Mercedes-Benz boosts donations for public education, environment

Mercedes-Benz Korea's social contribution committee has been promoting traffic safety for children with the Korean government and nongovernmental organizations since April. Courtesy of Mercedes-Benz Korea

Mercedes-Benz Korea is bolstering donations of money and public service through a diverse range of fields to keep up its contributions to the Korean public it has maintained for the past decade, according to the German car company, Tuesday.

With this year marking the 10th anniversary of the company’s committee for social contribution, it has collected an accumulative donation of 51.6 billion won ($37 million), the highest among foreign car companies in Korea.

Mercedes-Benz MobileKids has offered traffic safety education for about 45,000 local children since 2014. It promoted the campaign at 100 school zones across the country in April with the Ministry of the Interior and Safety, the Ministry of Education and a number of nongovernmental and nonprofit organizations.

Mercedes-Benz Korea has also been providing overseas education opportunities for automotive technology students. Mercedes-Benz Mobile Academy has been connecting its experts to students from 11 universities to prepare them for professional careers.

In July, the company took the students to Factory 56 in the German city of Sindelfingen and showed them how its digitized production takes into account carbon neutrality.

Under Mercedes-Benz All Together, the company has been focusing on helping people with disabilities and social welfare recipients through 220 missions and projects. In September, the company donated 250 million won to 35 social welfare service agencies across the country. Since 2014, the campaign has donated 4.5 billion won to 850 agencies in total.

Starting in 2017, Mercedes-Benz GIVE has been hosting marathons to collect admission fees and donate money to local teenagers in poverty. The “give and race” event has formed a pool of 6.6 billion won collected so far, with the latest marathon in April seeing the biggest number of participants of 20,000 who generated 1 billion won. Half of the money went to the Busan Metropolitan City to support teenage victims of domestic abuse and prevent further such crimes.

For environmental initiatives, Mercedes-Benz GREEN+ has been planting trees and investing efforts in recovering regions struck by wildfires. Since the campaign’s launch in September 2021, over 15,500 trees have been planted in four urban forests.