Founded in 1978 in Toronto, Canada, the rePlan team comprises over 75 professional staff, including community engagement and development specialists, social scientists, planners, engineers and architects.
We offer natural resource companies and financial institutions a comprehensive range of services to help them understand and manage their social impacts and risks. These services include community engagement, social impact and risk assessment, social management planning, land acquisition and resettlement, regional and community master planning, housing design and construction, and training and capacity building.
We are known for our innovative approach to engaging with companies, communities and governments to address the complex, multi-faceted social, economic and housing challenges that often accompany natural resource projects.
We are further distinguished by our ability to guide such projects from the earliest stages of planning through to implementation, including the design and delivery of monitoring and evaluation programs. We have offices in Toronto, Edmonton and Amman, Jordan, and numerous project offices around the world. We have the capacity to work in a number of languages including English, French, Spanish and Portuguese and have extensive experience working with local translators where required.
OUR SERVICES
We offer clients a comprehensive range of services to help them understand and manage their social impacts and risks in accordance with international best practice. These services include:
Social Impact/Risk Assessment
We assess the socio-economic impacts and risks associated with a given project. We undertake such assessments as part of project due diligence studies, pre-feasibility and feasibility studies, and comprehensive social and environmental impact assessment in accordance with local permitting and international financing requirements.
Social Management Plans
We prepare and implement a variety of social management plans to help clients manage specific impacts or risks in a comprehensive manner and in accordance with international best practices.
Our plans typically reflect extensive stakeholder engagement activities, including a range of disclosure, consultation, participatory planning and - where appropriate - negotiation activities. We are committed to communities and to restoring livelihoods in areas affected by natural resources projects. We have extensive experience developing and implementing livelihood plans as a component of overall community development.
Land Management/Resettlement
We prepare and implement land acquisition and resettlement plans to guide the physical and economic displacement caused by mining and oil & gas projects in accordance with international best practices. Our Resettlement Action Plans (RAPs) emerge from extensive consultation, collaborative planning and negotiations with stakeholders at all levels, including project-affected households, domestic regulators, NGOs and international financiers.
Regional/Community Master Plans
We have extensive experience in undertaking regional and community master plans to guide investment in infrastructure, facilities and housing. We have developed community plans for existing towns and for new towns in high growth regions impacted by rapid expansion of resource extraction activities.
rePlan has experience in new town planning, re-development planning, urban planning, urban design and land use planning. We have many excellent planners on staff with extensive international community planning experience.
Worker Housing Design/Construction
We plan, design and oversee the construction of housing to accommodate workers during project construction and operations. In so doing, we seek to provide a more sustainable alternative to the traditional construction camp and operations village, including the creation of a better quality of life for workers and stronger relationships with nearby communities. rePlan conducts building condition surveys including housing life cycle costing based on the condition surveys.
Community Engagement
Everything we do builds from a broad, inclusive and continuous process of relationship-building between a company and its stakeholders. This process includes a range of activities from community forums and participative planning activities to group-specific workshops and informal dialogue, and is designed to span an entire project lifecycle. It is through these activities that we learn the needs and cultural norms of stakeholders, what type of information they want and need and in what format, and how often they want to be engaged.
Training/Capacity Building
We organize and facilitate workshops and training on corporate social responsibility for client personnel at corporate and site levels. Among others, rePlan has facilitated capacity building sessions on IFC Performance Standards, workshops for companies, government and communities to prepare them for consultations and resettlement negotiations, and training to develop a wide range our clients’ personnel.