Giving Back with Toyota & #Toyota Women

I've been lucky enough to be a part of the Toyota TWIN experience, which has given me a chance to learn more about the company, try out their cars, visit the corporate office in CA, go "glamping" with my fellow TWINs in an awesome locale, and attend a real live NASCAR race in NC as well as discovering Toyota Racing.  The first two weeks of October were spent with me on both coasts and Shaun holding down the fort here in Colorado.

On the first California trip, someone suggested that it would be awesome for TWIN to partner with Toyota at one of their many charitable events.  Timing made this difficult, so Toyota created a charity event just for us--donations to the Santa Barbara Food Bank.  Along the way from Santa Monica to Santa Barbara, we stopped at Target for a bit of shopping to help out the food bank.  Toyota gifted each TWIN with a $25 gift card to help stock the food bank and the manager at Target offered us each a $10 discount on our purchase, so $35 worth of donations per person!  Since we had a group somewhere around the 25-30 people mark, that's a whole lot of food!

I opted for the always efficient iPhone documentation of my shopping trip, of course.

What does the food bank need the most?
They provided us with suggestions to help our shopping.

Starting to grocery shop, and looking for sales to maximize my card

After a lot of mental calculation, I came up with:
3 cans of fruits, 3 cans of veggies, 6 cans of soup,
2 jars of peanut butter, 2 boxes of cereal, 6 cans of tuna
2 bags of beans, 2 bags of rice, 4 boxes of pasta

And voila!  The winning total was $35.05.
I'm kind of good at this game.

My driving partner and I tucked all the bags
into the trunk of our Prius V
Lots of room, even with our luggage!

An overhead view of the Toyota Women (TWIN) donations,
we filled two big bins!!!

This program just looked really interesting,
a way to give back with your garden too

And ... the grand total from TWIN?
634 lbs of food and necessities!

Glamping was awesome, that's a whole other post.  I got to kayak, ride bikes along the coast, have dinner at a gorgeous winery, campfires & s'mores, and I still got to sleep in a bed in a climate controlled cabin with plumbing and electricity.  But the giving back?  A truly amazing experience.

Disclosure: I was selected for participation in the TWIN community through a program with Clever Girls Collective. I did not receive any compensation for writing this post, or payment in exchange for participating. The opinions expressed herein are mine, and do not reflect the views of Toyota.

Comments

  1. Wow! Kudos on maximizing the funds from Toyota and Target and coming so close! It was so nice to have a charitable component as part of our trip and continue to help with Toyota's mission of charitable acts in local communities while spending time together!

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  2. This was such an awesome thing to do together as a group. Great post, Shannon!

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