During Manufacturing Month in October, Toyota celebrates its U.S. manufacturing plants and the people who make them run. This focus is coupled with a strong commitment to engaging with local communities, particularly through initiatives that support and inspire young people.
Supporting Educators, Expanding Possibilities
Toyota Alabama, in coordination with the United Way of Metropolitan Dallas and the Huntsville/Madison County Chamber Foundation, has awarded grants to teachers across 10 Huntsville City Schools.
Grants announced this month provided more than $130,000 in funding for projects that will support students’ learning experiences and resources for teachers. The grants will help teachers implement classroom and building updates, acquire new hardware and software to improve educational efficiencies and introduce curriculum innovations that support learning outcomes.
The grant program is one way Toyota Alabama offers its support to the Huntsville community.
Funding Innovative Instruction
In Jackson, Tennessee, the Malesus STEM Innovation Center — a school-within-a-school model, blending science, technology, engineering and math standards through the innovative frameworks of design thinking and problem-solving — received a $100,000 grant from Toyota Tennessee.
This funding was used to launch the Engineering, Manufacturing, and Mechatronics (EM²) Institute at the center to provide specialized training. The center includes a robotics learning and competition area, a cyber room for AI and computer technology, and maker spaces for students to create projects.
This immersive and authentic learning environment empowers students to engage with real-world challenges, fostering creativity and critical thinking skills for their future success.
Getting Students’ Feet Wet
Beyond grants, Toyota supports communities through other initiatives. At Toyota Indiana, the team recently hosted over 170 students from Princeton Community Middle School at a collaborative event with the Jane Goodall Institute Roots & Shoots program and the University of Evansville.
The event, which took place on World Water Monitoring Day (September 18), featured hands-on, STEM activities to illustrate the importance of clean water and water stewardship.
In addition to testing water collected from local water sources, the sixth graders learned what steps Toyota Indiana takes to efficiently use and reuse water to reduce our impact on our local water supply.
Students were also given a tour of Toyota Indiana’s other efforts to reduce, reuse and recycle throughout the 4.5 million square foot facility and beyond.
Peeking Under the Hood of Production
While students in Indiana were getting a behind-the-scenes look at how things work at the local facility, about 100 students from schools across Scott County in neighboring Kentucky were able to get a glimpse into Toyota’s largest manufacturing plant in the world.
At Toyota Kentucky in Georgetown, students were able to see how the company’s flagship North American facility manufactures hundreds of thousands of vehicles each year, supported by robotics, advanced manufacturing processes and a team of nearly 10,000 employees.
The tours are designed to spark curiosity and inspire students to consider future career pathways in STEM fields.
Driving Towards Success
To help put students on the right path, mobility is key.
Gulf States Toyota is literally getting students moving through a collaborative initiative with Toyota Mississippi and its local school districts by donating 12 brand new exclusively-hybrid Toyota Sienna vehicles with extended warranties to Driving Possibilities program, a Toyota USA Foundation initiative. This will directly support 11 schools across two districts, potentially benefiting more than 4,100 students.
The donation is about $564,000 in in-kind support. Allowing for better access and efficient transportation, the Toyota Siennas will be used to transport students to and from career readiness programs, after school STEM education, internships, tutoring, general enrichment programming, and math and science fairs.
To overcome existing transportation limitations, providing accessible, fuel-efficient, and electrified alternatives to large school buses is crucial. These options, which do not require a commercial driver’s license, will empower educators and students with more opportunities to engage in programs that were often restricted due to a lack of available transport.
Hands-On Challenge
To encourage middle schools students that STEM can be fun, Toyota North Carolina supported the second annual North Carolina FAME (Federation of Advanced Manufacturing Education) challenge.
Around 140 middle schoolers representing 16 schools from Guilford County Schools, Uwharrie Charter Academy and Asheboro City School District went head-to-head for the chance to be crowned champion at the STEM competition.
The competition aims to help encourage girls to imagine themselves working in STEM fields. One current NCFAME student said she was inspired to join the program after participating in a similar STEM event in fifth grade.
Part of the NCFAME STEM challenge was for students to build a device to protect an egg from an 8 to 9-foot drop, which helped promote creativity, teamwork, and problem-solving skills.
The winner received a year-long family membership to the North Carolina Zoo, trophies and snap circuit kits.
Steering Students onto a Path of Ingenuity
For the last three years, Toyota West Virginia and the Putnam Career and Technical Center (PCTC) have won the Manufacturing Innovation Challenge.
The goal of the competition is for high school students to develop real-world solutions to challenges on the shop floor or in an industrial setting.
For Toyota West Virginia, a team of students from PCTC are invited to the plant to determine if they can make a production line more efficient. They devote an entire semester of their pre-engineering class to develop improvements. The competition starts in September and ends the following May.
In the case of Toyota West Virginia, student-led solutions were so effective that the plant implemented their ideas. One solution reduced bolt drops by pre-sorting them and making them more accessible to team members working on the line. Another project seamlessly integrated collaborative robots, or cobots, into an assembly process.
Overall, Manufacturing Month is a powerful reminder that for Toyota, building vehicles is just one part of a larger mission: to build a better world, one community, one student and one innovative stride at a time.