A Reflective Critique of a Coaching Program Experience in a L’Arche Canada Community

The development of a community environment that responds to the changing needs of its members and remains true to the core values of its founding story is at the root of L’Arche's mission. Jean Vanier began L’Arche in 1964 out of a desire to live the Gospel and to better follow Jesus Christ. Today, L’Arche International is an organization that works in thirty-eight countries. It serves ten thousand members with and without intellectual disabilities. The organization is composed of one hundred and fifty-three communities and twenty-one community projects. Twenty-nine of its communities and one community project are present in Canada and are grouped under L’Arche Canada. According to Jean Vanier, the need to belong to some form of community is inherent in human nature.

In 2020, the leaders of a local L’Arche community in Canada requested external assistance for the development of a leadership culture in the community that could invite leaders to evolve within a community in crisis of meaning and in transition. A coaching program was proposed and accepted for accompanying the leadership team.

The presentation will focus on coaching as a posture of accompaniment for leaders in a Canadian community of L’Arche, for which the presenter was responsible. It will take a critical look at the process used to carry out the transformation project and explore how a two-eyed seeing approach could have helped in creating a relational process as opposed to a rational one. As stated by Debbie H. Martin, “The two-eyed seeing approach argues that there are diverse understandings of the world and that by acknowledging and respecting a diversity of perspectives, without perpetuating the dominance of one perspective over another, we can construct an understanding of a problem.”