CCC Competencies and Learning Pathways Resources & Tools

The CCC competencies and learning pathways define and promote the role of Community Climate Coaches, in order to catalyse, scale and accelerate community climate action. They explain the skills, knowledge and attitudes that Climate Coaches need to work with the communities that they helping to respond to the climate, ecological and wellbeing crises. Usually these competencies will be developed and shared across a team, so it is not expected that any one Community Climate Coach is an expert in the full range of competency areas.

The Community Climate Coaches training supports people to understand and strengthen the core competencies they need to be effective as a Community Climate Coach. After this core training, it is particularly through practising as a Community Climate Coach, usually as part of a team, and working with communities to take their climate action and community resilience initiatives forward, that these competencies become strengthened, added to and refined over time.

Why coaching?

The essence of coaching is to help people a) identify appropriate goals for themselves, b) make changes and learn about themselves, in order to c) help them achieve their goals. Individuals and households, groups, organisations and communities have challenging goals for climate action and community resilience. Therefore, coaching can help significantly as part of the ecology of skills and experience needed to achieve those goals effectively. In more detail, the essence of coaching is: 

To help a person or group change in the way they wish, and to help them go in the direction they want to go. Coaching supports a person, group or community at every level in becoming who they want to be. 

Coaching builds awareness, empowers choice and leads to change… It unlocks a person’s, group’s or community’s potential to maximise their capacity to achieve their goals. Coaching helps them to learn, rather than teaching them.

Source: adapted from https://internationalcoachingcommunity.com/what-is-coaching/

Worldwide, more and more people are joining forces and self-organizing within communities to meet their unmet needs, and to co-create new models for building resilient communities and regenerative lifestyles. To do so, they need the right competencies to respond in constructive ways to questions that require self-awareness, consideration of values, skills, talents and passion, which arise as part of the process of working collectivity. Climate coaching questions ask ‘what’s mine to do in responding to the climate crisis?’, and further questions about how I use and develop my talents for the wider good, in combination with those of others. Coaching ideally creates a supportive and safe environment in which this individual and collective transition can unfold.

Why community coaching?

In general, a coach is there to help a person or group to meet their goals. On a community level, the objective is the development of the community itself.  For community climate coaches working with a motivated community, the goal for using their coaching competencies is:

1. To agree the community direction, destination and goals – by asking questions that enable the community to uncover and describe these for themselves
2. To support the community on their journey to reach that destination and achieve their goals

A coaching approach encourages community members to think and act for the positive development of the community to identify their collective goals, which ideally will integrate with and complement many peoples' personal goals and needs, and the goals of many organisations within the community. A Community Climate Coach team will integrate their coaching skills with engagement and facilitation skills. In doing so, they aim to ensure that the consent of all the community members is established during the visioning and goal-setting process, and aim to ensure that challenges such as motivation, exclusion tendencies or unconscious power structures are transformed for the good of the community. If this process is facilitated with skill and integrity, the benefits should be numerous, including:

• Developing shared wisdom and collective intelligence
• Improved conflict resolution
• Increased personal and group awareness
• Improved knowledge transfer
• Enhanced capacity to collaborate
• Increased commitment and accountability
• Heightened emotional intelligence of the members
• Development of trust and support within the community

Why Competencies?

The word ‘competency’ (like ‘sustainability’) is not very user friendly. It comes from the formal education sector, and originated in the 1970’s as a way to move beyond narrow (class-based) concepts of skills (for 'workers') and knowledge (for 'professionals' and 'managers'). Competency thinking recognises that any job or role needs a specific set of competencies to do it well. This focuses on what a person can learn (rather than what they can do), on outcomes, and on a learners' performance in the real-world. Competencies can include self-knowledge, motivation and the desire to be effective in a role. This approach therefore identifies what people need to learn to be able to support and activate community climate action - whether this is as individuals, as a team, as trainers, or in any relevant job.

The CCC competencies and learning pathway define and promote the role and vocation of Community Climate Coaches, in order to catalyse, scale and accelerate community climate action. This work explains the many skills and aptitudes that are needed for Community Climate Coaches to deliver and facilitate a variety of activities, events and processes that will help the communities they are working in to respond to the climate, biodiversity and wellbeing crises. In particular, the CCC Competency & Learning Pathway guide will help you to:

• Map existing competencies, competency gaps and learning pathways for you and your team
• Plan how to develop the competencies (skills, knowledge, attitudes, experience, etc) you, your team and community initiatives need
• Understand how those competencies relate to particular roles and activities
• Plan how to use these competencies to activate, deepen and expand community transformation

A Community Climate Coach’s role is normally to work with, or as part of, a community climate action team to initiate and support the 6 phase resilience pathway, and the 5 step the journey illustrated below. CCCs should enhance their own competencies, as these are what determine their capacity to activate community-led approaches to resilience and regeneration.

