Creating value for our communities.
Helicat operations are truly unique. Our use of Crown land to provide a dramatic product draws considerable engagement from stakeholders and the public. Sharing the landscape with others is our responsibility. We need to maintain relationships with stakeholders and communities to ensure welcome access to the landscape in which we operate.
The vision.
The vision for social and community value is to demonstrate the dedication and importance of helicat operations to communities by supporting relationships with stakeholders, organizations and economies, ensuring the personal well-being of staff and clients, and building positive connections between people and the natural environment.
Defining social sustainability.
Put simply, social sustainability relates to the issues that directly impact people. It pertains to the priorities, values and concerns of individuals, such as personal safety and well-being, but also of communities and social institutions, such as economic development, cultural integrity and governance. This network of social interactions plays an important role in relation to the greater picture of economic and environmental sustainability – to the degree that social conditions are necessary to support ecological sustainability.
“Social sustainability is about identifying and managing business impacts, both positive and negative, on people. The quality of a company’s relationships and engagement with its stakeholders is critical. Directly or indirectly, companies affect what happens to employees, workers in the value chain, customers and local communities, and it is important to manage impacts proactively. Businesses’ social license to operate depends greatly on their social sustainability efforts.”
Maintaining a social license to operate.
Social License to Operate (SLO) can be defined as “broad sentiments of stakeholders towards an activity and/or operation…it is often tied to an operation’s legitimacy”. Approaches to SLO emphasize a collaborative process that is based on the comprehension of local socio-cultural values. “In order to establish a collaborative SLO, host communities and developers are obliged to work through processes of listening, understanding each other’s concerns and interests, and reaching compromise.” — Harvey & Bice, 2014
SLO can better be understood as a continuous process of “working directly with project-affected stakeholders to achieve accommodation and agreement on issues that are of priority in the local context”. — Harvey & Bice, 2014. By working together with stakeholders and considering the greater business impacts on them, helicat operations can build and maintain support for their business.