Students go on to become employees—including ours. That's one reason we support education and vocational training. Education and training are central to improving livelihoods and sustaining long-term economic development. We focus our investments on school- and work-based career and technical programs. We sponsor reading, science and math classes, and we help train educators.
Improving Education
Many of Chevron's efforts to improve education are focused in the areas of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). We partner with Project Lead the Way, one of the leading providers of STEM curricula for middle and high school students in the United States. Our contributions are helping the organization, which currently reaches 400,000 students, expand in areas of California, Mississippi and Texas where Chevron has significant operations. Our funds have started or expanded engineering programs at 36 schools in California and trained more than 100 teachers to educate nearly 4,000 students.
Chevron’s Fuel Your School program is an innovative collaboration with DonorsChoose.org, an online charity that makes it easy for anyone to help public school teachers obtain classroom resources. Since its inception in 2010, Fuel Your School has funded more than 3,200 projects at 571 schools. The program has grown each year to support students in communities where Chevron operates.
Since 1993, the Chevron Open Minds program has taken Canadian schoolchildren out of the classroom and immersed them in rich learning environments in the community, such as the Calgary Zoo, the Glenbow Museum, the Cross Conservation Area and the Telus World of Science. More than 50,000 students and 2,000 teachers have participated in the award-winning program.
Chevron Bangladesh partners with Save the Children to bring its Shobar Jonno Shikkha (Education for All) initiative to 15 schools near the Bibiyana gas field. Using a community-based approach, the program provides cost-effective early child development and informal primary education to achieve improved educational results. We currently support a staff of teachers and teachers' aides who have been hired and trained to supervise more than 400 students who were previously unable to attend school due to geography or illness.
Chevron also supports the Amy Biehl Foundation in South Africa. This nongovernmental organization runs creative and cultural after-school programs for children in Cape Town's townships. The programs help protect the students from the negative influences of drugs, crime and violence and provide lessons in crucial areas such as reading, computers and environmental preservation.
Chevron's other key educational initiatives include the University Partnership Program and our work with the Discovery Channel Global Education Partnership to provide learning centers at underserved primary schools in Angola, Brazil, Nigeria, South Africa and Venezuela.
Providing Job Training
Chevron Philippines partners with local communities, governments and nonprofits to provide opportunities for at-risk youth, who include street kids, dropouts and children in trouble with the law. Since 2006, the KAPATID program, a partnership with the Marcellin Foundation and the Education and Employment Alliance, has provided technical training and job placement services to more than 330 out-of-school youth, more than 70 percent of whom are now employed.
Chevron's refinery near Cape Town, South Africa, trains disadvantaged students, helping address a shortage of local skills in the oil, gas and chemical manufacturing industries. Students participate at the refinery in a mentorship program with employees and managers.
In Indonesia and Saudi Arabia, Chevron has helped to found, develop, and fund polytechnic schools to train students for jobs in the industrial sector. Launched in 2008, the Saudi Petroleum Services Polytechnic in Dammam was the first of its kind in the kingdom. It graduated its first class of field service professionals in 2010.
Our second such school in Indonesia, Politeknik Aceh was built with our partners in the long-term recovery effort following the 2004 tsunami. It offers courses in robotics, information technology and accounting. The first class graduated in September 2011.
Also in Indonesia, Chevron works with a number of partners to provide vocational training in skills such as welding, automotive, heavy-equipment operation, carpentry, electronics, cooking, sewing, and agriculture. The program has served more than 2,500 people in the past three years.
In California, Chevron continues to support The Bread Project, a Berkeley-based career training program for low-income people in the Bay Area. The program provides training in basic culinary skills, wholesale bakery production and customer service as well as job placement. Chevron's funding helped to support an expansion in 2010 into an 8,000-square-foot bakery in Emeryville, California. Chevron also supports The Bread Project with volunteerism, including pro bono business planning and hands-on help in the bakery.
Updated: April 2012