Our Coaches

How to choose the right coach for your Innoweave coaching engagement

Finding a coach that is the right fit for your organization and your social innovation project is not always easy, but a good match leads to a more successful and enriching coaching experience.

The following tool (4-page PDF) offers tips to help you in your reflection when selecting a coach. This is not a checklist! It’s about finding the right fit for you and your project and about helping you achieve your intended impact.

Innoweave’s coaching principles

Our most active coaches are those who identify potential organizations in their networks that could benefit from Innoweave coaching support, and steward those organizations through an application process with Innoweave. Being an Innoweave coach does not guarantee contracts or serve as an endorsement. We provide a database intended as a helpful resource for organizations looking to connect with folks who have self-identified as able to support them in one or more of our coaching streams.

Innoweave helps purpose-driven organizations and collectives clarify and amplify their impact. We do this by helping them understand and implement social innovation approaches with guidance from talented coaches. To do so, we rely on a few coaching principles that inform how we work and what we support.

1. Impact focus: Successful organizations cultivate a strong and shared understanding of the impact that they seek to achieve. This focus is key in all that Innoweave does. A social innovation approach is one that helps maximize your impact: understanding it, implementing it, scaling it, learning to improve on it, or measuring it.
2. Hands-on learning: We believe that learning happens best through hands-on experience. To this end, Innoweave encourages organizations to work with a coach—an experienced professional who can co-create a process and guide the organization to successfully develop and implement a new social innovation approach.
3. The organization does the work: Coaches provide structure, guidance, and feedback based on their expertise, as well as targeted contributions to the work, where appropriate. Organizations themselves must undertake the majority of the work. Applications, deliverables, reports, and all other pertinent documents should primarily be written by staff within the organization, so they can learn from the experience, have ownership over the work, and be able to implement their plans without sustained coaching.
4. Build capability: We believe that organizations should be enabled to run social innovation approaches on their own and gain their own autonomy. The role of the coach is to provide enough support so that the organization has enough competence and confidence to continue implementing their social innovation approach after the coaching engagement ends.
5. Continuous learning: We aim to support organizations to adopt learning-based processes with regular feedback loops to deepen their impact. And we hope they will continue these approaches after our support ends because they see inherent value in them. In this lies resilience, adaptation, and innovation. To learn more about Innoweave’s impact-oriented learning and reporting approach, we also encourage you to read our piece entitled “Shifting from prove to improve”

Want to become an Innoweave coach?

If you are interested in joining our coach network, please see the Become a Coach page. Those approved will be added to the directory thereafter.

Want to edit your coach profile?

Complete this form to request changes.