The Phoenix team was one of the early adopters in Scotland carrying out a social audit. We want to give special thanks to Maggie Buxton for all her help carrying out this project and to REAP for undertaking the audit.

In this post we give you the PDF of the audit publication as a flipbook, and below that an extract from that document.

To browse through the document please use the < > arrows at the left and right of the window. For easier reading, use the buttons at the bottom of the window: use Zoom (the + and – buttons) or Toggle Fullscreen (the four arrows pointing outwards).

The participation of the Phoenix in a Social Audit programme was a natural progression of our wish to be socially as well as financially accountable for our business decisions and operations.

In the same way that a conventional business reports on its financial actions each year through its annual accounts and AGM, we believe it equally important to report on what are the human, community and ecological results of our trading activities.

For instance, as a flourishing community business we may be achieving good trading profits but the increase in traffic to the store may be a bad result for community residents. A Social Audit can therefore help us work with our stakeholders in looking at the Phoenix as a whole. This information can then inform our future development to help maximise mutual benefit for everybody.

Conducting the Audit has been a mixed experience as the plaudits; judgements and feedback have been recorded and compiled into graphs and statistics. Sometimes a pleasant surprise, sometimes an emotional or ideological ouch.

Our intention is to integrate the Social Audit process into a central management guide for our business with a rolling programme of focussed audits on different aspects and levels of our operation. It is considered that 5 years is a good cycle for the next full Audit.

While there is no doubt that Social Auditing requires significant resources in both time and money it is a long term investment in sustainable economic development a key element of our eco-village values and principles.

On behalf of the Phoenix I would like to thank everyone who has participated in our Social Audit process. It has been the quality of your engagement that has made such a meaningful experience for the Phoenix and the wider Findhorn eco-village economy.       David Hoyle