Applying Community Coaching in Arkansas Delta Communities

The Clinton School of Public Service Center on Community Philanthropy has been carefully planning a new approach to reduce the effects of poverty through strong collaborations with three rural Delta communities. This project is the Emerging Communities Initiative (ECI) and is supported by the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation as part of their "Moving the Needle Campaign" Through this campaign, the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation and its partners are committed to helping improve the lives of Arkansans through a public awareness and advocacy campaign that confronts persistent poverty and promotes social justice.

Ken Hubbell and Associates is working with the Clinton School to facilitate this initiative. Our team will provide regular planning assistance through community coaches. The coaching effort will involve supporting and facilitating groups through strategic thinking, community problem-solving, and program planning. Coaches help unlock ideas and passion that are already present in people and groups and help them frame their own innovative solutions. Coaches aren't the answer people; instead they will help lift the capacity of people to learn and lead community change together.

The ECI project will start in September, 2009 and continue through 2010 in three Delta communities: Blytheville, Marianna, and Helena-W. Helena. The intention is to develop unique community-based solutions to poverty in rural Arkansas.

The ECI team will be hosting conversations, collecting ideas and data about the way poverty is affecting people, neighborhoods, schools, and the workplace-and designing new solutions . There may be meetings, informal task forces, and survey efforts where volunteers can help carry out important activities. The process will be inclusive; we will invite people living in or previously experiencing poverty, representatives from the spectrum of organizations, agencies, institutions, and local government that provide services to the community, and other volunteers from the business and faith communities to build a long term blueprint to reduce the impact of poverty in the community.

For more information about the ECI effort you can download program materials, or contact kenhubbell@kenhubbell.com.

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