Investing in Our Communities
The relationship between companies and communities is complex. Increasingly, companies are starting to recognise that their long-term business success relies on the health and wellbeing of the communities where they operate. As a result, many companies choose to invest in their local communities, both as a way of demonstrating their commitment to sustainability and to manage community-related risk.
Leading organizations, decision-makers and stakeholders are understanding the importance of investing and reinvesting in their communities.
How can your organisation invest in local communities?
If you have been thinking about how your company could make more meaningful and strategic investments in local communities, here are some helpful ideas and resources to consider.
Understand the interconnectedness between your organization and communities. Organizations are increasingly expected to account for their impact on community resilience. What resilience looks like is different in each community, based on its unique local context.
Measure your impacts on people and communities. When companies lack understanding of their impacts and their dependence on people and communities, they may underperform, miss opportunities, or expose themselves to business risk. Developing a framework can help your company to measure and value social and human capital and generate relevant information for organizational decision-making, including on strategic investments in local communities.
Build lasting relationships. Investing in communities, when done well, is a highly collaborative undertaking that requires frequent and ongoing engagement with communities. This engagement should not be a stand-alone activity, but part of your company’s broader community engagement approach.
Foster strategic partnerships. Strengthening community resilience is a complex undertaking, because of the many interrelated systems and role-players involved. As such, establishing cross-sectoral partnerships with local stakeholders can help your company to identify relevant opportunities to make tangible contributions and support effective delivery and monitoring of outcomes.
Recognise the complexity and unpredictability of social progress. As a complex, multifaceted undertaking, social change does not usually follow a predictable path. Emergent strategy is an approach that responds to the unpredictability of social and systems change.