Our parallel mission: Social Impact

Welcome to Suits & Tides, the sustainability blog with more knowledge than microplastics in the ocean. This week, we will provide you with a comprehensive understanding of what social impact is and why it is important to pay attention to it.

Social impact is sometimes a buzzword we often hear regarding projects or operations in developing countries, yet it is rarely fully explained. The truth is, it is s a crucial aspect to ensure because of social reasons and because it plays a vital role in ensuring the project's long-term sustainability.

What is Social Impact?

Social impact refers to the positive changes that a project or initiative brings about in society, such as improving the quality of life of individuals and/or communities. "Quality of life" refers to the overall well-being of an individual across the physical, mental, emotional, social, and environmental dimensions; so, it is a largely subjective term. However, some factors can generally be considered to improve the quality of life of individuals, for example, access to basic needs (e.g., food, clean water, and shelter), health and healthcare, education, financial stability (such as a dependable living wage), social relationships, healthy natural environments, and safety.?

Social impact is about providing access to or improving these quality of life factors.

Why is it essential to build social impact into projects?

At the end of the day, projects and initiatives are implemented and operated by people for people. It is then the individuals, not only those directly engaged in the project but also affected by it, who will determine its effectiveness, longevity and scalability, and overall impact on achieving the project goal.?

To ensure a project's long-term success, creating meaningful and distinctive Social Impact for its stakeholders is essential. Building strong and locally relevant Social Impact is critical for a project's sustainability and creating buy-in from those involved. This is important for several reasons, which include:

1. Quality of life improvement: Creating social impact positively affects the quality of life of the direct and indirect beneficiaries, such as project-engaged individuals and the community in which they live, an inherent benefit and goal.
2. Project effectiveness and efficiency in achieving its core goal: Delivering social impact creates buy-in and support from key project stakeholders, who can in turn assist in removing obstacles or provide input that will improve the project. Social impact through education and empowerment of project proponents can further bring about project advocates and custodians who understand the project aim and can actively work to foster its growth and adoptability.
3. Project scaling and replicability: Building, and illustrating, the social impact of a project can support the replicability and scalability of the project or initiative as stakeholders will actively work to or support its wider success and growth.

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Social impact within the plastic waste collection sector and Seven Clean Seas

In the context of plastic waste collection projects, social impact means addressing the environmental and social issues associated with plastic waste, such as environmental pollution, health risks, equity issues, socio-economic disparities as well as fostering innovation, and sustainable waste management awareness and empowerment.?

These key social impact generating areas are all aspects that we address and incorporate in our projects at Seven Clean Seas; for ensuring that we success in creating sustainable long-term projects with solid social impacts.?

We do this through deliberately designing our projects to bring about these impacts. This means that as part of our projects, in addition to the environmental impact from the collection of mismanaged plastic waste, we:

• Hire our crew from the local target communities, providing full-time dependable jobs leading to financial empowerment?
• Consult and inform communities prior to establishing projects to gain buy-in, a sense of ownership as well as feedback on implementation design
• We deliberately target marginalized communities struggling with addressing plastic waste pollution as well as seek to hire locals who are or has been struggling to find any or stable employment, to address equity issues
• Undertake regular educational session in communities and schools to improve the understanding of plastic waste pollution, issues of mismanaged waste, and recycling
• Work actively in establishing or improving the local waste infrastructure where we have our collection projects

Thank you for reading another episode of Suits & Tides.?We will dive deeper into how we're making an impact at Seven Clean Seas in our following newsletter. You'll hear from the people on the ground and get the scoop on all our activities to make a positive change!