Stakeholder, Community & Social Value
Building trusted relationships with communities, partners and stakeholders.
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We help clients understand those people and perspectives from the outset – building trusted relationships, identifying different needs and creating opportunities for communities and stakeholders to influence better project outcomes. From early stakeholder mapping and consultation through to social value and long-term community partnerships, we put people at the heart of project development.
Social Value and Sustainable Outcomes
Social value is part of how we deliver projects, not an activity added at the end.
Through SLC Life, our approach is built around People, Planet and Place and aligned to the UN Sustainable Development Goals. We work with clients to understand the outcomes a project should create, turn tender commitments into practical actions and track delivery through our Social Value Tracker and the Rail Social Value Tool.
This includes project-aligned engagement and outreach, from STEM and rail safety activities to community partnerships, knowledge sharing and local initiatives.
Our wider capability allows us to support sustainable outcomes across the environmental, social and economic dimensions of a project.
We combine engineering, planning and sustainability expertise to help projects identify and deliver the right environmental outcomes.
Our capability includes qualified BREEAM assessors, planning support and consideration of environmental performance throughout design development, helping clients balance carbon, resilience, environmental impact and long-term value.
We help projects understand the people and places behind the infrastructure.
Our Care by Design approach combines inclusive design, Human Centred Design, engagement and structured project decision-making to help create infrastructure that is safe, accessible, welcoming and responsive to the communities and workforces it serves.
Our partnership with Community Rail strengthens this offer, helping us understand stations as community assets and connect project development with local knowledge, aspirations and opportunities.
We care deeply about promoting the right project. Our integrated strategy, commercial and financial capability helps clients understand both the cost of a scheme and the wider opportunities to fund it.
Depending on the project, this can include Community Infrastructure Levy, Section 106 contributions, private investment, land value capture, voluntary contributions and wider public or partnership funding.
We help challenge the proposed solution, identify opportunities to improve value and develop funding approaches that make projects more deliverable.
Care by Design
Care by Design is our approach to embedding inclusion and social value into project delivery. Care by Design considers people from the point at which the brief and requirements are developed, through option selection, design, delivery and operation.
Our Protected Characteristics+ approach combines:
- Equality Act Protected Characteristics
- Social Mobility
- Active Travel
For workplace and operational environments, we broaden this further to consider issues such as neurodiversity, sensory and communication needs, fatigue, caring responsibilities, shift working, temporary and situational impairment and intersectionality. This reflects the social model of inclusion: focusing on barriers created by environments and systems rather than expecting individuals to adapt to them.
Care by Design can support clients and project teams in understanding and responding to the Equality Act 2010, Public Sector Equality Duty (PSED), Equality Impact Assessment (EqIA) requirements and relevant inclusive design standards and guidance.
Our Behaviour and Delivery Frameworks help teams:
- Define inclusive requirements early
- Create a culture where people can challenge assumptions
- Identify unconscious bias and design blind spots
- Integrate engagement and lived experience into decisions
- Record assumptions and design development
- Understand and manage equality impacts
- Identify reasonable alternatives where barriers or conflicts arise
The result is a clearer line between understanding people, making design decisions and delivering better outcomes.
We can independently review projects at key stages to identify where design, operational assumptions or project decisions could create exclusion.
Reviews consider the complete system, including:
People + Movement + Activity + Welfare + Information + Safety
Our reviews can identify barriers and pain points, challenge assumptions, assess user journeys and support teams in converting findings into requirements, design questions, evidence requests and actions for design development.]
This can be integrated into delivering EqIA or as an additional service to broaden the scope and support widder placemaking.
We can also provide an Inclusive Design Champion to support the client and project team through key decisions.
We offer bespoke workshops ranging from a focused session on a specific project challenge to a full-day facilitated programme.
Workshops can be tailored to transport systems, stations, interchanges, depots and wider workplace environments.
They can combine:
- PSED and inclusive design responsibilities
- The social model of inclusion
- Human Centred Design
- Psychological safety and respectful challenge
- Our Unconscious Bias Tool
- Personas and day-in-the-life scenarios
- Movement, activity and system mapping
- Normal and degraded operation
- Structured capture of barriers, assumptions and design opportunities.
The Unconscious Bias Tool helps teams understand how their own lived and professional experience can affect what they notice and value. Personas then allow those blind spots to be tested against the real system, helping teams identify where apparently small barriers can combine to exclude users. We have applied this approach across multiple rail projects, including stations, interchanges and operational rail depots, helping teams understand complex human systems, challenge assumptions earlier and identify practical opportunities for better outcomes.
“Care by Design enabled a highly productive discussion among senior stakeholders from the project delivery team, Barnsley MBC, Network Rail and Northern Trains Limited. It provided a structured basis for reviewing the layout, considering its impact on different users, and identifying opportunities to improve the overall user experience at Penistone Station. We look forward to continuing to work with SLC as the project develops, applying the Care by Design approach alongside community engagement to ensure that local community voices are reflected in the delivered solution.” - Tracey Brewer FIHE - Head of Strategic Transport, Growth and Sustainability, Barnsley Metropolitan Borough Council
Let's create infrastructure that communities support. Talk to our stakeholder engagement specialists.
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