Pro-Bono and Free Charity Coaching Options

Who is this for?

I’m offering this to charities, non-profits, and social enterprises whose work aligns with my values (individuals looking for coaching – see below).

If your team could benefit from coaching to strengthen leadership, enhance operations, or navigate change, I’d love to hear from you. I usually do a couple of engagements annually – get in touch to find out more.

What’s included in coaching?

Each 10-to-20 hour pro bono engagement is tailored to the needs of the organization. It could be any combination of team coaching, 1:1 private coaching, or group coaching. Durations can vary from one-hour sessions to 3-4 hour workshops. I typically work with senior leaders, managers, or project teams within the charitable organization, and occasionally with the clients / recipients of the charity.

Some examples of coaching areas:

• Leadership development: Support you and/or your leaders to grow their confidence, resilience, and impact. It could be for yourself, as the leader who would appreciate an extra perspective to think things through. It could be for some of your leadership team – for example, if some are new to leadership, or would benefit from a more confident approach, or need adjustment to thrive in the company’s culture.
• Management team alignment: Enhancing collaboration and ways of working, to achieve your shared goals. Maybe your management team are mostly brilliant, but they’re not working together as well as you’d like. Or maybe you feel the team isn’t performing at their best at the moment. Or you just want to ensure the team continue to deepen and improve their collaboration.
• Agile team coaching: Helping project teams work more efficiently together, usually using Agile approaches. Coaching helps teams and individuals adopt the agile mindset of collaborative, transparent, honest continuous improvement.
• Strategic business coaching: Helping you identify priorities and create actionable plans for growth or change.
• Support coaching: Working with the clients of your charity to help them thrive. For example, while working with consortium.lgbt (a network to support LGBT small communities), I coached several of the micro business owners / grassroots charities whom they supported.

You can read more about my general coaching throughout my site. Note that I’m an accredited ICF coach (ACC). You can see my testimonials on TrustPilot.

How does coaching help charities and non-profits?

• Increased impact: Improved strategies lead to greater effectiveness, which is essential for charities. My questions – done from a place of love – can help you spot new ways to improve impact.

• Sustainability: Helps ensure long-term financial and operational health. Coaching helps people step out of the day to day grind, and come up with a fresh perspective for the long term.

• Confidence: Equips leaders and teams with the skills to tackle challenges. Coaching gets under the skin of what’s holding people back.

• Efficiency: Enhanced accountability and streamline processes. My background is operations – while I don’t give advice, I ask challenging questions that can help teams improve efficiency.

How does it work?

• Pro bono opportunities are limited and offered at my discretion based on availability and fit with your mission. Even if I can’t offer any more free work at the moment – I might be able to line it up for later, or be able to work for a nominal fee. So, just ask.

• We’d agree the nature of the engagement at the start – how many hours and what types of sessions will help you most. I’ll work with you to figure this out.

• I only offer coaching with full confidentiality. When I coach people on a 1:1 basis, I don’t share the contents with their managers or others* . Anything that I share back to help the company, is will be shared anonymously – for example, as a theme that emerged from one or more coachees.

*Note there are obvious essential exceptions, such as danger or serious crimes.

How to apply

If your charity could benefit from pro bono coaching, please mail me with the following details:

• A brief introduction to your organization and its mission.

• The challenges or opportunities you’d like coaching to address.

• Some context on the team/s or individual/s you’d like me to work with.

I’ll get back to you within a working day.

Why I do this

As a coach, I’m passionate about helping people and organizations unlock their full potential. Supporting charities aligns with my belief of using my skills and time to contribute to causes that matter. I’m particularly interested in supporting charities in sectors such as environmental, LGBTQ+, multiple sclerosis, and helping the disadvantaged – but I’m open to many others. Get in touch!

Charity coaching for individuals and for-profit companies

For individuals, I occasionally fundraise for charity, for multiple sclerosis – usually offering a single deep dive session in return for a charity donation of whatever size you can. If you want to be really generous to charity, I can offer a package of sessions – let’s discuss.

I usually run this offer in May (Multiple Sclerosis day is 30 May) and/or December. I generally announce the launch date on LinkedIn, or email me if you’d like to be part of the next round. Frankly, if you need this urgently, and are willing to donate, I’ll probably help immediately if I can.

There’s no requirement on what you pay. Some have paid just £20; others have paid hundreds. Do what you can – it’s for charity, after all!

If you’re a for-profit company, and you’d like to try out coaching and you’re willing to make a healthy donation to charity (tax deductible!) – get in touch!

How does Coaching for Donations work?

Because of International Coaching Federation (ICF) requirements, I need to show the ICF that the money was paid to me, and that I paid the money to the charity.

So I’ll usually send you my bank details, then pay the money you donated, to MS UK. I’ll forward you the email that I get from them when the donation is complete just so you know it’s all gone through.

Sorry that it’s a bit more convoluted than doing the donation directly! If you have Wise or Revolut, though, the payment to me is even easier than a charity donation.

Why is multiple sclerosis your charity of choice?

Why multiple sclerosis? I have some very good friends with MS, so I’m particularly conscious of it. Even when I was a teenager, one of my brother’s best friends had this – so I’ve been aware of it for a very long time. And the number seems to be growing: a couple of friends were newly diagnosed over the last couple of years, and I hear more often about friends-of-friends with it.

It’s a pretty horrible condition, usually typified by progressive paralysis, without anything close to a cure yet – though happily, the newly diagnosed have options which should delay its progress a lot. And, as one of my friends with it observed: charity donations usually go to the ‘glamorous’ charities, like cancer, that everyone knows and is affected by.

So I decided to focus on multiple sclerosis. While medicines to slow it down are improving, yet there’s a very long journey before there’s a cure. They need money – please donate, with or without coaching!