Building a Future-Ready Retirement Living & Aged Care Model: Metlifecare’s Sustainability Journey
At Tadpole, we help organisations turn sustainability ambition into practical action. Our work with Metlifecare shows how a structured, evolving sustainability approach can deliver real impact throughout a business.
Building the Foundations
We started by helping Metlifecare to understand and address its environmental footprint through carbon measurement and management. In the absence of a sustainability lead, Tadpole also served as Metlifecare’s sustainability team, and helped develop the plan for Metlifecare to deliver on its ambitious Sustainably Linked Loan targets. This work created a clear baseline for action. An emissions reduction target and strategy soon followed.
Alongside this, we delivered targeted education sessions to build sustainability capability across staff and residents, ensuring sustainability could be understood, owned, and embedded throughout the business.
From Pilot to Organisation-Wide Engagement
Part of embedding that capability was engaging the people closest to village life: residents themselves. What began as a pilot in five villages four years ago has since expanded organisation-wide. Today, around 30 resident-led Enviro Groups are actively shaping and delivering sustainability initiatives, driving engagement, ownership, and real impact at each village.
Keeping Strategy Relevant with Double Materiality
Alongside this resident-level action, Metlifecare also needed a mechanism to ensure its broader sustainability strategy kept pace with an evolving risk landscape. That’s where regular double materiality assessments, conducted in line with GRI 3, have been central to building long-term operational resilience.
Through the course of our partnership, Tadpole has delivered three materiality assessments for Metlifecare, identifying the sustainability issues, risks, and opportunities that matter most to the business, its stakeholders, and the communities and environments in which its villages operate.
This approach ensures:
Ongoing engagement with stakeholders
Early identification of emerging risks and opportunities
A sustainability strategy that evolves with the business
Revisiting material topics every two years allows Metlifecare to keep its strategy aligned to shifting expectations and a changing risk landscape, building continuously on the foundations already laid.
Embedding sustainability into the Business
Sustainability at Metlifecare isn’t a standalone workstream, it’s woven into how the organisation operates and plans for the future. Insights from ongoing carbon management, climate risk assessments, stakeholder engagement, and materiality assessments flow directly into its sustainability strategy, with clear connections to the organisation’s wider business priorities. The result is a sustainability programme that is not a bolt-on, but a genuine part of how Metlifecare plans and operates.
“Tadpole has helped us turn our sustainability ambition into a clear and practical strategy. Their expertise in materiality and stakeholder engagement ensures we stay focused on what matters most to our business and our communities.”
Earl Gasparich, Chief Executive Officer, Metlifecare
If you too would like to embed sustainability across your operations and communities, and turn insights into action, call us for a chat about how we can help.
Contact: Alan Adams on +61 428 783 919, alan.adams@tadpole.consulting or Allan Birch on +64 21 930 992, allan@tadpole.consulting