Your Old Car Could Help Train the Next Generation of Sisters
There are more than 36 million registered vehicles in California. Somewhere among them are a great many old cars sitting in driveways, garages, barns and side yards because they aren’t worth fixing, aren’t worth selling, or simply haven’t made it to the top of anybody’s to-do list. California has enough abandoned and inoperative vehicles that the state has maintained an Abandoned Vehicle Abatement Program for decades, helping local governments remove vehicles that have become public nuisances.
The Sisters of the Valley Ministry has a new use for them.
This month, we are launching a California vehicle donation program in collaboration with Brownfield Auto Auction. California residents can donate an unwanted vehicle—even one that isn’t running—and Brownfield will arrange to collect it, process it and sell it at auction. The proceeds that come to the Ministry will be dedicated to something very specific: formalizing the training program for the next generation of Sisters.
For more than a decade, women who have joined the Sisters have learned the way women have taught one another for thousands of years: by working side by side. We teach our plant practices, our ceremonies, our traditions, our business methods and our approach to service by doing them together. New Sisters learn from experienced Sisters, and eventually become the women who teach those who come after them.
But if this work is going to outlive its founders—and if Sisters of the Valley chapters are eventually going to take root in other communities—we have to do more than pass that knowledge from woman to woman. We have to document it, organize it, teach it and preserve it.
That is what the vehicle donation program will help us do.
From an Informal Apprenticeship to a Training Program
The Sisters did not begin with a handbook. We did not inherit an established religious order with centuries of rules, training manuals and institutional memory behind it. We built our practices through experience: growing and making medicine together, running a woman-owned business together, developing our ceremonies, establishing our six vows, serving our community, and learning—sometimes the hard way—what works and what doesn’t. That accumulated knowledge now needs a home.
The Sisters of the Valley Ministry is working to turn more than a decade of lived experience into a structured training program for women who want to pursue the path of Sisterhood. That means documenting our teachings and practices, developing training materials, organizing a curriculum, preserving our ceremonies and traditions, and creating a path that can eventually be followed not only by women who come to us in California, but by Sisters establishing communities of their own.
There is something wonderfully appropriate about funding that work with old cars.
A vehicle can reach the point where it no longer makes economic sense for its owner to repair it. It can sit for years because selling it is a nuisance, towing it costs money, and somehow there is always something more urgent to deal with. But that doesn’t mean the vehicle has no value left.
We can take the value that remains in something whose working life is over and put it toward preparing women whose work is just beginning.
The Car Doesn’t Have to Run
This is not a program only for operable used cars. If you have an old vehicle that won’t start, needs repairs you don’t want to make, or has simply been sitting around taking up space, it may still be useful to us. Brownfield Auto Auction specializes in processing vehicles donated to charitable organizations; its public auction site says more than 95 percent of its inventory comes from charitable donations.
Brownfield handles the practical side of the program. They arrange for the vehicle to be collected, evaluate it, prepare it for auction and sell it. Brownfield retains its agreed-upon fees for handling the vehicle, and the remaining proceeds come to the Sisters of the Valley Ministry. The donor receives a receipt for the charitable donation. In other words, you don’t have to repair the car. You don’t have to advertise it. You don’t have to negotiate with strangers who want to come to your house and offer you half of what you asked for it. And if it doesn’t run, you don’t have to figure out how to get rid of it.
From Your Driveway to the Next Generation
The process begins with a simple online application. Once it is submitted, someone from Brownfield generally contacts the donor within 24 hours to verify the information about the vehicle and arrange a convenient time for pickup. If the vehicle isn’t running, Brownfield arranges the tow. Then they take it from there.
For the donor, it is a relatively simple way to clear out an unwanted vehicle. For the Ministry, each donated car helps us do something much larger: build the infrastructure that will allow the Sisterhood to be taught, preserved and carried into the future.
We have always believed in making use of what the world overlooks.
We do it with plants. We do it with land. We do it with women whom conventional institutions might never imagine as spiritual leaders. And now, apparently, we’re going to do it with old cars.
So if there is a vehicle sitting in your driveway that has reached the end of one life, perhaps it is ready to help begin another.
Our vehicle donation program is currently available to California residents. Click the link below to get started.