Dec. 20, 2012—The Alcoa Foundation, the philanthropic branch of fabricated aluminum producer Alcoa, has awarded the Collision Repair Education Foundation with a $40,000 grant to provide aluminum repair training and education to post-secondary collision instructors and students.
The Education Foundation said all collision repair instructors and students are able to apply for the aluminum training grant through its spring 2013 scholarship and grant opportunities. The Education Foundation will select 17 instructor-student pairs to attend aluminum repair technical training, which will be conducted at the I-CAR Tech Centre in Appleton, Wis., next summer.
The grant applications will be available online in January at collisioneducationfoundation.org.
“As more and more of today’s and future vehicles are being constructed with aluminum, it is crucial that repair professionals complete aluminum repair technical training in order to repair consumers’ collision damage properly,” said Clark Plucinski, executive director of the Education Foundation. “Through this Alcoa grant, not only will instructors gain technical training that they can bring back to their classroom for additional students, but the students will have completed industry recognized, I-CAR aluminum repair training—making them more employable to the industry. I thank Alcoa for their support and we look forward to working together with them and I-CAR on training the future repair professionals of the collision industry.”
The Alcoa Foundation is one of the largest corporate foundations in the U.S. with assets of roughly $446 million. The organization has invested more than $550 million in nonprofit partnerships worldwide since its inception in 1952, including more than $20 million in 2011.
”The work of the Collision Repair Education Foundation is spot-on with our desire to educate and train people for important STEM-related trades including automotive repair,” said Randall Scheps, director of marketing for Alcoa. “As the mix of materials in this market continues to change as consumers seek more fuel efficient vehicles, this work is even more important.”
