Tofaş believes that a strong society is the fundamental to its business success. It therefore focuses on multifaceted, socially-beneficial projects that promote social progress, contribute to the national economy, and create added value for society at large.
Tofaş’s socially-beneficial projects are designed both to address the needs, expectations, and priorities of the country and to be compatible with UN Sustainable Development Goals. The company monitors the progress of these projects on the basis of the measurable medium and long-term targets that it sets for them.
SOCIAL INVESTMENTS
Believing fundamentally that contributing to society is one of the duties of a responsible corporate citizen, Tofaş regards charitable donations and sponsorships as an important means of supporting social wellbeing in localities where it carries out its operations. Total donations and aid made in 2022 was TL 24.8 million.
As a way of enhancing a project’s effectiveness and encouraging practical-solution development, Tofaş encourages its own employees, dealers, and suppliers as well as other stakeholders to play a role in dealing particularly with its environmental and social aspects. To the same end, it also enters into strong collaborations with NGOs, international agencies and organizations, universities, local governments, and private individuals with expertise in the project’s subject matter.
Tofaş regards employee voluntarism as an essential element of its CSR attitudes and approaches. It encourages employees to club together as volunteers not only to play an active role in a variety of social-responsibility undertakings but also to develop socially-beneficial projects through in-house intrapreneurship programs.
Tofaş undertakes long-term projects that invest in future generations, promote inclusiveness and diversity, and protect the cultural heritage.
INVESTING IN FUTURE GENERATIONS
Tofaş Sports Club
The systematic, infrastructure-focused efforts of the Tofaş Sports Club have nurtured many new basketball players both for Bursa and for the country as a whole ever since the club was founded in 1974. The club supports both rearing healthy new generations and improving the quality of people’s lives in general by giving all youngsters an equal opportunity to take part in sports activities.
Players and coaches who had their start at the Tofaş Sports Club have gone on to achieve success in sports both nationally and internationally. The club continues to pursue its twin goals of making Bursa a city renowned for basketball and of being a model sports club in which its members and supporters can take pride. The club’s priorities are to nurture athletes from the grassroots level, to manage its Basketball A Team, and to carry out socially-beneficial projects. As of 2022, 29,000 people had benefitted from such projects. The club intends to increase that number to 45,000 by 2030.
Infrastructure
As of end-2021, more than 5,000 athletes have benefitted from Tofaş Sports Club’s infrastructure and more than 400 coaches have been employed in it since the club was formed.
Basketball A Team
Over the years since its formation, the Tofaş Sports Club’s men’s basketball team has won 1 President’s, 2 Basketball Super League, and 3 Turkish League cups. As of 2022, about 745 athletes have played on the Tofaş Men’s Basketball A Team. During the 2022-2023 season, the team is competing in Basketball Super League and Basketball Champions League games.
Promoting equality of opportunity in sport and sport culture
As summed up in its “Basketball City Bursa” motto, the aims of the Tofaş Sports Club are to provide all youngsters with the opportunities they need to take part in sport and also to promote equality of opportunity in sport and sport culture not just in its home province of Bursa but throughout the entire country. To leverage its effectiveness, the club cooperates with NGOs, local governments, and national and international organizations and also carries out projects capable of benefitting society as a whole.
Twenty-two Tofaş Basketball Schools that have been set up in ten cities contribute to their local communities. As of 2022, a total of 4,500 children have received basketball training in these schools.
Launched in 2016, the goals of the Tofaş Next Generation Project are to provide all children with an equal opportunity to take part in sports and to foster attitudes and points of view among children that will help them be successful in all aspects of life. The Tofaş Next Generation Project is based on a training and implementation model that focuses on the trainer-family-child triangle in order to foster a generation whose members truly believe that every child should have an equal chance to play basketball. Minor and junior teams formed from among selected children continue their training at the Mustafa V. Koç Sports Complex. The members of the Tofaş Sports Club’s junior teams consist largely of youngsters who have undergone Next Generation Tofaş training. Other aspects of the project include an e-learning system set up to provide distance learning resources for coaches and family members, street tournaments conducted to promote basketball among the public at large, and science and creative drama workshops.
As of 2022, e-learning system training videos had been viewed a total of 250 thousand times and 6,500 children and 5,000 parents had been reached through 15 basketball schools located in Bursa province townships. The goal is to reach 20 thousand children and parents by 2030.
In 2019 the Tofaş Sports Club began establishing basketball courts in different parts of Bursa city as part of Tofaş’s Neighborhood Pitches Project. As of 2022, 46 of these pitches had been created in the city and are being provided with seasonal upkeep and maintenance services.
The Tofaş Basketball Team plays its home games at the Nilüfer Tofaş Gymnasium, another Tofaş facility that contributes to the social life of the city of Bursa and its people. The premises and facilities of the Tofaş Sports Club Mustafa V. Koç Sports Complex, are available not only to Tofaş personnel but also to Bursa’s amateur sports teams and athletes since 2016. With 5,800 m2 of space, this complex contains three basketball courts, a fitness center, and a fully-equipped sports rehabilitation center capable of providing whatever forms of physical therapy athletes may require.
