Community-Company Assessment
The Community-Company Assessment (CCA) is an inductive management tool unique to BCS.
The CCA identifies options for community investment, partnership development, focus areas for company and community capacity building, and other issues pinpointed through a proven inductive methodology. It also provides clients with customized advisory services, tools and training.
The CCA process reflects fundamental principles: the process respects stakeholders’ knowledge, logics and language; the process engages directly with stakeholders to map complex power relations to understand the interactions between local power structures and other actors such as donors, corporate and civil society organizations. The CCA process also analyzes the communities where companies work–their history, current problems, diversities and resistances of the communities–in order to understand the relative influence of these different aspects of community identity. Finally, the CCA process assesses community and company capacities for change to ensure that a shared understanding is reached.
CCA process
Download an illustration of the Community-Company Assessment process here.
Why is a CCA useful for your company?
Companies are increasingly judged not only on their ability to deliver profits for shareholders but also on how they generate their profits. Your company’s ethical behavior, civic responsibility, attention to environmental impact and contributions to positive social change all affect your corporate reputation.
Effective collaboration between businesses, their public and private stakeholders, and the communities where they operate requires a thoroughgoing understanding of the context, the people, the culture, and the ways in which your objectives can best be met while meeting those of the community.
How does your company benefit from a CCA?
The CCA identifies options for community investment, partnership development, focus areas for company and community capacity building, and other issues using its proven methodology. The CCA pinpoints the customized advisory services, tools and training that a company needs.
A company that conducts a CCA can develop mutually beneficial working relationships with local communities. Companies that integrate contributions to local communities into core operations will deliver greater long-term value to shareholders, other stakeholders and future generations, while obtaining and retaining a strong social license to operate.
Understanding the complexities and value generated by mutually supportive business-community relationships can be a daunting task, and, as companies are increasingly coming to realize, no one size fits all situations. BCS helps clients understand and find the right role among the complex opportunities in developing country operations through partnerships with governments and communities—and helps make them work.