Empowerment and recognition

We believe that carers are undervalued by society, and this is often reflected on an individual level by carers undervaluing themselves, their contribution and their skills. We address this in two ways. In our work with carers, we use Positive Psychology based approaches which focus on the person’s resources and attributes to empower people by building confidence and motivation. As coaches with lived experience of caring we can validate their experiences and help develop self-compassion. More widely we seek to increase recognition of the significant contribution unpaid carers make to our society. We do this by speaking at events, running awareness-raising workshops for non-carers, and writing articles about our work with carers.

Innovation and learning

Coaching for Unpaid Carers grew from an understanding that there was a gap in current service provision for unpaid carers. We could see that there was a need for something completely individualised, person-centred, empowering and proactive, which resulted in lasting change for carers. Coaching does all of these things and offering coaching to unpaid carers is innovative in itself. We continue to value innovation and learning and invest significant amounts of our time and resources in evaluating our work so we can keep learning and developing new ways to best to support our carer community. As practitioners we reflect on our work and receive supervision to ensure we keep growing as individuals and as an organisation.

Equality and fairness

Whilst we now work with people and organisations nationwide, our roots as an organisation are in the borough of Hackney and the City of London, a very diverse area of the UK, meaning that we grew up working with people from many different backgrounds. This has installed in us a deep value of our differences and respect of different ways of living and finding meaning and fulfilment in our lives. We strive to make our service as accessible as possible, rarely turning people away and instead trying to find ways for us to overcome any barriers they might face working with us. We acknowledge that there is more we would like to do in this area, starting with recruiting coaches from a different backgrounds and who speak different languages.

Partnership and community

We have a track record of building long-standing relationships with our partner organisations and individuals who share our vision. We believe there is huge potential in this work and our aim is not just to excel as an organisation, but to contribute more widely to improving the lives of carers through coaching. As such we are always happy to support other organisations and coaches by sharing our learning and resources and building a community. We believe that our partnership with carers and co-production approach is an important part of how we work because it means that our services continue to be relevant and can respond to the changing needs and priorities of the carers we work with. We contribute to the field of coaching for social impact more widely through our participation in the steering group for the Coaching for Social Impact network, and by speaking and writing about our work with carers.