Buying Better, Being Better

The value of social procurement and how to achieve it

By Jim Timlick

Sarah Aspinall, BGSD Consulting.

Social procurement is becoming an increasingly important part of doing business as more and more companies, community organizations, and governments try to figure out how to buy better and be better at the same time.

At its core, social procurement is about leveraging existing purchasing to not only get the products and services a business, government department, or organization needs, but to also drive positive change in the communities it serves.

One Calgarybased expert says that while virtually everyone agrees it’s a noble endeavour, many businesses and governments are often left wondering where to start when it comes to creating and implementing a social procurement policy.

“The ‘how’ is the hard part, especially in governments because of all the applicable laws, regulations, and trade agreements,” says Sarah Aspinall, founder and principal of BGSD Consulting. There are a variety of things you have to navigate, including creating a shift within organizations towards a more social value culture.”

Social procurement is a concept Aspinall has more than a passing familiarity with. She worked for the City of Calgary for seven years and helped the city develop its own social or benefitdriven procurement program. She formed her own consulting company last year to help other companies and organizations develop their own social procurement policies and programs. BGSD provides social and sustainable procurement advisory services to both government and private businesses and is in the early stages of developing tools to support implementation.

Aspinall says the first thing she tells clients who are looking to set social procurement policy is to come up with an overarching plan. That includes determining what their overall strategic goals and objectives are, the actions and changes that will be required to achieve them, and how they will monitor and measure results. She also emphasizes the need for resources and resiliency to develop such a plan and see it through to implementation.

“It’s really about understanding that this isn’t something that’s done quickly. You need to plan, you need to resource it, and you need to know that you’re going to be on this journey to implement it for quite some time because it’s a change in behaviour and culture that’s been in place for years,” she says, adding larger organizations usually need to take a multiyear approach.

Such a plan should include a thorough examination of a company or organization’s supply chain and who it’s comprised of, especially if supply chain diversity is a key objective. Many of Aspinall’s clients are surprised to learn how diverse their supply chains already are. The next step, she says, is to figure out how much business is being done with those groups and then determine “what can I do differently to reduce any further barriers within the current supply chain.”

300 - 160 Quarry Park Boulevard SE, Calgary, Alberta T2C 3G • Environmental • Geotechnical • Material Testing • Civil Engineering • Geotechnical Investigations • Environmental Site Assessments (Phase l, ll, lll) • Site Remediation, Biophysical, Wildlife, Fish Salvage & Rare Plant Assessment • Materials Engineering, Inspections and Testing Services (Soil, Aggregates, Concrete & Asphalt) • Hazardous Building Materials Assessment

Phone: 403-458-4422 | www.envirogeotech.com Specializing in the manufacturing of Large Threaded Products

2113 50 Street SE Calgary, AB T2B 1M8 Bus: 403-272-7082 Toll Free: 1-866-ABM-BOLT Email : albertabolt@outlook.com

Another critical piece of the puzzle, Aspinall explains, is engaging with both internal and external stakeholders. That’s especially true in cases where a company or organization’s goal is to achieve a specific social outcome, such as increasing economic opportunities for select groups.

“It’s like they say, you don’t know what you don’t know,” she says. “Until you actually engage in a conversation, you’re not going to understand the barriers or challenges people face or the opportunities that are available to you.”

Regardless of what an organization’s social procurement objectives might be, Aspinall points out that it’s critical to determine how to effectively measure whether or not they have been achieved.

“All of these kinds of programs take time, they take resources, they take investment so you want to know if you made a difference. You want to know if somebody is better off at the end of it,” she says.

Aspinall suggests that companies and governments take some small steps initially when it comes to determining what works or doesn’t work with their social procurement policies. For example, Calgary’s municipal government ran a series of pilot projects to determine which strategies created social benefits.

“Pilot projects help you to find out about the suppliers who you are doing business with and also help to make people aware of what’s going on and acknowledging the changes to processes without it just being ‘Let’s put a policy in place, implement it, and then everybody reacts (negatively) to it’,” she says.

One of Aspinall’s biggest clients is Buy Social Canada, a national social enterprise that promotes social procurement at all levels of the marketplace through advocacy, education, and consulting. Last summer, she codeveloped a Social Procurement Professional certification course with the agency that teaches participants how to create a social value culture within an organization, how to develop social procurement policy, and how to embed or operationalize social procurement within organizations. Aspinall teaches several modules throughout the course, with the most significant being the Operationalizing Social Procurement section which follows a sixstep process (see diagram).

To date, more than 180 people from private companies as well as various levels of municipal, provincial and federal government have taken part in the fourweek course. The virtual sessions offer instruction on everything from developing a social value culture within an organization to developing social procurement policy that will generate real community value. Participants must also complete a handful of homework assignments and take part in a series of workshop sessions in order to become certified.

Aspinall has also worked closely with the Calgary Construction Association (CCA) on several occasions. The CCA was one of several industry partners she worked with to design and develop social procurements on behalf of the City of Calgary.

More recently, her consulting company developed a social procurement training course for the CCA that was designed specifically for the local contractor community. It teaches participants about what social procurement is and how they can prepare for social procurement requirements in government or general contractor bids.

Aspinall doesn’t see the social procurement movement losing momentum any time soon. In fact, she believes it’s going to pick up speed as more businesses see value in it and consumers become more selective about the enterprises they want to support. n

CALGARYCALGARY

4049 - 11 Street S.E. 4049 - 11 Street, SE Calgary, AB T2G 3H1 Calgary, AB T2G 3H1 Tel: Fax: 403-225-2000 403-271-2788 Phone: (403) 225-2000 Fax: (403) 271-2788 Old World Craftsmanship & Quality OLd WORLd CRAFTsmAnship & QuALiTYModern Techniques & Standards since 1971  modern Techniques & standards since 1971Custom Landscape Work  Entry Features   gino@gmstone.com Water Features Retaining Walls www.gmstone.com  Columns

 Architectural Work  Exterior Building Faces  Interior Walls  Decorative Features  Masonry Fire Place