The civic sector is driven by individuals who often combine their activism with other work, too often burn out from stress and the emotional strain of solving problems, and suffer even more from the shift in communication approaches, teamwork and the organisation of work under quarantine conditions. Indeed, with Covid-19, many have been confronted with the need to quickly shift gears in order to continue changing society for the better.

In response to these challenges, the East Europe Foundation took advantage of its EU-funded 3D Project to offer coaching to the leaders of civil society organizations, as an instrument for better coping with the uncertainty and distance that the pandemic has led to. Until now, coaching has been more of a results-oriented instrument for developing competencies and offering targeted individual and group guidelines in the corporate environment. However, the stories of community activists who tried coaching confirm that it also works well in the civic sector.

The 3D Project’s coaching programme for leaders of CSOs during the pandemic is being run in two waves. Each series involves three months of training, nine group meetings, and nearly 100 individual coaching sessions for 20 civic activists from across Ukraine. Five professional coaches are working with the group. Demand for coaching in the civic society sector is quite high: when we announced that

we were inviting participants for these two waves, we received 324 applications. The heroes of the stories in this publication all completed the first wave. They have plenty to say about their experience in the programme, about personal transformations and sometimes unexpected discoveries, and about their new understanding of themselves in the context of the CSO community.

Author of text — Yulia Hudozhnyk.