Our community

Our community development approach

Community development is a key way that we create a better way to live. Our four step community development process enables us to deliver a consistent quality community experience for our residents, tenants and customers.

We recognise that it is our role to provide through our residential communities, commercial properties and retirement villages:

• A place to live
• A major contribution to our local economies
• Community hubs and places to meet and gather
• A safe and active place to work and learn
• Places to recreate
• Accessible services and facilities

Each of our residential communities and commercial properties have community development plans in place.

We have a consistent approach across our businesses, tailored to our residential communities, retirement village residents and shoppers, retailers and the surrounding community of our shopping centres. Over the coming year we will strengthen our focus on stages of life of our customers - now and in the future, especially youth and aging as well as continuing to explore how we can best partner with others to tackle the challenges of local unemployment.

Livable communities

Over the past five years Stockland has developed a series of robust environmental metrics, making clear the environmental performance of assets and projects. Communicating the social performance of our communities has been more challenging.

In mid-FY11 we engaged a consultant to work with our Corporate Sustainability and Community Development teams to develop livability metrics to enable us to better understand benchmark and measure livability. Click here to read more about our project.

Embedding Community Development in the business

Residential

In FY11, we increased our community development resourcing with representatives in our NSW, Qld, Vic and WA offices. This provided a clear focus and central point of contact for community development in each state. the community development managers, together with the project teams, are responsible for facilitating the development and implementation of residential community development plans on all active residential projects. These plans have been developed following our consistent four step approach which includes identifying the key hard and soft infrastructure in each community. The community development plans are customised to each project and include key actions, timelines, project owners and budget. Community development budgets have been approved for all states where we do business.

Our local contribution

In some of our communities we provide a significant source of local employment through our operations and developments.  With our community partners, contractors and tenants, Stockland has developed vocational employment programs, construction training and employment programs, migrant education programs and sustainability training programs.  Some examples are outlined below:

The Stockland Shellharbour development has partnered with Salvation Army's Employment Plus and Brookfield Multiplex to address youth unemployment in the Shellharbour and Illawarra area.  Our office assets are involved in working with local schools and employing social enterprises run by people with a disability.  Our industrial assets have partnered with migrant community employment services and WorkVentures to provide education, training and employment to new migrants in Western Sydney.

Giving and Volunteering

Stockland's Giving and Volunteering program continues to evolve as we seek to identify opportunities for our employees to make a positive contribution to the communities in which we operate and as we develop new and exciting partnerships with community groups.

Team and personal volunteering opportunities have remained a key part of our FY11 Giving and Volunteering Program, including our Workplace Giving Program and student mentoring programs. However, this year we have refreshed our strategy by clearly defining our core areas of focus, our guiding principles for employee-community partnerships and how to better align our investment in the community with our business purpose.

Key guiding principles include that our community partnerships and projects:

• address our material sustainability issues;
• are focussed within or close to communities where we have a presence;
• actively involve our people.

Our employees continue to embrace opportunities to participate in volunteering and mentoring programs and over this past financial year 70 per cent of our employees have volunteered their time - an increase from 62 per cent in FY10. Additionally twenty-nine teams participated in a dedicated team volunteering day compared to 18 teams in FY10.