Social Contribution Activities

The “Hajimaru-kun Personal Computer Donation Program,” being organized by Group member OGIS-RI, based on the idea of helping the environment by encouraging the reuse of PCs, is also a social contribution activity that provides employment support for the disabled to whom recycling operations are outsourced, as well as IT support for donation recipients. Since this program started in 2009, it has donated over 4,174 PCs to social welfare organizations. In FY2022, the 12th Daigas Group Hajimaru-kun Personal Computer Donation Program donated 180 “Hajimaru-kun PCs” to 163 welfare facilities in six prefectures in the Kinki District, Japan. In addition, the Group offers proposals to local governments on building towns and cities in which all residents from children and adolescents to the middle-aged and elderly can lead active lives and on establishing child-raising networks aimed at “joint child-raising” in collaboration with communities, government agencies, NPOs, and other corporations.

Outside Japan, Osaka Gas USA Corporation, which develops and invests in natural gas and power generation projects, etc. in the U.S., works on social contribution activities, including provision of lunch at NPO facilities which support the homeless and reforestation projects in public parks.

The Daigas Group has operated the NOBY T&F CLUB, an athletic club led by our Olympian employee Nobuharu Asahara. The club started its activities at the track field owned by Osaka Gas in 2010 with the aim of “promoting the healthy mental and physical development of local young people through sports and contributing to the revitalization of the local community.”

At present, the club has many coaches who are Olympians and former national team members of Japan, etc. It also undertakes projects from local governments and NPOs, etc. by taking advantage of the know-how acquired through their experience as athletes and their track record in coaching.

In FY2022, the club jointly produced a dance video titled “Dance for Running Faster with NOBY” in collaboration with Sompo Japan Insurance Inc. The dance incorporates elements of the program offered in the “NOBY T&F CLUB” course. In July 2021, the club started to offer “coaching sessions for dancing / track and field” based on the content mainly at elementary schools.

The NOBY T&F Club will continue to provide a wide variety of exercise programs, thereby aiming to become a comprehensive community sports club where a broad range of citizens, from children to the elderly, can become familiar with and enjoy sports.

Since FY2007, the Daigas Group employees and alumni traveled to elementary, junior and senior high schools to teach lessons on energy and the environment in order to help children think about and understand increasingly important environmental issues. Daigas Group's instructors tour about 246 schools a year to offer two programs, including Eco-Cooking. In FY2022, a total of 294 teaching sessions were held, in which 8,598 individuals (mainly elementary school students) participated.

In addition, Osaka Gas runs the Gas Science Museum (located on the premises of the Senboku LNG Terminal) where visitors can learn about energy and the environment. (The museum has been closed since March 2020 to cope with the COVID-19 pandemic.)

The Daigas Group has developed two fire education programs for children one workshop style and one classroom style. The aims are to teach children how to start and manage a fire safely and how to cook with flames. By giving children the chance to learn about fire and become familiar with it physically, they will be enriched and develop greater hardiness.

In response to the increased need for disaster response education following the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami of 2011, we created an original textbook for an upper elementary school on the theme of disaster response Lessons in Disaster Response that we distribute to local elementary schools (a revised version was issued in January 2020). The textbook teaches children about natural disasters in Japan. While studying it, children take a workshop designed to impart useful knowledge about the changes that take place in people’s lives when a disaster strikes. The textbook also contains a checklist of items to prepare and things to do at home to prepare for emergencies. Over a period of eight years, the textbook has been used widely at junior high schools, high schools, and universities, as well as by local governments and local residents’ associations. Over 210,000 textbooks in total have been distributed.

In 2021 to 2022, videos created based on the textbook were uploaded to our website.

The Daigas Group also engages in food education. The slogan is “Let’s foster healthy minds and bodies though good eating.” We hold food education seminars and workshops for schools and childcare providers and produce and distribute the Food Education Book, a teaching text for elementary schools (300,000 copies distributed since 2008). We have developed a Japanese Soup Stock Workshop for teaching Kansai-area cooking flavor/culture, as well as a wide range of cooking workshops in collaboration with local universities and governments on the themes of local production for local consumption and food and health. We also hold a Kinki region contest of the “With Gas National Parent-Child Cooking Contest.”

The “Japanese Soup Stock Workshop” was first held in FY2018 as a new area-based, workshop-style traveling program to pass on Japanese-soup-stock-based healthy and rich food culture to the next generation. As of March 31, 2022, 42,553 people had attended 1,300 workshops.
Under the influence of COVID-19, we made available on our website various kinds of information about food education, including cooking videos for elementary school students as well as videos of the food education seminars held for schools and childcare providers.

We plan to continue hosting such food education activities together with local communities as an ongoing initiative.