OREANDA-NEWS. Metalloinvest has won the PEOPLE INVESTOR 2014 corporate competition for the best project in the “Developing local communities” category with its School of Communal Good initiative and for the best project in the “Employees’ health” category with its project Women’s Health. The awards ceremony was held as part of the VII Business Forum of companies investing in people.

Metalloinvest’s School of Communal Good is a programme for schoolchildren in four towns of Company’s operations: Gubkin, Zheleznogorsk, Stary Oskol, and Novotroitsk. The primary goal of the initiative is to develop an active and responsible approach among children towards their own lives and towards the life of the town, where they were born and are growing up. The programme undertakes to promote community engagement among schoolchildren and their parents in social, ecological, cultural and educational areas, aiming to resolve social issues in the town. Since 2011, around 600 schoolchildren take part in the School of Communal Good each year.

Women’s Health programme is aimed at creating a comprehensive system of early diagnosis and prevention of breast cancer. As part of the project, mammogram screening, awareness-raising events, cancer counselling were organised in the Kursk region, along with the new equipment being supplied to the medical institutions. In collaboration with the Blokhin Russian Oncology Research Centre, Metalloinvest organised a training of medical specialists to upgrade their qualifications.

Julia Mazanova, Social Policy and Corporate Communications Director of Management Company Metalloinvest, commented: “It is highly important for us, that the funds the Company invests in social projects, are used in the most efficient way. One of Metalloinvest’s key areas of corporate social responsibility is partnership with local governments, which enables us to jointly identify priority tasks and implement them. Another important factor to our success was the attraction of intellectual resources to our social projects – non-commercial organisations, funds, Russia’s leading experts and research institutes, which have extensive experience in the relevant areas. PEOPLE INVESTOR forum provides businesses an opportunity to exchange expertise, share best practice and jointly find solutions to problems. And we are especially pleased that the expert jury of the competition highly valued our expertise and systemic approach in this field.”

The PEOPLE INVESTOR project is an initiative of the Association of Managers and has been running annually since 2008. In this time it has created a whole community of representatives of Russian business for whom intangible elements – including employees, accumulated expertise, reliable partner relations and social reputation – are crucial for the successful functioning of a modern company. Metalloinvest wins the PEOPLE INVESTOR corporate competition second year in a row. Each year the contest organisers gather the most interesting and innovative projects in corporate social responsibility and sustainable development carried out by Russian companies.