Home Making a commitment About us The journey Levels of support How we work Education Arts and culture The environment Regeneration External verification Contacts and partners Give us your views The Jubilee project Download complete report as a pdf [1,096k]    © Rolls-Royce plc 2004    Legal Information Our long and successful history of community activity has taken us on a journey of exploration and discovery. As we increase our involvement, we learn more about the people and places where we work and about ourselves. In this report we travel around the world to demonstrate the variety of work we undertake, with real-life case studies and examples of projects. Past The journey began in 1904 when the Hon. Charles Rolls and Henry Royce, the founding fathers of the famous brand, forged a company which soon became famous for its quality workmanship and engineering excellence. The company ethos was firmly rooted in responsible business behaviour, recognising and rewarding dedicated and loyal service by employees, and forming links with the community in the firm belief that it was the company’s duty to give something back. As Rolls-Royce grew, both organically and through acquisition, the company’s largely philanthropic contributions to the community were extended both locally and through corporate initiatives. Present We are now continuing that ‘voyage of discovery’, exploring a varied and lively programme of community activities around the world. There are four main themes to our community programme – education, arts and culture, environment, and regeneration. Working with external brokers, we build long-term partnerships with clear objectives to benefit both the community and our business. This allows our employees to get involved in individual or group activities which are becoming an integral part of our people development programmes. In 2003, we reported publicly on our community involvement for the second year running in the UK’s Business in the Community’s (BitC) Corporate Responsibility Index. We achieved 10th place with a score of 94.89 per cent, representing a significant improvement on our position the previous year. Our community impact is also reviewed by the Dow Jones Sustainability Indices and, for the second year running, we are a sector leader in both the Dow Jones-World and European STOXX indices. We are a member of the London Benchmarking Group, a consortium of more than 70 companies working together to assess and measure community programmes, and we have used their model to help us evaluate the impact of our major projects. Business in the Community has also provided its assessment of our activities. Their assurance statements are in the External verification section. We have established a programme of dialogue with our community partners and their comments can be found throughout this report. Future As our partnerships evolve, we will review and evaluate the success of our projects adapting them, where appropriate, to more locations around the world. An example of this in action is our payroll-giving scheme, which has achieved substantial success both in North America and in the UK. We will extend our reporting of international community programmes and move toward a global representation of the projects we support. We will also evaluate more of our programmes. We are beginning to embed our community activity within formal business improvement processes. For example, across our businesses we are implementing the European Foundation for Quality Management’s business excellence model, which includes indicators to establish the impact business has on society through its community programmes. Our continuing work in this area will help us to gain a clear understanding and develop the sustainability of these projects by demonstrating the advantages of business and community working in partnership.