Context

Transelec’s more than 10,000 km of lines and 70 substations pass through many localities from the Arica and Parinacota region to the Los Lagos region. In this extensive journey, we encounter different territories, some with communities and residents.

Our company’s Community Relations and Social Investment department is responsible for maintaining good coexistence between our infrastructure and neighboring communities. This is achieved by prioritizing their needs, allocating social investment for community projects, and implementing cross-cutting support programs with the main goal of creating social value in the territories we engage with.

Currently, we engage with around 45 communities in 23 localities, with the support of consulting teams deployed in the field, facilitating and extending the company’s community relations with community leaders as counterparts.

During years of work and in updating our Community Relations policy, we have identified issues related to local-scale territorial information, decreased participation in assemblies, difficulty in disseminating information, low coordination of public funds for social investment, speculation, and lack of knowledge regarding the energy sector.

For this reason, we have set ourselves the challenge of “Community Participation” to transform these issues into improvement opportunities, seeking tools that allow us to maximize the social value we aim to deliver to our communities, leaving it in their hands.

Challenge

The challenge is to increase participation and social cohesion for communities we relate with through solutions designed to enhance social value added by Transelec to the communities and territories where the company operates. 

We are specifically looking for tools that will help communities to:

• Improve their sociodemographic and productive self-awareness at a local level.
• Foster communication, organization and participation. 
• Optimize social investment resources and initiatives.
• Become informed about the power industry and its impacts
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What we’re looking for

We’re looking for systems, applications, technologies, tools, platforms and methodologies that will increase participation and cohesion for our communities. It is important that these solutions be simple, easy to use and friendly for all types of users, since these are designed to be given to and used by these communities. 

Preference will be given to digital solutions that promote territorial self-management. 

Driving questions

• How could we deliver community self-management solutions?
• How could we improve the way we engage with our communities?
• How can we improve social cohesion for the communities we relate with?
• How can we enhance communities’ knowledge of their own territories?
• How can we identify and prioritize community needs?
• How can we improve information submittal flow from managerial levels to different community members?    
• How can we articulate other available funds to create more social investment resources?
• How can we bridge the information gap regarding energy projects and their impacts? 
• How can we increase the participation of different community members?