The ‘Community Significance’ pillar of our Sustainability strategy is focused around three key programs:
Through a range of community and business partnerships we are leveraging the unique position our centres hold locally, as well as Vicinity’s footprint nationally, to make a meaningful difference for communities across Australia. Our targeted program allows us to remain focused on causes that make sense for our business, driving a long term commitment and enabling us to have the greatest chance of creating significant positive impacts for Vicinity and our communities.
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Vicinity’s community investment program focuses on addressing an important social issue that impacts both our centres and local communities right across Australia – youth unemployment and disengagement.
We are currently in the second year of a three-year partnership with the Beacon Foundation to help deliver this program at a corporate and centre level.
Find out more about how our community investment program is being implemented on the ground, and our community contributions in FY18.
In June 2018, we launched our first Reflect Reconciliation Action Plan to enable our contribution towards a more equitable, just and reconciled Australia.
We see an opportunity to leverage our position in our local communities right across Australia, to achieve genuine and meaningful outcomes for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and businesses.
During the year we invested significant time and effort to understand our communities' wants and needs, so that we can respond to ensure we offer an experience that is better, easier and more enjoyable.
We know that high internal engagement levels with Vicinity’s Sustainability agenda and programs is an important driver of overall employee engagement, and can help make our people feel proud to work at a sustainable, purpose-led organisation.
In FY18, we increased employee engagement with our sustainability programs by 7 percentage points from the previous year, from 67 per cent in FY17 to 74 per cent in FY18.
Providing our people with genuine opportunities to get involved in our programs helped drive this result, which included a range of initiatives such as engaging employee volunteering offerings, running campaigns through our workplace giving program to encourage uptake and extensive participation in the delivery of our company-wide fundraising initiative for Beacon Foundation.
Find out how Vicinity's centre level jobs fairs are helping to connect local unemployed youth with centre retailers. 
Social procurement
With a portfolio of Vicinity’s scale and reach, we acknowledge our role as a large employer of service providers across Australia, generating significant economic activity through the operation of our centres.
Social procurement is an important avenue through which we leverage our unique position with our suppliers to help to shape better communities.