In coach-navigator programs, coaches help participants chart a course out of poverty using many different, often siloed resources. Along the way, participants strengthen the decisionmaking and self-regulation skills that poverty, trauma, and stress so seriously strain.
A new paper from Partnership member Elisabeth Babcock, president and CEO of Economic Mobility Pathways, highlights one important component of a succesful coaching relationship: high expectations. "Coaching," Babcock writes, "is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Participants are usually only as successful as their mentors believe they can be." Harnessing the Power of High Expectations: Using Brain Science to Coach for Breakthrough Outcomes offers strategies that help mentors create and maintain the expectations that can help their clients succeed.
For more on coach-navigator models, you can read Babcock's idea paper Using Brain Science to Transform Human Services and Increase Personal Mobility from Poverty and listen to a webinar she co-led on providing more effective, evidence-based human services.