Sponsoring

ALTANA supports sustained education campaigns. All of our projects are designed to give children and youths the education and training they need to take charge of their own lives as adults. As a sponsor of “Braille without Borders,” we support blind and visually impaired people in Tibet. The goal of the initiative is to enable these young people to lead independent lives with an income of their own in the future.

In India, we took a leading role in building and setting up a vocational training center together with the organization “Hope e.V.” The center allowed some 30 students at the DOVE Community College in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu to complete one-year training in 2009. 32 more graduated from the center last year.

The project provides young people with computer training and teaches vocational skills to work as laboratory assistants or nursing assistants.

In Brazil, ALTANA is involved with ”Passo Fundo”, which allows four scholarship recipients to pursue a full university degree in biology, mathematics, agriculture, or electrical engineering.

National and regional commitment

Education and science also are clear priorities in our national sponsoring activities. Thus, we provide support to the Department of Chemistry at Technical University of Munich and are members of the North-Rhine Westphalia chapter of the Foundation for German Science. In addition to our corporate membership, our employees are active in select projects of the Foundation.

The newly established Foundation of the Technical University of Munich is an outstanding initiative that aims to further strengthen the global competitiveness of the university and to retain the best scientific researchers in Germany to attract outstanding students and doctoral candidates.

As a consequence, the Foundation is making a contribution to boost the significance of Germany as an industry site. ALTANA has committed some € 500,000 to the university foundation over five years and our CEO, Dr. Matthias L. Wolfgruber, is a member of the foundation board.

As one of the largest employers in the Wesel district, we are also aware of our regional social responsibilities to provide young people with future perspectives by offering hard-to-find apprenticeship options.

ALTANA therefore is the main sponsor of the apprenticeship initiative in Wesel, which was begun to improve the vocational training situation in the region by encouraging young people and by motivating regional companies to offer new or additional apprenticeship opportunities. Beyond that, ALTANA is active as a private partner in Wesel Marketing to support the attractiveness of the site. A 5,000 square meter exercise area for the CJD Vocational Center in Wesel was built with the support of ALTANA.

Illuminating the region

The new Rhine Bridge in Wesel was officially opened to traffic in 2009. It replaced the previous structure that had been built as an interim solution in the 1950s and will be torn down. With a pylon height of 130 meters, the new bridge over the Rhine is visible from far away in the daytime. ALTANA sponsored an unusual architectural illumination concept for the new bridge, which will light up in the ALTANA colors blue and cyan at night to make it a new symbol of Wesel and the entire Lower Rhine region.

The company has been working on this project with the city of Wesel and lighting engineers since 2008. ALTANA has agreed to make a one-time invest­ment of approximately € 200,000 in the bridge illumination. The completion of the project is scheduled for the end of 2011 / start of 2012.

While we were pleased to help the association with the purchase of special technical Braille equipment and funds for educational scholarships in 2007, we provided additional support to the project in 2010. Thus, ALTANA helped fund the renovation of the kitchen in the education center and continued the scholarships.