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Governance

Positive relationships with our communities are a top priority for Yamana, which is why we ensure all levels of management play an active role in the management of our host community relations. Each of our operations have a dedicated community relations team that focuses on active engagement with local stakeholders and acts as a direct line to communities by participating in ongoing discussions with site general managers. They ensure consistency throughout the site and community, with the corporate HSEC team providing support, strategy and organizational alignment.

The Board of Directors and senior executives receive monthly updates on a variety of topics, including engagement activities and grievances, provide final oversight and approve all policy or strategy changes.

For more information on how we ensure accountability on community relations across all levels of the organization, please see our HSEC Governance page.

Strategy

Our HSEC vision is One Team, One Goal: Zero, however, our approach to community relations is to go beyond zero and ultimately generate a net-positive impact for our local communities through long-term economic development, education, healthcare and capacity development. The goal is to help create resilient communities that can thrive beyond the mine. We have a variety of mechanisms that help guide us to industry best practice and to fully understand the concerns of our stakeholders, mainly our HSEC Framework and the Social License to Operate (SLO) Index.

Incorporating Industry Best Practice Through Our HSEC Framework

We set a benchmark of evolving international best practice through our framework, which forms the basis of our community relations strategy. The framework is based on three pillars of social risk management: (1) stakeholder engagement, (2) impact management and (3) benefit management.

Topics covered within the three pillars include:

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Stakeholder Engagement

  • Stakeholder Identification & Analysis
  • Stakeholder Engagement
  • Material Issues
  • Feedback Management
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Impact Management

  • Impact Identification
  • Impact Management
  • Baseline Social Closure
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Benefit Management

  • Expectation Management
  • Local Employment and Procurement
  • Community Investment

Each site identifies gaps against the framework and ensures sites are aligned throughout the Company and with the top performers in the industry.

Social License to Operate Index

The SLO Index provides communities with another mechanism to make their voices heard, while providing Yamana’s operational management with a quantitative measure of each of the sites’ acceptance by host communities. Stakeholder feedback is the most important factor for maintaining social license and data generated from the SLO Index directly influences our actions to ensure that we maintain a high level of acceptance and address any new issues or concerns identified during the process.

The SLO Index is an industry-leading tool for hearing and understanding community voices and providing data for decision making by senior management. This tool quantitatively measures the social license at all of our sites (with the exception of El Peñón, which has no community within 200 kilometres). The SLO Index is generated through an in-depth annual household perception survey and a series of quarterly mobile-based surveys, which provide ongoing and comprehensive perception data of the Company and our performance. The data not only gives us an overall social license score, but also highlights which issues are most critical to community members and how we are doing in terms of the quality and quantity of our engagement.

This approach to measuring community acceptance and judgment is unique amongst our peers and gives communities the ability to provide direct feedback on our performance. It reaches a wide range of stakeholders, and significantly amplifies the community’s opportunities for meaningful engagement, while providing our senior management a direct line of sight on the quality of our community relationships.

By quantifying an indicator that has historically been qualitative, we are better able to proactively manage risk, make informed strategic decisions that work best for our stakeholders, and better communicate our social license successes and challenges to decision makers. For information on our SLO Index performance, see our latest Material Issues Report.

Measuring Our Social License: The SLO Index

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Risk Management

For Yamana, we consider the effective management of our social license as one of our top priorities in risk management. Through ongoing engagement, our community relations teams design our social programs to mitigate this risk. Along with our social programs, we ensure that we manage impact, maintain fair and transparent processes, and include stakeholders in decision making to maintain our social license.

Effective community engagement is the mechanism that underlines all of these discussions. To Yamana, effective engagement means transparency and responsive dialogue – listening to, and acting on, feedback from the community, and to the greatest extent possible, involving stakeholders in decision-making processes.

The key principles of our social risk management are:

Stakeholder Engagement

The goal of our community relations strategy continues to be proactive and transparent engagement with all of our stakeholders on issues that matter most to them.

Traditionally, the primary method we use to engage our stakeholders is direct stakeholder meetings, such as open houses, town halls or smaller focus-group meetings on key issues. Through these, we speak directly with communities to understand their needs and concerns.

Our Open Doors Program aims to establish, in a clear and transparent manner, better communications between Yamana and local communities. Employees and their families, students, mining association members and community representatives visit our mines to learn more about our vision, values, safety procedures and environmental policies.

Feedback from the SLO Index is used by our local community engagement teams to improve this engagement and target topics that are of concern to the local communities.

Grievance Management

We have multiple active grievance mechanisms across our sites to inform us on better ways to engage our stakeholders. All grievances are resolved through in-person dialogue; we strive for a 100% grievance closeout rate, and we consider a closeout period to be between 7–14 days.

As most of our sites are not in jurisdictions where human rights would be considered at risk, we maintain zero grievances related to human rights or labour rights. We provide our operations with a human rights policy and training, which is aligned with the United Nations’ Voluntary Principles on Human Rights. More information on our approach to this topic can be found in our Human Rights Policy.

Local Employment and Procurement

Local employment continues to be a top priority for both Yamana and our stakeholders, as it is one of the most impactful ways to bring benefits to host communities and to build the long-term capacity of the local workforce. We maintain high levels of local, regional and national employment. For more information on our local employment performance, see our latest Material Issues Report.

Local procurement is a core component of our community relations strategy, with a significant proportion of purchases for our operations coming from the region where our sites are located. Supporting local suppliers is a driver in providing economic benefit to our communities; it also increases employment and skills to generate long-term economic development for the area. It is Yamana’s policy to prioritize local and regional suppliers by implementing a cost strategy to leverage local supplier competitiveness. Yamana also works with local industry associations to best identify suppliers capable of meeting our needs and international standards.

Community Investment

Across all sites, Yamana’s approach to community investment is completed through three main facets:

The Integrar Program, which focuses on helping communities fill education, infrastructure and capacity gaps.

The Integrar Program’s goal is to improve the quality of life of local and surrounding communities by providing support in four key areas: health, the environment, family and community involvement. The program includes Integrar Day at each operation, where volunteers, in partnership with local governments and members of the private sector, offer services free of charge, including medical exams, environmental education and support completing legal documents. Our Integrar Days have grown significantly in popularity since their inception.

Within the Integrar Program, sites host specific programs in the areas of:

  • Entrepreneurship
  • Sports/Culture
  • Human Rights
  • Social Assistance
  • Environment
  • Education
  • Health

The Partnership Alliance Program, which provides a platform for company partnerships with local NGOs.

The Partnership Alliance Program partially funds community investment projects chosen by local citizens. Local enterprises submit applications for local and regional development projects to receive 85% of their required funding directly from Yamana. Projects are chosen based on community members' votes for which projects are the most desired and will generate the most positive impact for the surrounding area.

Direct economic contributions into new and existing community initiatives.

Finally, Yamana offers direct economic contribution to our communities, with the goal of providing sustainable, long-term local economic value. While our primary method of this is through local employment and procurement, we also contribute financially to our communities through direct community investment, donations and sponsorships, as well as taxes and royalties. These facilitate local and regional economic growth and create long-term prosperity, which far exceeds the life of the mine.