Assessing the Larger Benefits of Our Community Engagement

It is challenging to assess the larger benefits of our community engagement and investments to the communities in which we operate. We know the dollar amounts of projects we fund and charitable contributions we make. And we know the number of hours our employees volunteer in their local communities through Ford-sponsored projects. For 2013, these numbers were substantial: We contributed to community projects, including nearly a half a million dollars in mini-grants to support our employee volunteer projects, and Ford employees volunteered over 150,000 hours. However, these numbers are just the “inputs”; they don’t adequately convey the larger positive impact of our efforts.

We are trying to improve our ability to measure this larger positive impact. For example, we believe that our volunteer efforts in 2013 positively impacted more than 2 million people. At this point, our understanding of the larger impact of our projects is often anecdotal. However, these anecdotes are still important and inspiring. For example, we know that by building wells in India and South Africa, through our Global Week of Caring projects, we have enabled girls in local villages, who would otherwise have to walk miles to gather water for their families, to attend school instead.

We will continue to try to improve our ability to measure these kinds of larger impacts in years to come.