36 SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 2026 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL We estimate that coaches provided between 1,500 and 2,000 hours of coaching over the program’s three-year run, reaching roughly 500 to 600 clients. It was a significant return on investment—contracted externally at market rates, those hours, alone, would have cost more than $2 million. And USAID coaches also trained their teams to use coaching techniques and created coaching and mentoring programs, laying the groundwork for a true coaching culture across the agency. As the program grew, the impact showed up in ways both tangible and unspoken. Coaching helped surface blind spots that traditional training programs rarely addressed. Through sustained engagements, typically three or more sessions over several months, coaches could help clients identify patterns of behavior they couldn’t see on their own, develop individualized growth paths, and build strategies tailored to their specific circumstances. Sometimes our colleagues simply needed a confidential space to strategize and reflect on their leadership challenges, which could mean a single session to think aloud with a trusted partner. Other times, the work unfolded over months, helping a colleague step into a new leadership role with greater confidence and self-awareness. We also experimented with barter coaching between ourselves, honing our skills while supporting each other. We were expanding into team coaching in early 2025, when DOGE entered the building, intent on destruction. It Wasn’t Perfect Not everything was working optimally, however. USAID made a significant upfront investment but hadn’t followed through in supporting coaches after that initial training. Continuing education, International Coaching Federation (ICF) membership, and credentialing costs fell on individual coaches. There was no formal structure for coaching supervision or quality assurance, and we lacked a robust way to measure the program’s impact beyond what individual coaches tracked with their own clients. Further, many certified coaches were frustrated by low client intake; some went months after completing their Georgetown training without a single new client. In hindsight, the program needed far more aggressive marketing at all levels of the agency, including a sustained push in overseas missions. These were growing pains, however, not fatal flaws. It wasn’t prudent to continue investing in training new cohorts of coaches when demand hadn’t caught up with supply, but the program certainly had room to grow. After all, it was just three years old; and we believe that, given time, it would have matured into something more like the Department of State’s coaching program. With the dismantling of USAID in early 2025, the contractors who had managed the coaching program’s administrative infrastructure disappeared seemingly overnight. Within days, thousands of USAID contractors lost their jobs, followed in waves by direct-hire staff including members of both the Civil Service and Foreign Service who had dedicated their careers to international development. USAID Undone, Coaches Regroup A small group of coaches who had been building an informal USAID coaching community came together to ask a simple question: What can we do? As we watched the entire U.S. development infrastructure being systematically dismantled, we realized our colleagues needed a safe space to process their grief, which we were uniquely positioned to provide. By March 2025, as reports emerged that DOGE had installed artificial intelligence tracking on agency communications, USAID’s internal systems were no longer safe spaces. We organized outside the agency, creating an external system to match USAID certified coaches with current and former staff who needed support. We advertised through numerous channels, and the response was overwhelming: 75 coaches stepped forward to support more than 250 clients in those early months. One client noted that their coach helped them “regain clarity and confidence, turning fear into focused leadership.” In September 2025, we formalized the effort and rebranded as “AID Coaching.” More than a name change, it was a deliberate professionalization of the volunteer collective. We required all coaches to adhere to ICF ethics standards and document their ICF-accredited training. We also instituted formal client-coach agreements and developed a structured framework for pro bono career transition coaching. We began offering drop-in hours, biweekly skill-building sessions, and coaching supervision with a Professional Certified Coach. We also implemented feedback collection from clients and conducted a “pause and reflect” exercise to assess our own effectiveness, which is exactly the kind of rigorous self-evaluation that the original USAID program had lacked. USAID’s internal coaching program, started in 2022, was relatively new in comparison to the State Department’s program, which had been operating since 2009.
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