A mountain of brand new toys covered the conference room table at the Levin Tire and Service Center's Highland location. All of these goodies were donations from generous community members, businesses and Levin Tire employees for the Marine Toys for Tots Foundation. Every year around the holidays, new, unwrapped toys can be donated to the Foundation and these toys go to children all over the country to be opened on Christmas Day.
This was the first year that Levin Tire took part in the program. All of the locations participated, and anyone was allowed to donate. We at NWIndianaLife wanted to get involved so at our last Tweetup, we had guests donate new and unwrapped toys in exchange for a chance to win a free oil change from Levin Tire. We then loaded up the donations in a big box and delivered it to Levin Tire. More toys means more happy kids!
Laura Stephenson, Quality Assurance Coordinator at Levin Tire was quite happy with the turnout for donations.
“We brought the collections from all seven of our locations here to our Highland location, and the representative for Toys for Tots will pick them up on Monday the 16th,” Stephenson said. “We've had the boxes out in our stores for about a month and we were pleasantly surprised by the amount of donations that came in. This is our first year participating in Toys for Tots so we weren't sure what to expect. We wanted to find a cause to donate to that would stay within our local communities.”
Donation boxes were provided by Highland Pack and Parcel. And a special donation was made by the Lake County Public Library. Every year the library chooses an organization to donate money to, and this year they chose to donate to Toys for Tots through Levin Tire. So not only toys were given, but a monetary gift of $304, which was accumulated through a holiday raffle that the library held, was donated to the cause as well.
“We definitely wanted to do something this holiday to give back to the community to be a part of it,” Rachel Shropshire, Marketing Director for Levin Tire, said. “So this had really positive turnout and we were really happy about all of the toys that came in. Everybody in the community really stepped up.”
It goes without saying that this is something that Levin Tire is going to do next year. Now that they have gotten the first year under their belt, they can use this experience to make next year even better and make even more children happy during the holidays.
