Corporate volunteering

The Plant of Goodness corporate volunteering programme is implemented in all cities where Nornickel operates. The programme brings together the Company’s expertise and its vast track record of social and environmental initiatives.

Each year, more than 3,500 Company employees, representatives of non-profit organisations and passionate citizens take part in the project with a variety of volunteer events, including educational programmes, environmental marathons, eco-shifts, a charity fair, and a personal donation programme. Nornickel’s volunteers attend international and Russian forums and expert platforms as participants, speakers, moderators, and experts.

After being volunteers for some time, our employees often come up with their own initiatives. The skills and expertise they obtain doing this kind of work help them not just in everyday life, but also in their extra-professional skills and career pursuits.

Icebreaker is a comprehensive training project to develop the skills of leaders of the Plant of Goodness volunteering association. It allows volunteers to improve corporate communication and social design and offers a deeper and wider understanding of initiatives’ creation in small towns.

The programme aims at developing the extra-professional skills of the Company’s employees to address social issues and making the leaders of the volunteer movement better learn the region’s context and objectives. In 2022, there were 20 events in Moscow, Zapolyarny, Monchegorsk, Norilsk, Chita and at Bystrinsky GOK.

It was a unique opportunity for employees to be the architects of the programme so it could meet their most pressing needs: through questionnaires and regular surveys, they collected and analysed feedback from volunteers interested in improving the programme. Being in Touch was a key message of 2022 highlighted during all Icebreaker events.

In 2022, a Map of Useful Actions information platform was launched, where programme participants can find like-minded people from their region and jointly implement a project for the benefit of society and the city.

Having started out as just a series of clean-up days, the marathon has come to include environmental awareness initiatives in addition to litter picking, landscaping, and urban improvement.

The marathon is held annually from May to September and features prizes for both accomplishing general environmental tasks and coming up with complex individual projects.

The initiative is implemented in four stages, namely a communication stage, a project stage, a nature reserve stage and a partnership stage.

Results achieved:

• since the project’s inception, there have been 576 volunteer teams (including 184 teams in 2022);
• the marathon has seen more than 6,000 employees (including 1,200 in 2022);
• 932 environmental projects have been implemented (including 200 in 2022);
• more than 40 partners join the project every year.

In 2022, an educational interactive lesson called “Seven Wonders of the Arctic” was developed to foster greater awareness of the Arctic nature and the issues of its conservation.

The lesson can serve as a universal educational tool for the Company’s corporate volunteers to use it in educational institutions in person or online. It can be easily adapted for different age groups as there are different tasks and lesson plans for primary and middle school students.

The eco-shifts are aimed at building partnerships, increasing motivation, learning more about the Company and environment, socialising, sharing experience and working for the benefit of specially protected natural areas (national parks and reserves):

• the Lapland Nature Reserve (Murmansk Region) – installing benches, landscaping in the tourist reception area;
• the Pasvik Nature Reserve (Murmansk Region) – creating recreation areas along the Glukhaya Plotina new nature trail, laying 80 metres of nature trails, installing a viewing bench and a viewing pier;
• the Putoransky Nature Reserve – improving the nature trails at the isthmuses of Kapchuk Lake and Lama Lake (installing directional signs, marking a safe route, anchoring a cable to dangerous rocky areas);
• the Krasnoyarsk Pillars National Park (Krasnoyarsk Territory) – creating a meteorological site, installing a weather visualiser, improving the Zhivoy Klyuchik spring;
• the Daursky Nature Reserve (Trans-Baikal Territory) – implementing a project “Plants of the Daursky Nature Reserve” to introduce tourists to nature and raise environmental awareness;
• the Darovoye estate (Moscow Region) – planting fruit trees to recreate historical gardens;
• other projects across the Company’s footprint.

Over 300 volunteers from the Murmansk Region, Norilsk, Chita, Saratov and Moscow attended the 2022 eco-shifts.

In 2022, Nornickel’s volunteers took part in the following events:

• the Siberian Perspective eco-summit is an expert platform for discussions on strategy and synergy in implementing environmental volunteering projects and partner events. It brings together more than 50 international experts and over 70 most active corporate volunteers from Nornickel and other companies;
• the #WeAreTogether 2022 International Forum was devoted to working in partnership for the sake of achieving common goals and outcomes when addressing most challenging social and public problems; Nornickel’s volunteer team set up a corporate stand where any visitor to the forum could learn about the Arctic and also discover mechanisms for building corporate culture, bringing together employees around shared values, and strengthening teamwork and inter-city relations through real-life cases of activists from cities where the Company operates. The forum also offered a venue for a session titled “Volunteering – Competencies of the Future”, which was organised with the assistance of Nornickel and its partners;
• the Garden of Memory international campaign seeks to commemorating everyone who died during the Great Patriotic War. Every year, more than 100 corporate volunteers take part in the campaign;
• the all-Russian “Save a Forest” campaign is the world’s largest reforestation project. Nornickel’s volunteers are reforesting the Kola Peninsula by planting over 2,000 pine seedlings each year.