Building community resilience might involve a wide variety of objectives and corresponding initiatives, but it is important to focus your involement on an objective that is both strategically relevant to your company and effectively achievable given available resources.
Identifying a clear, strategic motivation for your partnership, rather than a philanthropic one, often helps generate more commitment and resources from within your organisation. Thus, clarifying strategic relevance is also important so you can explain to your partners why your company is involved.
The partnership objective also needs to be feasible, so that you can agree on tangible actions in conjunction with your partners and recognise progress from working together. The key is to identify something that you can do together with others that will have far-reaching benefits for the community and for your company. This will depend on your business and the local context, so there are no "off the shelf" solutions. Our examples illustrate how these case study companies went about trying to focus their objectives.
Finally, there is a risk that when you identify a partnership objective that is aligned to your company's strategic priorities, this may give rise to a focus on particular stakeholder groups at the expense of other groups and thereby affect the equitable nature of partnership impacts. The Santam case below illustrates an example of this risk and how it was dealt with.
For Santam managers, a possible response to growing insurance claims from customers due to fires and floods in the Eden District might have been to increase premiums, but this would have had negative impacts on customers, the local community, and the business. They therefore sought ways to reduce or mitigate these risks.
From their discussions with scientists, they came to an important conclusion: While little could be done about the extreme weather events, there are important "proximate risk drivers" that determine whether such weather events result in loss of lives or property. For instance, the proper maintenance of a town's drainage system plays a crucial role in whether or not a rainstorm results in a damaging flood, and the effectiveness of emergency response teams influences whether lives or assets are lost in this flood.
The managers realised that they might be able to influence such risk drivers and that doing so would benefit both their customers and their business. However, there was the possibility that the company's efforts to reduce fire or flood risks for insured customers may transfer such risks to uninsured, poor communities. Such possible unintended consequences were considered explicitly and the Santam managers ensured that their efforts were focused not only on their clients but also on vulnerable communities. The feasible objective was therefore to identify and address the key risk drivers that increase disaster riskfor all communities in the Eden District.
Based on their initial explorations, managers at Woolworths decided they needed to address water risks at a catchment level in the Ceres area, as this would have important benefits for their suppliers, the local community, and the company. Yet there were a host of issues, trends, and actors that were playing a role in catchment management in the area. In discussion with some of these actors, Woolworths managers identified the spread of alien plant species that consume much more water than indigenous plants (and they also cause greater fire risks) as a particularly important factor. A focus on eradicating alien vegetation in the Breede River catchment became the feasible objective targeted by the partnership.
Nedbank managers sought to enhance social and economic development in Magaliesburg, which would also improve the company's marketing prospects in that area. But this might involve a plethora of possible approaches. The managers discussed this with Ranyaka (a community development organisation) and realised that targeted interventions could catalyse locally driven initiatives to rejuvenate economic development. Establishing such local working groups became the feasible objective for the partnership.
AngloGold Ashanti managers realised that there were a multitude of ways to support economic development in the eMalangeni District, yet they needed to find something that addressed local needs and was also amenable to corporate support. In discussion with local role-players, they agreed that they could help facilitate a large-scale maize growing project on a specific piece of fallow land as a feasible objective with benefits for the local community and the company.