or belief in the capacity to change life conditions, or in the ability to imagine this change.
- Coaches work to enable community self-organization and reorganization, and foster new leadership. Coaches are not the clients of current community leaders or established groups. Rather, as a result of their work, a new development elite and leaders emerge from among the disadvantaged community.
- While sport is not the primary focus or method, it often emerges as a local activity in the coaching process (as a mini community project implemented during the pilot initiative), helping people to unlock their potential.
- Most importantly, the impetus for change requires no resources — the coach helps disadvantaged communities to see that money is not the first thing they need. Contrary to much developmental thinking and activism, they discover that asking the local municipality for funds actually comes last. The first step is about people learning to improve their own lives.
- The first months require almost no resources, and are not about infrastructural improvements per se. They are about local communities mobilising themselves, clarifying their needs, and learning to represent themselves. At this point they will be able to join the project planning and preparation, strategy planning and the longer term developmental process.
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