The Formula for Good Deeds: how residents of Russia’s regions are transforming their cities together with SIBUR
13 march 2023
In 2023, the Formula for Good Deeds, SIBUR's social investment program, turns seven. Over all these years, the program has helped implement more than 160 projects in 23 Russian cities with the involvement of specialized federal-level experts and institutions. A total of 262 volunteering projects and over 900 public welfare projects have received the program’s support in the form of grants. Nearly 300,000 people have taken part in bringing these initiatives to fruition.
The Formula for Good Deeds was launched back in 2016. Its principal objectives include improving the quality of life in the cities where the company conducts its operations, and creating new opportunities for personal and professional fulfillment, better entertainment and continued development for local residents by working in partnerships with non-profit organizations, local authorities, residents and other stakeholders on a systemic and long-term basis. The key focus areas of the Formula for Good Deeds are culture, education and science, sports, volunteering, urban development, environmental protection, and inclusion. The program is being implemented within the framework of SIBUR's Sustainable Development Strategy.
SIBUR has been a strong supporter of local initiatives by providing its grants to various organizations and individual volunteers, including employees of SIBUR’s companies and students. This has made it possible to find and address challenges that local residents find important and to develop local leaders, who, in turn, gather around themselves groups of people who care about their communities and are ready to work towards effecting meaningful change. In Tomsk, for example, local activist Liliya Daricheva implemented a volunteering initiative "Let's Make Our Planet Cleaner”, thanks to SIBUR’s support. Ms. Daricheva enlisted the help of her colleagues and local residents in order to clean several suburban areas from garbage and waste. The volunteers ended up collecting more than 1,000 kilograms of garbage, getting rid of five large and about 20 smaller illegal garbage dumps, while also helping low-income families remove more than 500 kilograms’ worth of household garbage and waste from their neighborhoods.
SIBUR has been supporting important initiatives that can help improve living standards for local residents. That is why volunteers who are SIBUR’s employees living and working in these cities keep initiating new projects. Volunteer Fyodor Anodin from Noyabrsk, for example, opened a carpentry workshop for people with mental issues to teach them the basics of working with carpentry tools. The idea behind this initiative assessed by the company to be the best volunteering project of 2021-2022, is to help young people with disabilities become more self-sufficient and master important skills necessary for one’s daily activities.
The program has been helping local NGOs, sports centers, theaters and libraries to develop. This is well illustrated by the story of the Tobolsk Free Youth Theater, that, thanks to SIBUR’s grant support, has been able to transform itself from a small art project into one of the city’s premier centers of drama education and culture hubs. This is the place where they put on stage multi-genre productions that could be of interest to diverse audiences, train local drama professionals and organize festivals of talents where local amateur companies can get introduced to each other.
Our key priority is to demonstrate that theater can come in different forms and shapes. We have a multi-genre repertoire and we use experimental formats that include street performances and sensitive performances, Olga Solodovnikova, the project’s author, noted. Many of our actors go on to continue their studies at the country's leading theater universities and then they come back to us later to share their experience. Our actors may have already set up their own studios at schools and in art centers, but the Free Theater remains their second home.
Over the past seven years, hundreds of large-scale initiatives have been implemented in 23 of the cities where SIBUR operates, something the company has been doing in partnerships with other reputable institutions. Thanks to the Formula for Good Deeds’ projects and participation of national-level experts, the residents of these regions have gotten access to new opportunities that had previously been only available to those living in major cities.
These projects include tours and educational program of the State Theater of Nations, exhibitions of the Moscow Design Museum, the Basketball School project designed to support talented junior players, the Forest Formula program seeking to conserve and restore the planet’s natural resources, STEAM Fest science festivals, and many others. 2022 saw the launch of an interregional inclusive initiative titled You can do anything! in the regions of SIBUR’s presence. As part of this initiative, motivational meetings for people with disabilities have been held in Voronezh, Nizhnevartovsk, and Tobolsk with the lineup of speakers at these events including famous individuals with disabilities. More than 450 people have taken part in these meetings altogether. The project was instrumental in creating an inclusive blog called The City of Opportunities and a course on representation of disability on social networks. The blog currently counts more than 650 followers from different cities of the country, and its audience keeps growing. One important product of this project is that it has helped build whole communities of people with disabilities at city and interregional levels.
SIBUR is the largest employer and social investor in the regions where it operates. The company's contribution to the development of communities where its facilities are located includes tax revenues, jobs and, of course, investment in the development of these areas’ social infrastructure. That is why the Formula for Good Deeds is an integral part of SIBUR's Sustainable Development Strategy, with all of its projects aimed at effecting long-term and systemic positive changes in the realm of public welfare and wellbeing. The results that have been achieved to date are the sum of joint efforts undertaken by all of the program’s participants including its partners, volunteers, and local residents. The program’s list of priorities for 2023 will continue being comprised of environmental protection, promotion of inclusive society, support for entrepreneurship, and educational programs that are integrated into all of the company's social projects, Elena Snezhko, head of SIBUR's Formula Good Deeds social investment program, noted.