Help for New Practice Cars for Puketapapa Community Driving School (PCDS)

On Saturday morning 7 August we saw our Migrant Action Trust office at The Salvation Army Mt Albert Rd littered with beer cans, smashed glass door and broken key boxes. Sadly, our two dual control practice cars for Puketapapa Community Driving School and Open Road Refugee Driver Training Programme were stolen and badly smashed by youth offenders. We do have liability insurance and car insurance. But prior to losing our two cars, due to increasing requests we were preparing to fundraise to get another practice car to enable us to help more.

It makes a world of difference to our refugee-background learners to gain freedom and access to more job opportunities by getting restricted and full licence. But losing our two practice cars mean longer waiting times for our learner drivers who needed urgent driver training. This is extra stressful for our 50+ refugee-background learners who were hoping to get extra practice sessions and borrow our cars for their test days in the next few weeks.

As a local community-owned social enterprise, we aim to help anyone needing safe driver training. We use the income we get from full-paying customers to support refugee-background learners. Each year we get over 200 urgent referrals especially mothers with special needs children, single mothers and refugee-background learners facing multiple barriers to get driver licence in order to get jobs, go to frequent doctors appointments, and get around with essential transport everyday.