Swings + Roundabouts Summer 2020

BY PHIL AND TIFFANY SMITH, COLLINGRIDGE AND SMITH ARCHITECTS (UK) To be a genuinely sustainable centre, we need to understand what is our licence to operate within our local community and how we do this. As defined in our sustainability article in the September 2020 issue, the word 'Sustainability' was officially defined in 1987 in a report called the 'Brundtland Commission's Report – Our Common Future' as: Meeting the needs of today without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs. In that issue, we discussed the environmental and community-based initiatives a centre could take to be more sustainable. If these initiatives are aligned with a centre's values, a centre is halfway there to being a genuinely sustainable centre that has a "licence to operate" within its community. By "licence to operate" I do not mean the licence issued by the Ministry of Education. Too often we assume we have a right to have a business or centre within a local community – but do we? How a centre chooses to operate environmentally, socially, and economically within their community impacts that community and will, in turn, impact that centre. A centre's license to operate brings together how they choose to operate environmentally, socially, and economically with their community. The first step in answering the question "what is our licence to operate within our local community?" is understanding what a centre’s core values are, as presented in the June 2020 issue. The next step is to understand the business/ community environment the centre operates in. There is a straightforward business tool called a SWOT analysis that can assist a centre owner or manager to quickly understand a centre's business/community environment. A SWOT analysis initially focuses internally by exploring what the centre's strengths and weakness are. It then concentrates externally defining the opportunities a centre may have environmentally, socially, and economically and threats it could be facing environmentally, socially, and economically. Finally, it looks to realise the opportunities and manage the threats by leveraging the centre’s strengthens and weaknesses. This is done by bringing the centre's values and SWOT together into a strategic plan to retain its license to operate within that community in a sustainable way, i.e. environmentally, socially, and economically. DO WE HAVE A LICENCE TO OPERATE WITHIN OUR COMMUNITY? December 2020 { 20 }