Toyota is ready to start the second year of a program that helped aid Georgetown’s Quest Farm in its care of individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities by providing access to services that contribute to their quality of life.
“We quadrupled the number of Facebook friends we have and learned a lot about how to better engage our supporters with technology,” said Quest Farm’s executive director Lara Ingram. “It helped us to gain support of a younger generation of supporters and allowed us to increase their awareness of our cause.”
On top of that, the group, which houses 19, provides adult day training to another 30 and houses respite services, also got a brand new Toyota Highlander Hybrid.
“We’ve given quite a bit of money over years [through our divisions] … but the organization’s never done the vehicle donations,” said Helen Carroll, manager of community relations for Toyota Motor Engineering & Manufacturing North America. “We’ve had a lot of requests for vehicle donations over time, but we’ve never really done a lot of that.”
Last year was the first of what Carroll hopes will be many for Toyota’s 100 Cars for Good program, which gives away a car every day for 100 days to nonprofits to be used for their missions.
“Our goal 10 years from now is to have 1,000 Toyotas out there doing good in the communities,” Carroll said. Toyota will be 20 percent of the way to that goal this year, as the second set of 100 is set to be given away starting in mid-May at Facebook.com/toyota.
Eleven of the first 100 cars are in Kentucky, the site of Toyota’s first North American production facility. “It’s because of the relationships we’ve established and the partnerships we’ve got across the state of Kentucky, and we’ve built a lot of partnerships and relationships in that time,” Carroll said.
For the first incarnation of the program, roughly 2,300 nonprofits applied, stating which of the seven cars they wanted and why. From there it was narrowed down to 500, with five facing off each day on Facebook in open voting. The four that didn’t win were each given $1,000 and are allowed to reapply for 2012.
In March, Toyota opened up the application for two weeks and nearly doubled its number of applicants, getting in around 4,000, according to Carroll.
“We are a rather small agency in a relatively small town, and I never dreamed that we could compete with agencies located in much larger cities,” Quest Farm’s Ingram said. “We publicized on our website, our Facebook page, talked to everyone we knew and walked through our city letting the businesses know. The day of the vote, we set up tables in our local businesses all throughout the city and talked with everyone who came through.”
This year winners will have their choice of one of six different Toyota vehicles: the Camry Hybrid, Highlander, Prius v, Sienna minivan, Sienna Mobility or Tundra full-sized pickup truck.