social value
The Polaris Community has a united commitment to measure and maximise our social value; defining it as ‘The positive emotional, environmental and economic impact we have on the Polaris community and wider society’.
This ensures we remain focussed on the values at the heart of our organisation while striving to enrich our social value for those we serve and the wider society.
We will achieve our Social Value commitment through the delivery of our services to children, young people and families and through the continued focus on social value driven business processes.
We will measure this commitment through our Social Value Pledges giving us a year on year benchmark to increase the Social Value we provide. This includes opportunities we offer staff, foster parents, adopters and our children and young people, but also how we work with suppliers, create job and training opportunities and our impact on the environment.
Polaris Community is aligned with the UK Government and UNFCCC by committing to achieving net zero by 2050. We are actively encouraging this through our Environmental Social Pledge and through our commitment to integrating climate change considerations in our business processes as outlined in our ISO 9001:2015 accreditation.
We are proud to have proven our commitment to Social Value though being presented with the Bronze Social Value Award across the whole Community. This strengthens our openness and transparency around external scrutiny and validation; matching our external Operational Inspections, Cyber Essentials Plus - Cyber Security mark and ISO 9001:2015 - Business Quality accreditation. We are now working towards the Level 2 (Silver) award, which we hope to achieve in 2024.
Our pledges
- Health and Wellbeing - We pledge to support individuals to understand and improve their emotional and physical wellbeing.
- Environment - We pledge to encourage everybody across the Polaris community to make positive changes to protect the environment.
- Economic - We pledge to contribute to the communities that we work in and are committed to making social value an integral part of our procurement process across our community.
- Social and Community - We pledge to challenge perceptions and stereotypes, building strong, diverse and inclusive communities.
- Education and Skills - We pledge to support people across the Polaris community to engage in education and training opportunities.
- Employment and Volunteering - We pledge to provide a positive working environment for all parts of the Polaris Community and to be supportive of individual career and personal aspirations.
