As procurement staff, we often consider ourselves the ‘doers’. We’re the ones who facilitate transactions to ensure our institution or municipality has the goods and services it needs to run at its best. But what if we could reimagine our role from doers, to changemakers? What if we could be the conduit of creating meaningful change and increased investment in our communities by harnessing the power of the work we already do?
In this article, we’ll explore just that – how York University built a social procurement program and launched one of Canada’s first open-sourced, free-to-access social procurement vendor portals.
York’s social procurement journey began with an honest reflection – what were we were doing to contribute towards a sustainable future for our institution and for our neighbours? To answer this question, as an institution, we had to do a lot of listening. Our community engagement was predicated on the idea that community members were best placed to identify what they needed to enhance community economic development in their neighbourhoods. To listen, we commissioned a series of working groups with community partners to address a host of topics on how York could support long-term community resilience. Specifically for our purposes, they told us that York could leverage its hiring and procurement activities to support the community to build economic resilience and contribute to a vibrant economy.
Having the community define outcomes allowed us as an institution to shift towards operationalizing existing procurement operations to satisfy those community-defined objectives. The amazing thing about social procurement is thatwe don’t have to change institutional best value frameworks to make social procurement come alive. All it requires is a thoughtful consideration of how we can make social outcomes a key consideration when we purchase. For our purposes, we knew that satisfying the community’s desired outcome for more local hiring was not something we as procurement staff could achieve unilaterally. So, we considered where in our procurements we could consider creating job opportunities and make significant and measurable investments in local, equity deserving businesses and social enterprises. We landed upon construction as a key testing ground for the validity of our social procurement endeavours due to its finite time frame, labour force required to complete the job and the sheer number of suppliers who are routinely engaged on a procurement. Fortunately, at the time, we had two large capital projects about to be undertaken, our new School of Continuing Studies building and Markham Campus, alongside some smaller renovation projects.
To ensure we could make meaningful inroads, together with industry and community partners, we landed upon including hard targets within the scope of work for both hiring local, equity deserving apprentices and purchasing from targeted businesses. We considered this to be an appropriate way to convey the gravity of the work while tracking progress to ensure everyone was working towards a successful outcome. While it involved some strategic work, building consensus from industry was quickly embraced as contractors saw social procurement as a way to support their own corporate social responsibility and as a way to attract new workers into the trades.
Since our initial pilots, our social procurement program has continued to grow. To date, we’ve seen 63 apprentices hone their skills on projects on our campus totalling over 23,000 hours and $9 million spent on businesses. We’re proud of our accomplishments to date and we’re confident our success could be replicated for you as well. But, as we as procurement staff are aware, construction and renovation is only one category across our institutions. The challenge for us at York was to expand the reach of social procurement across all buying categories.
Building the Portal
The desire to expand the program beyond construction presented a different set of challenges. With the potential market for suppliers less defined, we needed to find a way for buyers to find social procurement vendors for their unique needs. This need led York down the path to consider a social procurement vendor portal where qualified businesses could list their information and procurement staff could easily search the vendor database for the items they required. To do that, we needed to make sure the portal could take the guesswork out of social procurement and supplier diversity. We needed to convey the vendor’s unique selling point but also integrate their community impacts in a way that was not overly burdensome for businesses on the portal.
To make this vision a reality, we had to balance the buyers’ needs with those of the social procurement vendors we hoped to list. From the business lens, we conducted interviews with prospective businesses and got a good sense of what would need to be done to create a portal. The main concern we heard from the community was that any portal we created should be substantive enough that anyone could use it. Most businesses have little capacity to fill out the same supplier diversity forms repeatedly with each institution – especially where there isn’t necessarily a contract. Our solution was easy – with support from our President, we decided to make the portal free and open sourced so anyone can use it.
The other consideration was inclusivity. We wanted an application process that was barrier free, and we designed one that was – allowing vendors who met supplier diversity qualifications, that being 51% ownership by equity deserving persons or a social enterprise which reinvests a majority of their profits to their stated mission, to participate. On matters of their community and/or environmental contributions, we provided a platform to communicate impact in the portal. To build rapport within communities, we also looked at how equity-deserving businesses and social enterprises organized themselves within their community. What we discovered was that there are numerous business support organizations who admit members to their organization on similar tenets of our portal. This allows us to work with community business organizations to allow their members to fast-track their application by showing their membership in an approved community organization. Securing these partnerships cut down on the amount work for vendors on the portal but it also provides a unique opportunity to build relationships with business community leaders and lean on them to help build our program and respond to community need. This helps ensure our social procurement program remains grounded and targeted to community economic development.
How you can use the Portal
First and foremost, York’s portal is free and open-sourced. It’s available to help you learn about which diverse suppliers and social enterprises are active in your area and what contributions these vendors make towards creating vibrant communities.
Social Procurement Vendor Directory | Social Procurement (yorku.ca)
Here are a few key takeaways for how you can make the most of the portal:
- You can use the portal to search by commodity type, keyword, social impact, and postal code to learn more about vendors who could serve your procurement opportunity.
- Where you’re required to solicit quotes, the portal is a great way to identify vendors to bid on opportunities. Adding diverse suppliers and social enterprises to your bid invitation lists is a great way to start to diversify your supply chain.
- If you’re dealing with a larger contract, consider recommending proponents check the portal out to see how they can contribute social value to the project. You might even want to consider scoring their responses to how they’ll create social value by diversifying their supply chains for your project!
Working together to improve social procurement
The objectives of social procurement cannot be achieved by any one individual or entity. It requires intentional collaboration and the courage to challenge the procurement status quo for the greater benefit. York’s social procurement portal can be a tool for all of us to work together – leveraging our purchasing power to benefit local and historically disadvantaged businesses through our purchasing. It’s free for anyone to use and for our suppliers to apply and list their business.
If you’re looking to take steps in your social procurement journey, here are two ways you can do it:
1) Encourage your buyers to explore the portal the next time they need to make a purchase, especially small purchases.
2) If you’re interested in growing your institution or municipality’s social procurement program, you’re invited to join a bourgeoning working group of public sector institutions as we chart the social procurement course together by sharing best practices, building out resources and building capacity. If you’re interested in learning more, contact me: Brent Brodie bbrodie@yorku.ca