Cake bake sales, book sales, parties, quiz nights, lotteries, photo sessions and many different fundraising activities became a second job for various Toyota Motor Europe’s teams over a two-month period between October and November.
It all started with one team baking their specialties over a weekend: a carrot cake, black forest and a chestnutter and selling slices to colleagues to raise funds to support the non-profit organisation Serve the City, Brussels. The initiative caught on, and in no time homemade cakes became the after lunch dessert for almost each of over 1600 employees in the Toyota’s European Headquarters in Brussels.
This is the third year that we volunteer to support Brussels based NGO Serve the City.
In 2013 we filled three Toyota PROACE vans with food donated by employees in our offices in Evere and in the Technical Centre in Zaventem, which allowed Serve the City to feed the homeless in and around Brussels during the harsh winter period.
In 2014 our volunteers filled a Toyota PROACE with 250 gift boxes for children in need, and this year …it was the PROACE itself that we aimed to gift.
By donating a van, we are supporting Serve the City to maximise every opportunity to help people in and around Brussels. Today the NGO relies solely on the volunteers with cars for transport. With a van they will be able to maximise every missed opportunity – to pick up food or clothing and transport vulnerable people in various communes around Brussels.
Today, after the two months of fund raising and sugar rush, we could add a cheque for 26,000 Euros to the Toyota PROACE van handed over to Serve the City. The support given by the company and its employees underlines Toyota’s commitment to actively contribute to Societies in which it operates.
Other Toyota entities offered their support to Serve the City. Toyota Belgium offered five years free servicing of the PROACE and Toyota Insurance Management funded two years of free insurance.
