For living things to thrive, they need the right conditions. For plants, that means a balance of sun, water, and soil. For people, it’s a mixture of support and freedom to grow.
Beyond Emancipation, a nonprofit that serves youth in the Oakland, Calif., area who have left the foster-care system, had such a formula in mind when it began offering employees sessions with professional coaches to help them succeed at their jobs. The organization also trained employees to coach clients to help them cope with challenges and find success in their lives.
Leaders of Beyond Emancipation developed the coaching model about six years ago, in response to a national study that revealed that outcomes for youth involved with the foster-care system were “pretty abysmal,” says Kate Durham, the group’s executive director.
The nonprofit, which has 42 employees and an annual budget of $4.2 million, wanted to better empower its clients to solve problems. So it trained employees to act as coaches, not just caseworkers, for young people who need help. Today, coaching training, curriculum development, and evaluation represent 3 percent of the organization’s expenditures.
Coaching is different from therapy or consulting, says Magdalena Mook, chief executive of the International Coach Federation — done right, it’s a partnership that inspires people to maximize their potential.
Therapy often looks backward, and consulting involves an expert providing advice, Ms. Mook explains. Coaching, in contrast, looks forward to accomplishing goals, and coaches “believe individuals are experts on their own lives,” she says.
Coaching promotes clients’ creativity, connectedness, resourcefulness, and wholeness, says Paula Buck, operations manager at Beyond Emancipation. Caseworkers trained in coaching make clients feel safe enough to open up about their concerns, talk through possible solutions to their problems, and help clients set personal goals without judging their actions or providing them with answers.
The shift has benefited those the nonprofit serves, but it’s also helped reduce burnout and increase retention among staff members. In general, people who provide direct services encounter many tough situations that strain their psyches, Ms. Buck says. “It’s easy in our line of work to become very discouraged. It seems like no matter what you do, you can’t help.”
At Beyond Emancipation, trying to help young people tackle their problems put a lot of strain on caseworkers. “When they felt they had to come up with all the solutions themselves, there was a lot of vicarious trauma,” Ms. Durham says.
Adopting a coaching mind-set lifted the burden of finding solutions from employees’ shoulders. Now, they support young people in their own search for answers.
“We have stronger retention, and when people are leaving, it’s very intentional instead of someone saying, ‘I can’t take it anymore, I have to go,’” Ms. Durham says. “We had transitions like that in the past.”
The nonprofit employs four certified coaches as full-time staff members in different departments to work with colleagues. New arrivals learn the fundamentals of how to coach during their first few weeks on the job and also get at least three one-on-one professional development sessions with the certified coaches within their first 90 days of employment. All staff members participate in monthly coaching clinics and have weekly meetings with managers that incorporate coaching techniques to encourage personal and professional development.
Time is set aside for coaching “that’s staff-driven instead of supervisor-driven,” Ms. Durham says. Staff members bring up topics for discussion and problem-solving.
Beyond Emancipation, which won an award for its coaching from the International Coach Federation, has started training staff at community colleges and organizations that serve high-risk youth on how to use coaching to help clients.
That reflects a growing interest in coaching among nonprofits, Ms. Mook says. More charities, she says, recognize that they “have to be as good as any business; we just operate in a different way,” and that coaching can help staff members maximize their effectiveness as they work to solve vexing social problems.