Community Climate Coaches Competence Framework

Five primary fields of competence are important for ensuring that CCC’s can properly support communities to identify and achieve the climate and resilience goals. Typically, these competencies are spread across a team or group i.e. it is not expected that any individual would cover all these competencies. These competencies are set out in the Competencies Overview Table, and in more depth in the CCC Competencies Summary Guide.

There is no perfect way to define the competencies needed by CCCs. Some of the competency themes defined here will cross-over where transferable skills apply across all areas – such as good communication and ‘people skills'. For example, many of the inner-reflection skills that are relevant for community facilitation are equally relevant for coaching. Nevertheless, the distinction between the fields of facilitation and coaching is important – because the specific practices, methods and tools used in these roles are different, and needed in different situations. As CCCs pursue their learning pathways these distinctions become clearer, better understood and more refined.

Learning Pathways for Community Climate Coaches

Transformation Competencies enable a deeper kind of change to happen. Transformation implies that underlying characteristics of the situation or system, community or individual, have changed for the good. Transformation competencies for Community Climate Coaches cover what can broadly be called ‘people skills’. In particular these skills set people and communities up to have a positive attitude to change, to expect change and work with it creatively, particularly change that they shape for themselves at the local level. This involves obvious areas such as communication skills and experience in facilitating groups, and also a good level of self-awareness so that a CCC can reflect on the processes they are facilitating, be open to explicit and unspoken feedback, and learn from and refine their practice as a Community Climate Coach.

Community Facilitation & Engagement Competencies enable a creative and meaningful process of community engagement to be initiated, maintained and developed. Facilitation and engagement implies that the needs, priorities and potential of the community and the groups and individuals within it are the primary focus (rather than an imposed agenda). Facilitation competencies are ‘people skills’ that are used to initiate and develop the processes that enable transformation to happen, in individuals, groups and a community over time.

Coaching Competencies help people identify appropriate goals, make changes, and learn about themselves in order to help them achieve those goals. If people and organisations have climate action and community resilience goals, coaching-based approaches can definitely help as part of the set of skills and experience needed to help achieve those goals.

Carbon Reduction, Regeneration & Sustainability Competencies are needed for a) a meaningful process of community climate action to emerge and be sustained; b) the overall goals or outcomes to be achieved. In some ways, developing the community’s carbon reduction, regeneration and sustainability competencies involves developing a diverse range technical, professional and people skills that enable to technical aspects of local sustainability to be achieved over time, for food growing and distribution, to renewable energy systems installation, management and maintenance, to low energy affordable and healthy housing retrofit.

Scaling, Expansion & Deepening Competencies:  The important range of competencies that are needed to achieve a major increase in the scale, reach and depth of climate action and its positive impacts. The competencies covered by this section are set out only in simple terms, as they are either a) set out in detail in other frameworks or b) are broad areas that need to be held in mind for expanding the movement, supported by multiple competencies detailed earlier in this document. They include skills in areas such as the finance and legal systems for establishing, operating and growing community enterprises in areas such as local food, renewable energy and low carbon retrofit.

The importance of particular areas of competency will shift over time. For example, there is a very strong emphasis on facilitation, engagement and communication skills in the earlier phases, during the process that leads to a community resilience plan. Once the community has decided its goals, then the balance will shift to more of an emphasis on the coaching competencies, carbon reduction, regeneration & sustainability competencies, and scaling competencies, when the community is in the implementation phase for its climate action and resilience plan.

The image below indicates the overall learning journey for Community Climate Coaches to develop these competencies, and the learning pathways for the competencies described above.

Additional resources for Community Climate Coaches competencies and learning pathways:

To continue exploring the Community Climate Coaches initiative visit the following webpages:

• The CCC Resilience Pathway and toolkit
• The CCC Good Practice Guide and support system
• Community Climate Coaches competencies and learning pathways
• Doing the Community Climate Coaches training
• The Regenerative Knowledge Commons wiki

Return to the Community Climate Coaches mainpage