Our Approach to Communities
We steward our operations and relationships to demonstrate our commitment to being a responsible producer and a valued and trusted neighbour and business partner. This includes:
- Transparency with respect to safe and environmentally responsible operations, including our potential impacts on local communities
- Maintaining strong, genuine relationships with our communities, with engagement based on respect, listening and openness, and
- Creating shared value focused on local economic and social development
Our communities comprise a wide diversity of people and organizations, but they have one key thing in common: they care deeply about the safety, environmental stewardship and corporate citizenship that we bring to our local operations. At the same time, our people care deeply about their communities – whether we work or live there, these are the places we call home. Our Non-Technical Risk Management Policy enables us to identify the areas where the needs of our communities, our business and our people intersect, providing opportunities to offer support where it builds well-being for all.
Identifying and understanding the stakeholders who influence our operations, and the issues that are important to them, helps us to manage risks and opportunities that contribute to Vermilion’s ongoing operational and financial performance, and our long-term resilience.
The process of implementing this policy includes:
- Assessing our operating context and community concerns and issues
- Identifying and prioritizing our stakeholders
- Prioritizing issues based on stakeholder interest and influence
- Planning for issue management
- Addressing community investment
- Planning for stakeholder engagement
- Carrying out our stakeholder and issue-related plans
- Identifying and monitoring KPIs to evaluate the plan’s success
- Adapting our plans as necessary
As part of our non-technical risk approach, we support the communities we serve through strategic investment in people and resources. We believe that local employment and local procurement in the countries and regions where we operate play an important role in building good relationships and contributing to the local economy and community. We seek to procure goods and services from local suppliers who meet the health, safety and environmental standards under which we operate. We also require that our suppliers comply with our core values with respect to human rights, labour standards, and business integrity.
Through our Vermilion Ways of Caring community investment program, we give back, we give time and we give together. This strategic approach to community investment exemplifies “The Vermilion Way” of getting things done – demonstrating leadership, embracing responsibility and achieving excellence. The program provides a global framework, with clearly identified priorities and activities, that can be customized for local needs within our business units.
This represents our strategic funding initiatives, focused in four key investment areas:
- Homelessness & Poverty. We work with social investment agencies that support the most vulnerable in our community through measurable, impactful programs to break the cycle of poverty and homelessness, because we believe healthy, vibrant communities include all community members in their success.
- Health and Safety Promotion. We invest in results-oriented programs that enhance the wellbeing and safety of individuals and communities, sharing our best-in-class approach to a health and safety culture that is fully integrated into every facet of Vermilion's operations.
- Environmental Stewardship. We partner with organizations that use science-based best practices to enhance environmental conservation and education, contributing to healthy, resilient, sustainable communities today and in the future.
- Celebrating Vermilion's Cultures. We support the local cultures of our diverse locations to ensure that their traditions and contributions are recognized and preserved.
We support the wide variety of not-for-profit and charitable organizations that our staff and their immediate families volunteer at outside of working hours, using a tiered volunteer grant approach: the greater the volunteer hours, the greater the donation to the organization. This allows us to directly support the causes and community organizations that mean the most to our people.
We encourage our people to spend up to two days per year volunteering on company time as part of a team or larger Day of Caring project. These hands-on opportunities help us to put caring into action, building collaborative, trusted and genuine relationships between our people, our company and our communities.
Vermilion’s Netherlands Business Unit launched its Municipality Linkage Program (MLP) in 2016, to help us visibly support the communities where we are active. We have identified 12 municipalities that are priorities, based on our operational activities. Within these locations, we connect with key stakeholders such as residents, community organizations and municipalities to help identify strategic community investment that we could consider funding: a community need and a local solution that helps to address it. Projects supported by the MLP touch all pillars of Vermilion’s community investment priorities, with the majority of funds spent in the area of environmental stewardship, specifically supporting the energy transition. In the time we have been supporting the MLP we have seen tremendous growth in community and employee engagement.
Projects supported by the MLP touch all pillars of Vermilion’s community investment priorities, with the majority of funds spent on environmental stewardship, to support the energy transition – they include LED lighting (as in the pony club, below), solar panels and other sustainable renovations to help our communities improve energy efficiency and renewable energy.
The success of the MLP in 2022 included 15 projects, organizations in 13 municipalities, and €116,412 in support. Since its inception in 2016, this program has invested more than €1 million in municipalities in and around our operations.
Vermilion has developed a funding model that links our community investment budget to key business performance metrics over a rolling average of the past three years. This is applied globally to the entire budget, and then by business unit to establish local budgets. This helps to provide stable funding for community investment over time by levelling out one-time changes in annual revenue and production, and directly linking company activities with investment in our communities.
In addition, we use anonymous staff surveys to develop community investment activities (such as proposing and choosing organizations for our Days of Caring and activities for our Ways of Caring annual fundraising campaign) and to assess their success and potential for continuous improvement.
We connect our community investment work directly with our staff satisfaction metrics through our confidential, third-party-conducted Great Place to Work® people survey. This is carried out through quantitative responses to the specific question “I feel good about the ways we contribute to the community” and through qualitative comments received in the open-ended survey questions.
In addition, we use anonymous staff surveys to develop community investment activities (such as proposing and choosing organizations for our Days of Caring and activities for our Ways of Caring annual fundraising campaign) and to assess their success and potential for continuous improvement.
We use various metrics on the spectrum between Inputs, Outputs and Outcomes to measure the results of our strategic community investment funding, with an increasing emphasis on working with our community partners to establish the means and support to measure outcomes:
- Inputs: the value of our funding, staff volunteering (inside and outside working hours) and external resources leveraged
- Outputs: the scope of support provided (such as numbers of meals or workshops) and the number of people impacted by programs that we support
- Outcomes: the measurable impacts of the support we provide, including Social Return on Investment
As an example of outcomes measurement, our flagship partnership with the YW of Calgary (the Skills Training Centre project that provided 20-week construction training courses for women facing barriers to achieving viable employment) included a study into its Social Return on Investment. Our external consultant found that an SROI ratio of $4.65 of value created per $1 invested was a conservative estimate of the ongoing future value of the Centre’s services.
In addition to the Great Place to Work® survey metrics, we report the value of our community investments following the London Benchmarking Group’s standard “circles” of investment to reflect our total contribution:
- Direct cash contribution: our donations to non-profit and charitable organizations
- Additional direct support: adds in-kind support, such as donations of materials for Days of Caring and staff volunteering during working hours
- External resources leveraged: adds value of staff and our partner contributions
We adjust our funding and activities as needed, but on an annual basis at minimum. We identify and contribute to best practices as they develop, increase communication to staff to promote specific initiatives, and respond to changing needs within specific business units.