(1888PressRelease)
June 19, 2009 - "Accepting responsibility for our social environment is an important issue for us at RWE," said Alwin Fitting, the RWE Executive Board member responsible for corporate citizenship, and he continued by commenting, "The RWE Foundation is a central instrument in this endeavour".
To honour this claim, the activities of the RWE Foundation have been put on a solid financial base, with RWE increasing its funding capital to about €56 million. This makes the RWE Foundation one of the largest company foundations in Germany. Managing Director Georg Lambertz emphasised that, "This capital base will allow us to position ourselves as a patron of charities over the long term." To a large extent, the proven principle of the RWE Youth Foundation of putting the revenue from invested assets into social projects has been retained.
"Our organisational structures are lean and efficient and we avoid unnecessary overheads," according to Lambertz. The new Foundation will also adhere to the principles of the Youth Foundation. In this way the Foundation will give its activities new impetus – individual projects should not be supported for more than three years. Efforts are also being made to continue to set visible signals with model projects.
Besides the activities of the RWE Youth Foundation – integration and the development of social involvement of children, young people and young adults – the new RWE Foundation is now focusing more on the areas of school education, tertiary education and culture. "This means that we will be able to build on existing activities of the RWE Group but we also intend to reorder our priorities", stressed Dr. Stephan Muschick, who, together with Georg Lambertz, is the Managing Director of the Foundation.
Three principles are to apply to all projects in all four fields of activities:
support young people
support projects related to energy and technology
and, finally, supporting interdisciplinary dialogue and thus discourse between RWE and society.
The RWE Foundation has a top-class Advisory Board made up of in-house and external experts to help it with the strategic positioning of the new company foundation and to select projects. In appointing the committee members, particular emphasis was placed on personal links with the areas being sponsored.
The members of the Advisory Board are:
Matthias Hartung (Member of the Executive Board of RWE Power AG)
Prof. Dr. Reinhard Hüttl (President of acatech Deutsche Akademie der Technikwissenschaften / German Academy of Technological Science)
Dr. Heike Kahl (Managing Director of the German Childrens' and Young People's Foundation)
Prof. Dr. Jürgen Kluge (Director at McKinsey & Company)
Dr. Rolf Pohlig (Chief Financial Officer RWE AG)
Bernd J. Wieczorek (Chairman of Egon Zehnder International and Chairman of the Executive Board of the Gesellschaft der Freunde der Akademie der Künste Berlin e. V. / Friends of the Academy of Arts Berlin)
Dr. Filip Thon (Chief Executive Officer RWE Polska S. A.)
Dr. Knut Zschiedrich (Member of the Executive Board of RWE Energy AG)
The Board will hold its constitutive meeting in September 2009, when it will discuss the strategic orientation of the RWE Foundation and the projects to be supported in 2010. "In this context we will be setting new priorities, especially in the fields of primary, secondary and tertiary education and culture," announced Stephan Muschick.
Projects:
Just recently in autumn 2008 the RWE Youth Foundation approved a series of projects which will be continued under the auspices of the new RWE Foundation. These include:
"RUZ-elino – On the track of small wonders of this world. Building a regional environmental education centre as an educational offensive for basic scientific research", Biologische Station Osterholz e.V., Osterholz
"Soulguard – developing solutions for problems of interaction between child and youth pyschiatry and school" for reintegrating former child and youth psychiatric patients into everyday school life; University of Duisburg-Essen, Dept of Education/Institute of Psychology, Essen
“HaLT – Hart am Limit (Right at the edge), preventing alcohol addiction in children and young people", Suchthilfe direkt Essen gGmbH, Essen.
Jan-Peter Schwartz
Head of External Communications
T+49-201-12-15023
F+49-201-12-15094
http://www.rwe.com
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