Education Outside the Classroom
Coaches Across Continents is a global leader in the sport for social impact movement. Community based organizations from 95 countries have requested partnerships with Coaches Across Continents, enabling them to utilize our year-round strategic resources to Design, Develop, and Implement sustainable sport for Social Impact programs and focus on local issues such as: female empowerment, including gender equity; conflict prevention, including social inclusion; health and wellness, including HIV/AIDS behavior change; child rights; vital life skills; and fun. Our key to success is a unique Self-Directed Learning model that educates people to identify, address, and solve problems specific to their communities. We mentor organizations and empower communities to question harmful traditional, cultural, and religious practices; responsibly choose their own futures; and create sustainable change.
Our Corporate Legacy Team partners with corporations and foundations to Design, Develop, and Implement Corporate Social Responsibility and Cause Marketing Initiatives. We bring ideas to life. CAC's global expertise and strategic resources enable us to deliver lasting sustainable social impact and valuable return on investment.
Our Community Legacy Team mentors our community partner organizations in over 40 countries through our Hat-Trick Initiative, consisting of our ASK for Choice or Chance to Choice pathways. Through our Design, Develop, and Implement consultancy process, we create legacies of change based on the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
Vision
We envision the day when all governments, corporations, foundations, schools, and communities have the skills to use sport as a social impact tool and make the choice to do so.
Mission
We ensure human rights by empowering communities with the knowledge and skills to create their own future.
Beliefs
What inspires us the most:
• The capacity of communities to change
• The need to question harmful traditional, religious, and cultural practices
• The opportunity for women to be treated as equals in sport and society
• The power of sport and education
• The chance for children to laugh
• The ability for individuals, groups, and communities to choose their future
Our Methodology
Self-Directed Learning: the foundation of our work
Self-Directed Learners possess attitudes such as independence of mind, confidence in their own judgment, a sense of self-esteem leading to self-actualization and the ability to cooperate and collaborate with others. They are independent thinkers who can define and solve problems, reason logically, engage in the imaginative projection of their own ideas and set goals and strategies to achieve them. They reflect upon experience and learn from it.
Recently Board member Dr. Judith Gates and Chief Executive Brian Suskiewicz had an article published by Soccer & Society, Soccer Changes Lives: from learned helplessness to self-directed learners.
Monitoring & Evaluation: Measuring Our Success
Coaches Across Continents (CAC) measures our success in engaging leaders to become Self-Directed Learners and create locally owned sustainability. CAC trains knowledgeable, skilled individuals who are critical thinkers capable of driving change and educating their entire community. Empowering youth and adult leaders, individuals, and organizations yields profound, tangible results that carry over to future generations. Research has shown that developing local leadership is a cost-effective strategy to generate long-term behavior change and community development. CAC’s quantitative and qualitative Monitoring and Evaluation provides key insights that improve communication at all levels, provides for adaptation to local needs, and informs future programs thus ensuring the continual improvement of the quality of services delivered to our partners.
Theory of Change
The predominant approach to change in developing countries is typically top-down, outside in, and deficit based. In the case of NGOs this frequently manifests itself in a “west knows best” approach, by which foreign experts identify what they perceive to be local community issues. Externally determined solutions are then presented to local recipients with the expectation that they will be accepted and long term change will result. The change process is thus based on primary ownership by outsiders who analyse the situation based upon their perspectives, issues external directives and seek to change local communities without input from the community itself.
Conversely the guiding principles of Coaches Across Continents’ theory of change are that it should be bottom up, inside out and based on building community capacity. Change is fostered from within by empowering local partners to question previously taken for granted cultural certainties, challenge damaging local traditions and make responsible choices for their future. The Coaches Across Continents curriculum is structured to create Self-Directed Learners who have the capacity to identify, analyze and address local concerns and to see the world in a fundamentally different way.
Feel free to read Coaches Across Continents' full Theory of Change.
From Chance to Choice
Coaches Across Continents has adopted an innovative curriculum development program based upon our own “From Chance to Choice” philosophy first identified and described by Dr. Judith Gates, a member of our Coach Advisory Board.
We believe that young people throughout the world go through similar stages of development. “From Chance to Choice” focuses upon the principles of moving from the chance and conformity of an unquestioned lifestyle through deepening insight to the recognition of potential choices. Personal life skills are required to make and act upon these choices – Coaches Across Continents works to give youth the life skills they need to move beyond “Chance” and reach “Choice:”
- Chance of birth: the inheritance of country, culture, religion, family norms and traditions determine life style.
- Conformity of childhood: unquestioning acceptance, fitting in to inherited culture and unawareness of alternatives lead to cultural acquiescence.
- Conflict of adolescence: ritual rebellion, self-assertion and questioning of the “taken for granted” contribute to the emerging individual.
- Certainty of post-adolescence: the need for peer approval, similarity, acceptance and the avoidance of doubt leads to culturally created complacency
- Contradictions: the awareness of ambiguities, recognition of complexity and acceptance that no one answer is sufficient deepen uncertainty and doubt, supporting rejection of that which was previously taken for granted
- Challenge: widening horizons, gaining insights, glimpsing alternative ways of thinking, considering options and imagining a different future opens up previously unrecognized possibilities for new ways of living
- Choice: growing in confidence, taking personal responsibility, owning your life, creating oneself and choosing a future empowers and liberates from the constraints of the past