Bring on the Coaches! Amplify your Climate-Focused Community Engagement
One of the biggest ways a climate-oriented community-based organization (CBO) can make a difference in its community is by offering a coaching program. A program that connects residents with others in their community for guidance on sustainability-related topics like green consumption, home energy options, waste reduction, sustainable transportation, and more. A community that is encouraged to ask questions, and receives trustworthy guidance, is a community that is more engaged and apt to take action. An effective CBO would benefit from developing a coaching program fairly early on in its establishment, in part as it helps position the CBO as a community resource and the “one-stop shop”that residents can turn to for all their sustainability needs.
How does a coaching program work?
A coaching program typically consists of a group of volunteers (though these can eventually become paid roles) whose primary role is to answer questions about certain sustainability-related topics.
It is up to each CBO to determine how to best meet their community’s needs, but at a minimum, a coaching program should consist of a designated virtual space where people can submit their questions. The CBO may elect to allow residents to connect directly with coaches, or there can be a middleman who reviews and directs questions to the appropriate coach.
Other forms of engagement can include options like scheduled in-person/virtual workshops or drop-in sessions where residents can get answers in real time. What options your CBO offers depend largely on the individual coach and the sustainability topic they are providing guidance for, hinging heavily upon the coach’s availability. For instance, virtual touchpoints are likely to work better with most people’s schedules, though others may prefer in-person meetings to build rapport with community members. Some sustainability topics may also lend themselves better to in-person forms of engagement, such as a solar coach visiting someone’s home to assess their roof for solar panel installation.
As your CBO’s coaching program becomes more developed, it is highly beneficial to collect data and feedback about your services. Green Community Catalysts recommends that CBOs log all questions received in a tracker with information like the sustainability topic, the coach who responded, the question asker’s contact information, and the status of that inquiry (whether it’s been answered yet). Keeping this sort of log can be especially valuable for end-of-year reports analyzing the impact of your coaching program, and to better understand how to adjust the program to meet community needs.
For an established CBO, having about 20-25 coaches is a good target number. It’s also a good idea to have more than one coach for topics with a lot of demand. Of course, who and how many coaches you end up recruiting is also dependent on who is in your community and what types of expertise they bring.
How do you recruit coaches?
Coaches are people who hold expertise in a particular area that your CBO has identified as a need for your community. Some more common coaching topics include composting and waste management, home energy and solar installation, green consumption, etc, but it all depends on what your community has questions about. A good way to select topics for your coaching program is to revisit your CBO’s mission or scope. Green Community Catalysts generally recommends that CBOs offer coaching for all sustainability topics that a typical local resident has control over and thus may want to know more about.
After you’ve established topics for your coaching program, you should keep an eye out for community members with expertise in these areas. Oftentimes, coaches are retired professionals who previously worked in that industry, or educators like teachers or professors, but coaches don’t necessarily need particular certifications or qualifications. As long as they possess the capacity to answer questions effectively and guide people in the right direction, any community member could be a good coach.
In fact, it can be more beneficial to recruit people without a particular professional background — to stay away from expert terminology — and instead frame your coaching program more as a “neighbors helping neighbors” or mutual aid initiative to foster collective unity. Someone who has a personal passion for a particular sustainability objective or who has done their own research around it can, in most cases, provide the type of guidance residents need.
A logistical caveat: your CBO should always look to protect its legal interests first. Because your coaches are usually not providing expert services, it’s important that your CBO provides some sort of disclaimer (typically on your website) about the scope of your coach’s recommendations, and that reliance upon any information coaches provide is at the individual’s own risk.
Tips & tricks for a coaching program:
Managing coaching programs: Managing a coaching program is not dissimilar to managing any other volunteer program. CBOs should take an active role in promoting their coaches, and coaches should ideally represent the CBO, though this is not a requirement. It can be a good idea to make sure there is an easy way coaches can promote the CBO, for instance, through giving them branded T-shirts to wear when they’re working with the community.
Keep lines of communication clear: It is crucial to keep your coaches involved and up-to-date on your CBO’s happenings. This can look like monthly coffees with coaches, sending coach-specific newsletters or emails, etc. Your CBO should also make a point of recognizing your coaches for all the hard work they’re doing, for instance by giving them shout-outs on social media.
Be aware of any conflicts of interest: Coaches should be able to provide guidance in a neutral or unbiased manner, and should not be partial to any particular services. For instance, your CBO may want to stay away from recruiting someone who sells pollinator landscape services to be your CBO’s pollinator coach. This does not automatically disqualify someone who sells products or services in a particular space from being a coach on that topic, but they must be able to share information that’s in the best interests of the residents, rather than their business.
A coaching program can provide a powerful way for residents to meet their sustainability needs and build community in doing so. Is your CBO ready to start or improve its coaching program? Green Community Catalysts is here to help — reach out to us with your questions.
