Community Engagement
Chevron conducts business in communities around the world where our employees, customers, suppliers and business partners live and work. Our ability to gain and maintain access to new and existing resources is critical for our long-term success and depends on the strength of our relationships with key stakeholders.
Thus, we are committed to contributing to the social and economic development of the communities in which we operate. We believe that doing so is fundamental to the broader success we seek to achieve as a business. Most of our community initiatives and investments are focused on building human and institutional capacity in ways that help stimulate economic growth and enable communities to prosper.
We have identified three areas we consider critical to economic development:
- Basic human needs
- Education and career training
- Small- and medium-size business development, including access to credit
In 2005, we invested $73.1 million in community initiatives, nearly 65 percent of which was directed toward long-term, sustainable, capacity building projects in communities around the world. While having a strong focus on economic growth initiatives helps guide our ongoing efforts, we also remain flexible in our approach. This allows us to respond quickly in times of crisis or when circumstances change.
We continue to look for ways to measure and evaluate our initiatives as well as our impact on communities. In 2005, our international upstream organization adopted a new integrated standard process designed to assess the environmental, social and health impact of our major capital projects).
Funding Sustainable Outcomes
Chevron funded hundreds of programs and projects in 2005. In doing so, we want to know that our investments lead to positive and sustainable outcomes, which are often difficult to measure. This is the impetus behind our ongoing efforts to develop measurement tools that will allow us to evaluate our community engagement initiatives.