Practicing “Sharing Management”

The STX Group is implementing a social contribution program that includes support for social welfare, education, culture, the arts, sports, local community events, helping business partners and environmental protection. “STX faithfully satisfies its role as a trusted company by fulfilling its corporate social responsibilities,” said Kang Duk-soo, chairman of STX Group, adding, “All affiliated companies are geared toward putting this initiative into practice.”

The STX Scholarship Foundation was established on the basis of the sharing philosophy of the group in 2006. As a major scholarship foundation with a total contribution of 30 billion won, it has provided scholarships to 199 students in Korea and 55 students studying overseas. Each of the students in Korea receives full tuition and 500,000 won in subsidiaries, while those studying abroad each receive US$50,000 a year.

The other axle of the group in regards to corporate responsibilities is the STX Welfare Foundation. The foundation has been steadily conducting the House of Sharing Project, a project designed to improve the living environments of marginalized people, based on its foundation philosophy of “Creating a World with Dreams and Future.”

The project aims to build new houses as well as repair and improve existing houses, such as by decorating, and repairing toilets, etc. The foundation also carries out a wide array of community-friendly social contribution activities, such as providing financial support to multicultural families, donating study room equipment to financially disadvantaged students, contributing vehicles to social foundation facilities and providing living and medical expenses to injured laborers.

STX is pushing for projects that support multicultural families as a group-wide social contribution activity, helping to break the paradigm of social contribution activities for Korean nationals only in this era of one million foreign residents living in Korea in order to create an environment that respects pluralism and nurtures the nation’s global human resources. The most representative project among such efforts is the creation of libraries for children of multi-cultural families.

STX opened the first Modu Library, a library designed for children of multi-cultural families in Imun-dong, Seoul, in September 2008. Since then, the group has opened five more Modu Libraries in Changwon, Busan, Gumi, Daegu, Chungju cities in an effort to support multi-cultural families. These libraries contain approximately 49,000 books in various languages, including Mongolian, Vietnamese, Japanese, Chinese, Filipino, Thai, Russian, Iranian, Nepalese, Indonesian and Bangladeshi. These libraries also boast social service volunteers who are on hand to help children of such multicultural families learn Korean, such as by reading foreign fairly tales in Korean. These libraries also offer programs in which people can experience the various traditional cultures of foreign countries, such as plays and cuisine.

Meanwhile, the group’s top management is practicing sharing management by participating in the project. At present, 59 executives from 6 of the group’s affiliated companies have provided financial support to 50 low-income multicultural families.