Caring for people and the community
and developing compassion through experience
The Toyota Group is engaged in recovery support activities in a variety of disaster-stricken areas. One way this is done is through the Toyota Volunteer Center, established in 1993, which sends employee volunteers out to help these areas get back on their feet. “After the Great East Japan Earthquake in 2011”, says Kazuhiko Ohora, a member of Toyota’s Corporate Citizenship Division, “nearly 1,000 Toyota Group volunteers participated in 51 organized activities in Iwate Prefecture through the end of 2016.” Their experiences resulted in the creation of a disaster volunteer coordinator training course in 2015. Now, the company provides ongoing training in order to develop employees who can coordinate project site tasks to ensure that things run smoothly for participating volunteers.
Requests from the site of the Kumamoto earthquakes (2016) in southern Japan led to the dispatch of employees who had completed the training program. “They needed people who could automatically spring into action, and who could help with recovery in other locations”, Ohora explained.
Hiroki Kubota, also from the Corporate Citizenship Division, felt that his on-site experience was a critical component of his training alongside the classroom work and simulations. “When we went into the damaged homes of elderly people, the first thing we’d do is pay our respects at the family altar”, he told us. “If the altar was in disarray, we’d offer to clean it up. That kind of consideration and behavior was critical, but you weren’t going to find it in any of the training manuals.” The types of volunteers that are most needed in disaster areas are those who can act with the feelings and perspectives of others in mind.
The Toyota Volunteer Center was established in 1993 to support the volunteer efforts of current and former employees as well as their families. When a natural disaster strikes, the center serves as a base of operations, soliciting financial contributions from all executives and employees as well as coordinating employee volunteer activities to help victims and disaster-stricken areas recover and rebuild.