Our Sustainability

Here for the long haul

If we are to remain a sustainable organisation we need to enable and nurture relationships with individuals and groups within our community. We can only achieve this by continuing to ‘listen with purpose’ to the needs and concerns of our staff; our volunteers and many helpers; the environment that supports us; and the communities we live in and engage with.

Our response must always be true to our primary purpose – to serve people, build hope and honour God. We aspire to this purpose in all of our relationships but we focus our attention on the vulnerable, whose voices are rarely heard. We are all challenged by the need to encompass both long-term and short-term community health, the big picture and the every day detail. This means eliminating unhelpful boundaries and working across and beyond the whole organisation as never before.

We are all challenged by the need to encompass both long-term and short-term community health,the big picture and the everyday detail.

Wesley Mission is a not-for-profit organisaton responding to a wide range of needs. This makes juggling and allocating limited resources a challenge in its own right. Administering to need in the community in a way that provides sustained opportunity for people to engage in a whole and productive life, demands complex responses. Reorganising the way we do things into a more joined-up model includes looking at how we can use our resources, systems and processes more effectively so that we are able to make the best possible contribution to a healthy society.

In the following pages we provide a snapshot of where we are now and some of the ways that we are actively improving the health and welfare of both Wesley Mission and everyone whose lives we affect.

Faith and trust grow out of open and honest communication, and we intend to nurture these unifying principles through more transparent reporting against the key sustainability indicators of the Global Reporting Initiatives (GRI). We are in the early days of reporting against these indicators and, this year, we have begun the process of taking an organisational inventory to identify areas open to improvement. As our understanding increases we plan to extend our reporting in future.

This year we are reporting on how our staff performance compares with the Global Reporting Initiative’s (GRI) G3 sustainability reporting guidelines. GRI indicators that have been discussed either in full or in part are referenced in the online version of this report.

GRI Indicators Table

GRI Indicator	Located in concise printed 2007 Annual Report	Location in Online 2007 Annual Report
EC2: Financial implications and other risks and opportunities for Wesley Mission’s activities due to climate change.	pg 43	Our environment (A moral responsibility)
EN5. Energy saved due to conservation and efficiency improvements.	pg 44	Our environment (Our response so far)
EN6: Initiatives to provide energy-efficient or renewable energy-based products and services, and reductions in energy requirements as a result of these initiatives.	pg 45	Our environment (The broader effects of helping our environment)
LA1: Total workforce by employment type and employment contract.	pg 46/47	Our People (Total number of employees) Our People (Employee benefits)
LA2: Employee turnover	pg 46/47	Our People (Staff satisfaction)
LA3: Employee Benefits	pg 47/48/50	Our People (Employee Benefits) / Our People (Equal Opportunity)
LA6: Joint management-worker health and safety committees that help monitor and advise on occupational health and safety programs.	pg 48	Our People (Health and Safety Committees)
LA7: Rates of injury, occupational diseases, lost days, and absenteeism, and total number of work-related fatalities by region.	pg 48/49	Our People (Health and Safety performance)
LA8: Education, training, counselling, prevention, and risk-control programs in place to assist workforce members, their families, or community members regarding serious diseases.	pg 49	Our People (Health and Safety performance)
LA11: Programs for skills management and lifelong learning that support the continued employability of employees and assist them in managing career endings.	pg49/50	Our People (Employee Training)
LA13: Composition of governance bodies and breakdown of employees per category according to gender	pg 50	Our People (Equal Opportunity)

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