Tofaş Science High School
Located in the Demirtaş Organized Industrial Zone in Bursa’s Nilüfer township, instruction at Tofaş Science High School began in the 2014-2015 academic year. Tofaş provides the school with material support for the development of its instructors, students, and physical facilities. It also provides scholarship support for successful graduates who go on to university.
Initiated with Tofaş support at Tofaş Science High School, the “Innovation Workshop” aims to support the instruction of well-educated young people who will shape the future of automotive and engineering field in Turkey and serve as its leaders. Having identified it as a “Project That Inspires”, the Ministry of Education has decided to expand the Innovation Workshop program to embrace all science high schools. This support is being provided with the goal of making the Tofaş Innovation Workshop one of the top three STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering & Mathematics) workshops in Europe by 2030.
Tofaş Science High School’s curriculum gives attention to gender-equality and to career-choice awareness as a way of encouraging female students to go into engineering and thereby increasing the breadth and depth of its recruitment pool.
INCLUSIVENESS AND DIVERSITY
Fiat Barrier-Free Movement Program
The Fiat Barrier-Free Movement is a program that was initiated to make it possible for drivers and passengers with reduced mobility to get around without being dependent on others. Rooted in the idea that everyone should have the freedom to travel safely and freely, the program’s goal is to support freedom of movement among persons with disabilities and their families through solutions that address their safe-driving and travel-comfort needs.
To this end, Tofaş deploys the Fiat brand in its efforts to come up with solutions to a variety of issues ranging from raising vehicle-purchase awareness among persons with disabilities to making vehicles more suitable for drivers and passengers. In addition to such product-specific awareness, efforts are also made to create and support disability-issue awareness and sensitivity among the public at large.
Under the “Speaking The Same Language” project that was started in 2021, sign language is now being used when dealing with hearing-impaired customers in the conduct of vehicle-purchase, vehicle-use, and after-sales services processes, thereby making such processes more sustainable from the standpoints of their accessibility, inclusiveness, and equality.
In 2022 the scope of the Fiat Unhindered Movement program was expanded by making changes in and adding features to the websites of the Fiat and Fiat Professional brands that will make it possible for hearing-impaired users to communicate with a dealer without the need for anyone else’s support. Tofaş has also set itself the goal of achieving disability-standards compliance among the dealerships and authorized-service areas of all the brands that it represents by 2026.
Social Gender Equality
Tofaş seeks to promote social gender equality through activities that create social added value.
In line with the Gender Equality Forum’s global acceleration plan to achieve gender equality through the Technology and Innovation for Gender Equality Action Coalition, Tofaş will contribute towards efforts to increase the number of girls studying science, technology, engineering, and mathematics subjects throughout Turkey by creating new projects a whose aim is to achieve this as well as by participating in existing ones. Tofaş has set itself the goal of reaching 30 thousand girls through such projects by 2026.
PROTECTING THE CULTURAL HERITAGE
Tofaş Museum of Cars and Anatolian Carriages and Tofaş Art Gallery
Located in Bursa’s Umurbey district, the Tofaş Museum of Cars and Anatolian Carriages is a private museum focusing on the Anatolian transport heritage. A former silk-weaving mill that used to be here was restored and converted for use as a museum by Tofaş. On display at the museum is a historical panorama of the history of human transport in Anatolia beginning with a wheel that is 2,600 years old and extending to the present day with examples of Tofaş-built motor vehicles.
The museum opened its doors in 2002 and has received about 1.5 million visitors since then.
Located within the same grounds as the museum is the Tofaş Art Gallery housed in the Umurbey Hammam, the original construction of which dates to 1430. To date the gallery has hosted six exhibitions, the most recent of which is “The Poise Of The Steelyard: Scales, Weights & Measuring Instruments”, a show with past and present-day examples of such equipment. The museum’s cafeteria, Fayton Cafe, is open to museum visitors as well as to the public. The museum’s gardens are planted with more than 50 different species and serve as a venue for concerts and culture & art events throughout the year.
For the International Ceramics Festival organized in Bursa by the Turkish Ceramics Society with the support of NPO Durma Sanat in 2022, the Tofaş Museum of Cars and Anatolian Carriages hosted an exhibition of works from Hacettepe University’s “Macsabal” collection.
Pamukkale Hierapolis Archaeological Excavations
Since 2005 Tofaş has been supporting archaeological excavations at Hierapolis, the extensive ruins of one of the five biggest ancient cities in Turkey. Coterminous with the Pamukkale thermal zone, both Hierapolis and Pamukkale were declared UNESCO World Heritage sites in 1988. Excavation work, which is being overseen by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism and the Denizli governor’s office, is being carried out by an international team of about seventy archaeologists, architects, restorers, conservators, and other experts mainly from Italy and Turkey. Among the other significant unearthed in Hierapolis remains that have been unearthed are two necropolises, baths, a basilica, a martyrium, the Frontinus Gate, a gymnasium, an Apollo temple, and the so-called Pluto’s Gate (Plutonium), a shrine sacred to the ancient god of the underworld, Pluto. The site of ancient Hierapolis at Pamukkale welcomed 1.1 million visitors in 2022.
