Written by Victoria O’Neill

In July 2023, the IMPACT team made a collective commitment to embed sustainability into every aspect of our business.

Through group workshops and consultation with outside experts, 73 targets were established with a three-year time period to achieve them in.

So, how have we been tracking?

We’re half way there!

In our first official progress report we’re proud to confirm we have achieved 35 of our targets. Standout achievements include:

People First: Nurture good health + wellbeing: mind, body, spirit + environment  

• We appointed an external consultant to review and benchmark our OH&S policies and practices
• We formalised our wellbeing initiatives into a policy available to all staff in the IMPACT Employee Handbook. The policy outlines our commitment to:
• Promote workers’ health through our weekly cost-shared pilates In FY2024 and FY2025 the team attended 96 classes!)
• Encourage healthy work-life balance through our hybrid working arrangement and Summer’s Fridays Policy (early start, early finish)
• Prioritise mental health of staff through quarterly Wellbeing Days (one additional annual leave day for each quarter of the year)
• Provide $1K professional development training per staff member, per annum
• Enable employed staff to participate in an annual workshop that includes discussion + feedback on IMPACT’s Health and Wellbeing program
• We’ve raised awareness of mental health and wellbeing through the IMPACT Insights eDM and social media and will continue to do so, including CEO Nicole Webb’s participation in the Carboot Sleep Out
• We’ve engaged with experts to ensure IMPACT’s communications are inclusive and have explored how neurodiversity can elevate our communications strategies
• We’re particularly proud of the work we did to develop a unique service model tailored to supporting + protecting the “external advocates” of NGO/NFP organisations that undertake external-facing engagements (i.e., media) in the diversity space.
• We’ve acknowledged and honoured multiple religious and cultural practices and continue to do so
• We reviewed the evaluation process for recruitment and promotion to eliminate bias

 Planet Preservation: Empowering voices

• We’ve committed to carbon offsetting until 2027
• We completed and have been living by our 6R action plan (Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, Refuse, Rethink and Repair)
• We appointed CEO, Nicole Webb, as our Sustainability Lead
• We updated our travel policy and have introduced an incentive for staff to improve their personal carbon footprint with the Trace app
• We introduced a ‘matched giving’ program to match staff donations up to the value of $100 per annum
• We’ve introduced a locally sourced food from ethical sources food policy for all official work meetings

Ethical Growth: We care

• We’ve established how we will calculate the carbon footprint of a digital media article – and are currently in conversations with clients to offset their emission
• We’ve articulated the companies we will work with
• We developed and uploaded our First Nations Acknowledgement of Country
• We’ve established an ‘Everyone is Welcome’ culture
• We provided over $10,000 pro-bono support to the Australian Theatre for Young People (ATYP).

 We’ll provide another update on our progress this time next year.

If you’d like to learn about our ESG goals or any of the points above you can reach out to Victoria O’Neill at victoria@impactagency.com.au.