Understanding Company-Community Relations Toolkit
Long term success for responsible mining and metals companies depends on building and maintaining healthy relationships with communities. The Understanding Company-Community Relations Toolkit is an aid for companies to achieve stronger and more resilient relationships with their host communities. It enables companies to identify the reasons why community support may be lacking at a project or operation and develop targeted approaches for improving company-community relationships.
The International Council on Mining and Metals (ICMM) has developed this toolkit to:
- Help companies understand factors that influence community support (p12) and how to measure this
- Provide a tool to picture levels of community support per project for stakeholders or groups (p25/26)
- Supporting companies to build more positive relationships between companies and communities (p36)
The toolkit works best when used as a relationship-building tool between companies and communities.
- Make sure you have the time and resources available before attempting to implement the toolkit
- The toolkit has been designed to enhance your current approach to community relations, not replace them
- Ensure key managers and stakeholders are fully on-board. Their input will be vital
The toolkit has been divided into five, easy-to- follow elements: understand, measure, assess and respond, planning, and organisational challenges:
Understand
What is community support? This section describes the elements that characterise community support and the external influencing factors.
Measure
What is the current level of community support? This describes the process for assessing community support.
Assess and respond
Why is the current level of community support as it is and how can it be improved? This describes how to use the results of the assessment to determine where to strengthen community-company relationships and how to explore and agree next steps with communities.
Planning
How do I plan for this process? This answers practical questions about planning for the assessment, how it links to existing processes and how to leverage existing information.
Organisational Challenges
How do I identify and address internal organisational challenges? This describes how to explore organisational issues that pose challenges to building and maintaining strong community-company relationships.