Invest in Communities

Understanding Community Resilience

The success of a company is directly linked to the resilience of the communities where it operates, as well as the resilience of the communities of its workers, its suppliers, and its customers. Increasingly, communities around the world are starting to contemplate their resilience and long-term sustainability. As a result, companies are expected to account for their impacts on community resilience. This guide will help you to understand why community resilience matters, how communities are beginning to approach resilience, and how your company can explore its role in fostering community resilience.

Partnering for Community Resilience: South African Case Studies

Proactive companies are recognising the strategic relevance of community resilience to their short- and long-term success. Community resilience is a positive dynamic between social, economic, and ecological systems that ensures community wellbeing and effective responses to shocks and disruptions, such as fires, droughts, or economic crises. This guide shares five in-depth case studies of companies engaging in partnerships for community resilience in South Africa. We distil the key lessons from these case studies for corporate managers who are planning or implementing partnerships for community resilience.

Seven Principles for Partnerships with Frontline Communities

This set of principles from B Lab can help you understand how to build mutually beneficial and equitable partnerships with local communities. It is based on seven principles that came out of a co-creation process involving B Corp employees and community leaders. These principles include centering trust and transparent communications; centering local wisdom and perspectives; committing to equitable resource allocation; prioritising racial and cultural literacy; centering conflict acknowledgement and trust regeneration; co-developing clear and equitable decision-making processes; and centering long-term and sustainability commitments to best ensure collective survival. These principles will be most useful to community relations practitioners and anyone else involved in work that impacts communities, such as supply chain management, sustainability, and project management teams.

Social & Human Capital Protocol

Developed by WBCSD and launched by the Capitals Coalition, the Social & Human Capital Protocol is an excellent starting point for recognising and leveraging people and relationships as drivers for sustainable growth. Divided into four steps (Frame, Scope, Measure & Value, and Apply), the Protocol aims to clarify best practices, boost the positive impacts of business, and improve business credibility by integrating the consideration of social impacts and dependencies into performance management and decision-making. The Social & Human Capital Coalition has also developed case studies, sector guides, and a toolkit to complement the Protocol.

The B4SI Framework

As businesses shift their focus from philanthropy and donations to strategic investment, a growing number of leaders and sustainability professionals are looking for guidance on how to measure business investment for social impact. In response, the B4SI Framework was created to help businesses understand and measure their contributions to society; strategically assess their community programmes; identify the business benefits of various social impact activities; and to benchmark against others.

B4SI has created a guidebook to put community contributions in context and to explain their three-pillar framework, which consists of inputs (what you contribute), outputs (what happens), and impacts (what changes). The guidebook also provides tools, practical advice, definitions, and examples on how to collect relevant information.

Global Impact Investing Network

The Global Impact Investing Network (GIIN) was established to champion impact investing and to increase its scale and effectiveness around the world. Impact investments are "investments made with the intention to generate positive, measurable social and environmental impact alongside a financial return."

GIIN is one of the world's leading sources of data and perspectives on impact investing, and they have produced a wide range of publications that can help you to understand, embed, and expand impact investing efforts. These publications include research and reports on the impact investing market; methods for standardising and comparing impact performance; ways to enhance climate change mitigation and gender equality through impact investing; and more. GIIN has also compiled a series of case studies to demonstrate impact investing in action.