Tofaş aims to foster a sense of culture and an outlook among children and youths that will help them be successful in all aspects of life.

INVESTING IN FUTURE GENERATIONS

Tofaş aims to foster a sense of culture and an outlook among children and youths that will help them be successful in all aspects of life and to promote such values in society at large by creating communal equality of opportunity in sport and education not just in Bursa where its manufacturing operations are based but elsewhere as well.

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 sport both nationally and internationally. The club continues to pursue its goals both 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 Tofaş Sports Club’s priorities are to deploy its infrastructure assets to rear athletes, to manage its Basketball A Team, and to carry out social responsibility projects. As of 2021, 27,000 people had benefitted from Tofaş Sports Club social responsibility 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.

The Tofaş Sports Club is also continuing to develop infrastructure for use in the conduct of other sports, principally volleyball, swimming, and water polo.

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 2021, about 700 athletes have played on the Tofaş Men’s Basketball A Team. During the 2021-2022 season, the team is competing in Basketball Super League and Basketball Champions League games. Every one of the Turkish national players on the Tofaş Men’s Basketball A Team in the current season was reared by the club itself.

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.

Thirty-one Tofaş Basketball Schools that have been set up in seven cities contribute to their local communities. As of 2021, a total of 3,655 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 2021, e-learning system training videos had been viewed a total of 220 thousand times and 5 thousand children and 3 thousand parents had been reached through 15 basketball schools located in Bursa province townships. The Tofaş Sports Club’s goal is to increase these numbers fourfold 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 2021, 38 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 encourages female students to go into engineering as a way of increasing the breadth and depth of its recruitment pool.

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 encourages company employees and Tofaş Science High School students to develop joint projects related to Tofaş’s business activities and operations. Tofaş’s goal is to increase, by 2026, the number of such projects to six, with the output of at least two of them being patentable.

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.

FIAT LABORATORIES

Fiat Laboratories started out in 2006 as a key element of Koç Holding’s “Vocational Education: A Crucial Matter For The Nation” project. As of 2021, 2,250 students and instructors had undergone training at these laboratories.

Under the Fiat Laboratories project, schools are provided with support in setting up laboratories that will support motor vehicle technology training and instruction. Courses and seminars are also organized for instructors in various areas of specialization.

The term of a previously-signed collaboration agreement between Tofaş and the General Directorate of Vocational and Technical Education concerning Fiat Laboratories was extended in 2019. Under this agreement, Tofaş will continue supporting projects currently in progress at five schools until 2023.

Under its agreement with the education ministry, all students taking part in Fiat Laboratories programs are entitled to traineeship positions at Fiat dealerships and authorized service outlets. Every year, qualifying Fiat Laboratories program participants may also receive Vehbi Koç Foundation scholarships under Koç Holding’s “Vocational Education: A Crucial Matter For The Nation” project.

Tofaş Academy regularly conducts in-service training programs which cover new technologies and which deal with personal-development issues for Fiat Laboratory and motor vehicle shop instructors in schools around the country.

The first and only institution of its kind in Turkey, the Tofaş Bursa Anadolu Museum has so far been visited by about a million people.

PROTECTING THE CULTURAL HERITAGE

About 1 million people have visited Tofaş Museum of Cars and Anatolian Carriages, which is the first and only in its field.

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 950 thousand 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 Poise Of The Steelyard: Scales, Weights & Measuring Instruments”, a show with past and present-day examples of such equipment, attracted more than 200 thousand visitors as of end-2021.

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.

PAMUKKALE HIERAPOLIS ARCHAEOLOGICAL EXCAVATIONS

Since 2005 Tofaş has been sponsoring 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, continued during the 2019 season with Tofaş’s support. The excavations are 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 Hierapolitan 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. Although their numbers were reduced as a result of pandemic-related lockdowns and closures, the site of ancient Hierapolis at Pamukkale usually receives an average of 1.8 million visitors a year.

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 2012 the scope of the Fiat Unhindered Movement program will be expanded by making changes in and adding features to the websites of all brands represented by Tofaş 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.

In 2019 Fiat launched its “İyiye İşaret” digital platform as part of its “Fiat Barrier-Free Movement” program in order to make it easier to communicate with Turkish speakers who have special hearing needs. Located at engelsizhareket.fiat.com.tr and making use of videos that show the meanings of words and their use in context visually as well as through sign language and explanatory narratives.

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.