Community Contribution

Community contribution

Charitable support is aspect of community contribution but not necessarily a big one. Within your area of operation, and certainly where you have offices and facilities, the big contribution is likely to come from providing local jobs and supporting local supply chains.

Many companies fail to recognise the significance of their relationships with people, communities and society. Sustainable businesses consider how their activities affect people, the human impact of their operations. Traffic from staff and logistics, noise, lights, safety and security are all relevant for the communities you work in. A socially sustainable business will consider the positive and negative impacts, and work with communities to X (amplify) the positives and minimise the negatives.

Reputation and goodwill

One of the big benefits of understanding and improving your community contributions and impacts is enhancing your reputation and creating good will. This reduces the potential for local friction and disruption to your operations. Looking wider afield, as an example, outsourcing to manufacturing sites with unsafe or poor working conditions can hurt your brand if the media or customers caught on to the story. Local protests and campaigns can hurt your employer brand and make recruitment harder.

To benefit from the community support, you need to amplify your genuine positive contributions. Sharing your plans for growth and how they will support more local jobs and businesses will also help reinforce relationships and pre-empt any concerns.