How Coaching and Creativity Have Enhanced My Organising

Attending events at the Senedd and Westminster, becoming an anti-poverty campaigner and building a team of volunteers to tackle local issues in Cardiff definitely wasn’t the career I expected myself to have. In fact, when my school held a day where you could dress up as your future career, I proudly wore a beret and one of my dad’s old shirts covered in paint, deciding at the time that I’d like to be an artist. I still enjoy the occasional art and crafts session, and one of the things I love about community organising is that it still gives me the opportunity to be creative (from creating a video to highlight campaign issues to developing activities to engage children in our work). But there is more to community organising than just being creative, and I knew when I started this role that I wanted to develop my interpersonal skills, particularly coaching and mentoring. That’s where Act Build Change came in.

The path to community organising

I began community organising when I started working for Cardiff Foodbank back in April 2024. Before my current role, I worked as a social prescriber in Pontypridd, south Wales, where I connected adults with support in their community, ranging from grief support groups to volunteering at a local gymnastics club. I became much more aware of the systemic issues affecting the communities I worked in, especially in areas with high levels of income deprivation. I realised that while helping individuals enabled me to make small, meaningful differences, I was frustrated at only being able to put plasters on the issues people were facing rather than change the systems at the source of their problems. 

I was thrilled when I saw the opportunity for a Local Organiser role come up at Cardiff Foodbank. I was impressed that Trussell (a national charity that supports a network of about 1,500 food banks across the UK) were focusing more on poverty prevention and influencing for change, as well as giving individual support in the form of emergency food and signposting. Having never really done campaigning work before, I hadn’t known what to expect but I was given in-depth training on the power of one-to-one conversations and how to build a campaign team centred around people who have lived experience of the issues we would be campaigning on. 

It felt challenging at first, as I was trying to encourage people to join a campaign team that didn’t yet know what we would specifically be campaigning on! However, after attending our foodbank centres, community groups and other events in Cardiff, I soon met with passionate people who were keen to get involved. In March 2025, we had enough people interested to form a campaign group and C.A.N (Cardiff Action Now in English and Caerdydd Amdani Nawr in Welsh) was born! The group started off focused on issues with buses but has since grown to have multiple campaign areas, such as the cost of school uniforms, employment challenges for people with disabilities, as well as supporting Trussell with their national anti-poverty campaigns. 

Joining the Coaching Pod

Once my campaign team was formed, I realised I wanted to help them develop and gain skills while working on our campaigns. It was a lucky coincidence that I saw a post about the Coaching Pod while scrolling on Instagram as it was exactly what I was looking for! 

I was a bit apprehensive joining my first group training session, being new to both coaching and organising, but I needn’t have been worried. The training provided by Act Build Change was perfect for someone completely new to coaching but also enabled people with more coaching experience to benefit from the sessions. We practised coaching techniques through role play and covered additional models of coaching that people hadn’t come across in previous training. 

From the first session I found it helpful learning what coaching is and how it differs from other methods like mentoring and counselling. Coaching focuses much more on giving encouragement and support to help the individual figure out the solution, rather than telling someone how to do something. We moved to learning about different models of coaching and practised in pairs to prepare us for coaching our fellow organisers.

Working in an uncommon job role that people often haven’t come across before can feel isolating at times, and it can be harder to explain some of the challenges that can occur in the role. Knowing that all of the other people in the Coaching Pod were also community organisers made me feel at ease, you knew that everyone just ‘got it’. 

A big part of community organising involves developing leaders within campaign teams, and I am trying to use my coaching skills in this area, especially when encouraging members to take on more responsibility with our campaigns. 

Bringing coaching into my organising

Following the coaching training, I decided to start having ‘Campaign Leads’ in my campaign team at C.A.N to enable people who were particularly passionate about one of our issues to take on leadership roles. This has already led to positive changes within the group. The Campaign Leads have taken on more responsibility, which in turn has allowed me to step back at times while the leads have more input on campaign directions and have conversations with decision-makers. 

This change worked well during a recent task of creating a campaign video to highlight the issue around the affordability of bus tickets in Cardiff and the personal impact this has in terms of loneliness and missing out on socialising and hobbies. One of my campaign leads, Em, led in the production of the video. I used my new coaching skills to guide Em through issues that arose during filming. I felt like it helped me to approach conversations differently, not leading with how I thought we should do something but working through the issue with Em and letting them stay in the lead.

Another of my campaign leads, Zack, who has been part of our campaign work since 2024. He started his volunteering by helping at an open mic engagement afternoon and has since become a core member of C.A.N. Zack has also developed his own campaign for more transparency around the accessibility of jobs for people with both physical disabilities and neurodivergent conditions. I’ve seen his confidence develop, from speaking to Members of Parliament (MPs) and Member of the Senedd (MSs), to presenting his own campaign idea to staff at the Welsh Government. Zack has big plans for the future, and from the coaching training I have had from Act Build Change, I feel more confident in knowing the skills to help coach Zack to achieve his goals. 

I’m really looking forward to seeing where C.A.N will go in 2026 and how I can use my skills from the coaching course to further enhance our campaigns. If you live in Cardiff and are interested in joining our campaign team, please reach out to imy@cardiff.foodbank.org.uk - we’d love to have more people involved!