Hassell is proud to have become a certified B Corp in August 2024. This reflects our purpose to create a better future by designing the world’s best places – places people love and our commitment to using design as a force for good.
Certified B Corporations – or B Corps – are businesses that meet high standards of social and environmental performance, accountability, and transparency. Collectively, we envision a better economic system where profitable businesses benefit people, communities, and the planet. We value long-term vision and measure our success based on the positive impact we create.
As designers, it is our responsibility to embed sustainability and regenerative design in everything we do to enable people and nature to thrive together. We want to inspire, advocate and demonstrate leadership in tackling the world’s most pressing social and environmental challenges.
Fulfilling our purpose and achieving our ambition requires us to act collectively, working alongside like-minded organisations to achieve meaningful and authentic change for the benefit of our communities and the planet.
Before we entered the B Corp community, we completed a rigorous assessment of our practices and performance – for both our business and our projects. This independent validation of our impact provides us with a means to measure, assess, and benchmark our performance, holding us accountable to our commitments now and into the future.
Hassell has been measuring and reporting the greenhouse gas emissions associated with our business operations internally since 2007. As part of our Sustainability Framework, we continue to implement and refine our climate strategy which defines the actions we are taking in response to the impacts of climate change, for our practice.
To date, this has included the achievement of 100% renewable energy for our studios as well as third party verification of our carbon neutral status through the Climate Active standard and certification.
Public disclosure of our climate impact and greenhouse gas emissions is available via our profile on the Climate Active website.
At Hassell, we believe in the power of giving back. We are committed to creating social value through actively engaging with and investing in the communities where we work in a way that respects and promotes improved quality of life for all. In February 2024, we launched a new program to ensure our investments in social impact are purposeful, aligned, equitably available to all staff and create the most value for communities. Based on feedback from our people and our partners, we have structured the way we contribute to low and pro bono projects both locally and around the world to support a consistent and targeted investment of our time and skills. Our Design for Good program enables all our staff to contribute to improve the lives of the communities to create a more inclusive, diverse and equitable future.
By understanding what the people who use these places value – and quantifying and communicating this value – we can better advocate for investment in what really matters to people and ultimately foster more resilient and vibrant communities.
Our Employee Volunteer Program is a testament to our commitment to our business as a force for good, empowering our employees to be change-makers in the communities that we live and work.
Each Hassell employee has access to paid time to volunteer, that can be used to participate in organised volunteering events. This is a chance for all our employees to support the causes that matter most to us. Through organised programs with key partners, our employees use their volunteer time to make a tangible and positive difference in society. It is time dedicated to giving back, making connections, and helping create a better future by acting now.
Collaborative, inclusive design has the power to help connect people to each other, their communities, and culture — past, present and future. Designing for an Australian context and making these meaningful and positive connections means respectfully listening to, learning from and working with, Australia’s First Peoples.
We appreciate that much of the work we do as a practice happens on the traditional land of Australia’s First Peoples, who have a lasting connection to Country.
Our aim is to improve cultural engagement across our practice, encouraging deep listening and authentic collaborations with First Nations people, and to empower and create opportunities for the next generation of First Nations design talent.
“Together we are working to embed First Nations Australian perspectives in our design process, create a culturally safe environment, and promote our industry to the next generation of First Nations designers.”
Hassell Chair, Rob Backhouse.
Our Reflect RAP is a journey we began many years ago by respectfully listening to, learning from and working with Australia’s First Peoples across our projects and via specific programs such as our Cultural Engagement Working Group.
Officially endorsed by Reconciliation Australia our RAP lays a strong foundation for the work we want to do across our practice to support the national reconciliation movement in Australia for years to come.
Our Reflect RAP features artwork by Nani Creative, an Aboriginal-led studio based in Perth, Western Australia.“At its centre, the circle [in the artwork] represents the meeting places where we come together to yarn and share ideas,” says Wongutha artist and designer, Kevin Wilson of Nani Creative.“Around this, the orange and yellow lines stand for First Nations peoples, with the greens and blues symbolising Hassell, the organisation and its employees.
“As the design spirals outwards, it illustrates the ideas and projects we pursue together, into the communities we work in, and the impact we have on them through our joint effort.”
Discover more about our current initiatives and future commitments by downloading our Reflect RAP.
Download our Reflect RAP
Hassell has a strong commitment to gender equity, formalised in our 2021 Gender Equity Framework. In 2024, we revised our equity target from 40:40:20 to 45:45:10. This updated goal seeks to ensure 45% representation for each gender across all levels of our organisation, with the remaining 10% adaptable to any gender identity. We aim to reach this benchmark by the close of 2028.
We invest in a range of initiatives to build awareness, capability, accountability and supportive policies that are essential to achieving gender balance across all levels of our practice, including:
- Equitable 16-week paid leave to all parents, irrespective of their role as primary or secondary carers
- Policies and supports to ensure staff across the firm can work flexibly and are working sustainable hours
- Leadership development including training to reduce unconscious bias; and
- Gender balanced representation in interviews and panels.
WORKPLACE GENDER EQUALITY AGENCY (WGEA) REPORTING
Hassell shares the goal of the Workplace Gender Equality Agency (WGEA) to achieve gender equality.
As part of this broad commitment, we specifically support WGEA’s efforts to address the Organisational Gender Pay Gap in Australia and this inaugural cycle of public reporting of data across our industry.
The WGEA Organisational Gender Pay Gap data is an aggregate measure of progress toward gender equality at a whole of organisation, sector and national level.
It helps us reflect on where we are currently in our journey and what more we can do to accelerate toward achieving gender balance at all levels of our organisation.
VIEW OUR FRAMEWORK
READ OUR WGEA STATEMENT
A critical issue affecting our planet today is the prevalence of modern slavery, with an estimated 50 million people living in one or more forms of forced labour, human trafficking, or servitude — more than at any other time in human history.
Over the past year, we have witnessed and welcomed several developments in modern slavery and human rights regulation and legislation occurring around the world, in particular, the adoption of the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive in the European Union, and in Australia, the establishment of the first federal Anti-Slavery Commissioner. The continuing emergence of regulation and legislation to combat modern slavery highlights the severity of this issue and emphasises the role that businesses must play in respecting human rights.
Our industry is not immune to this global problem, with known areas of higher modern slavery risk in the deep and opaque value chains that produce and supply goods and services to the built environment. We remain opposed to slavery in all its forms and recognise the role that we play in its eradication. We’re committed to ensuring that such practices have no place within our organisation or our supply chains and to the need to contribute to ongoing global efforts to alleviate modern slavery.
Our past statements:
FY23 Modern Slavery and Human Trafficking Statement here.
FY22 Modern Slavery and Human Trafficking Statement here.
FY21 Modern Slavery and Human Trafficking Statement here.
READ OUR FY24 MODERN SLAVERY AND HUMAN TRAFFICKING STATEMENT
