Our Approach

We're a team.

We build strong, collaborative partnerships with reputable, committed local organizations.

We coach.

We build lasting capacity by educating local leaders to deliver our proven curriculum, and support them as their skills grow. In turn, these local trainers have a positive, cascading impact in their communities.

We adapt.

Our people and programs are 100% adaptable. We are constantly modifying our tools and supports to fit the unique and emerging needs of each community we visit.

We measure.

We monitor and evaluate every single thing we do, and continuously improve our programs and systems.

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.

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.

Our Model

Coaches Across Continents works with implementing partners all over the world. With these partners, we educate their staff and coaches in our award-winning sport for social impact curriculum in order to create self-directed learners. These community coaches are then empowered to develop future leaders through sport within their organizations.

Coaches Across Continents’ experiential approach aims to combine the development of soccer skills with the development of life skills. We use a soccer for social impact methodology that provides youth with a safe and fun learning environment where they can experience new ideas, practice life skills and make healthy choices. Local coaches are taught to apply soccer skills to real life situations such as setting goals and working as a team. They also learn to recognize and act on “teachable moments” that naturally arise during soccer games and that allow youth to practice solving problems on their own or address a specific local issue.

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

The Hat Trick Initiative

As any soccer fan knows, a Hat Trick means scoring three goals in a single match. Coaches Across Continents has received worldwide acclaim for its Hat-Trick Initiative program, which is designed to reach three goals:

To put in place a sustainable, long-term educational program for children and youth in collaboration with local teachers and community leaders;
To fund selected community teachers and coaches to train alongside CAC coaches in another one of our partner programs through our Community Impact Coach program; and
To provide soccer kit and educational supplies and develop sports educational facilities to help each community to sustain the program.

This unique program has been successfully used with groups as varied as former child soldiers in Uganda and Special Olympics participants in Namibia. Our focus on these three goals, together with our commitment to ongoing, rigorous monitoring and evaluation, helps account for the success we’ve achieved in the short time since our founding in 2008.

We build lasting capacity by educating local leaders to deliver our curriculum.