Provocare Coaching

Effective Community work is about doing with rather than for people.

Remember

• Individuals and communities have the skills, resources and ability to fix their own problems; Community worker roles is to enable and support them on the journey.
• Choice is something that is availed to us all, and choice and facing the consequences of those choices (both good and bad) is a crucial ingredient to change, growth and resilience
• Imposing a solution onto people seldom leads to success, learning, and it does not lead to empowerment.

Below are some tips in what you need to do to remain effective and avoid burn out.

Self-belief – community work often involves wrestling with complexity, uncertainty and in spaces and subjects where even angels fear to tread. Developing self- confidence balanced with humility and a great sense of realism, being solution-focused, acting decisively and saying no to negativity and procrastination is essential and remember all change start with ourselves.

Self-care – you are no good to anyone burnt out. Demonstrating Self-care shows others that it is ok to look after themselves. If you tired, stressed, angry, that bleeds into your work and others, even when you think your hiding it well.

Resourceful– in community work, you often find there are no or limited program budgets. You can spend your time remaining stagnant waiting for a miracle or chasing grant money and wasting a lot of your productive energy. Being resourceful is a necessity for survival.  This means optimising what you have to work with, being open-minded about possibilities, having an attitude of gratitude, and never giving up keeping an eye on the end game.

Patient – change is often needlessly slow, and people often scoff at your ideas, then debate them to death, resist the change and in the end likely claim them as their own. 

Value your work – Measure impact often hard to define but as Albert Einstein says “Everything that can be counted does not necessarily count; everything that counts cannot necessarily be counted.” -Albert Einstein

Courageous – you will need courage in abundance, to meet new people, engage strangers, speak truth to power, to try something new, to disrupt old ways of thinking, to stand up for the voiceless and at times at the risk of damaging your relationship with he very funders who subsidise your wage.  It helps if you are surrounding yourself with a diverse and robust support network of peers who challenge and encourage you—taking risks regularly, being reflective, putting self-interest and ego to the side, developing the ability to laugh at yourself all help.

Wisdom –  to be wise, you need to move beyond just knowing and acting but seeking to understand fully through asking the right questions, exploring beyond the presenting issues, results and words, exploring motivations, beliefs, questioning assumptions, being conscious of unconscious bias.

Enthusiastic – Entuhsisim is contagious, it is attractive, it gets thing done, it is Exciting, and it communicates impactfully. One mistake lot of community workers do spending hours lamenting on the woes of the world and debating everything that is wrong. It right to know and unpack where the fault lines are, but Community development workers should focus on the collective powers to act, the ability to change; it fosters conversations that create and brings to life solutions – not headaches.

Open-minded- community workers work with a wide diversity of issues, people, views and approaches and each one them matter and should be valued.

Resilient–   in community work, you might find yourself as always giving not receiving, and you have more mistakes than successes. Therefore you need to develop the ability to pick yourself up and try again, ability to face and accept criticism (deserved or not), and rejection of ideas, funding applications, and even people you try to collaborate with will become too familiar.