Donate A Car In Seattle

Looking back at 9/11: Worst attack on U.S. soil brought out the best in South ...

By midmorning, nearly 100 people were waiting in line at the Cascade Regional Blood Services collection center across from Tacoma's Wright Park.

Sharon Fishler waited nearly three hours to donate.

"I felt powerless," she told a reporter that day. "I needed to do something to help those people."

At the end of the day, the center had drawn 443 pints of blood – more than 55 gallons – and had to turn away 50 people still waiting at closing time.

The attacks on the World Trade Centers inspired an overwhelming rush of feelings here. Manhattan is 2,400 miles away, but shock and sorrow shrank the distance to nothing.

"I cry for people I don't even know," said Deana McCarthy of Tacoma. "I cry for the families that had people die. I cry for the people who died. I cry for the people who were hanging out the windows with no way to get out, just sitting there waiting to die."

The generations of Americans born after Pearl Harbor had never experienced anything comparable, making them unprepared for the tribal surge of patriotism that followed the attack.

Flags sprouted everywhere – on houses, in lawns, taped to the insides of car windows, on antennas, waving from the beds of pickup trucks. Middle-aged men on Harley-Davidsons towed flags almost as big as their motorcycles.

Some of the patriotism had to do with anger.

An open public forum set up by The News Tribune received a stream of calls for revenge.

"Our vengeance will be horrible and swift," warned a man who signed his name W.J. Garrick. "God bless America."

Another, Leslie Sample of Lakewood, said, "We should level their countries so that we never have to worry about an issue like this from them again."

As far as who "them" was, Sample said, "It is any country that is not with us. Any country that is not backing us and behind us, any country that's not flying its flags at half-staff. Level them to the ground."

But, overall, the surge of patriotism seemed to have less to do with anger than a need for solidarity. "United We Stand," said a bumper sticker that appeared almost immediately.

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After buying himself an old school Toyota Land cruiser last year, my friend Pete Maughan didn’t know what to do with his other Toyota Land cruiser which had thrown a rod while driving on the freeway. He considered selling it on Craigslist, but decided he didn’t want to deal with the hassle of fixing it up because it had lots of broken and non-working parts because of how old it was. He also knew that it was a wanted commodity but didn’t want to deal with the hassle of selling it.

His truck needed about $1000 worth of work, but otherwise it had been running fine. So he thought, why not donate it to a worthy cause, but which charity?

Q: How can I find a good charity that is also the right charity for ME to donate my car to?

Q: How much of a tax deduction can I declare to reduce my taxes?

A: If you want to make sure your charity of choice gets the best out of your car donation, start by doing your homework first. There are many for-profit organizations that take vehicle donations on behalf of great and worthwhile charities which sell the cars at wholesale auctions, and then return back to the charity a cut of the proceeds. This is often a good route to go if you want to donate to a charity that isn’t set up to accept donations efficiently. The only problem with this is that some of these organizations may only pass on only fraction of the proceeds, and watchdogs like CarDonating.org recommend you donate directly to the charity when possible so that the charity is most likely to benefit directly from the car donation.

As an example, the American Cancer Society operates its own vehicle donation program and is thus able hold onto 75-80% of the proceeds, explained Nancy Kellison of the American Cancer Society. Most of the vehicles that come need work so they opt typically to sell the cars at auction.

Where that isn’t possible, the car donation watchdog groups recommend researching the exact portion of proceeds that actually ends up going to the charity of your choice. In  the state of Washington, there are six commercial companies that have gone through the trouble to register officially to take car donations. These for-profit fundraisers return between 9-71% to their 501(c)3 clients.

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