People

For the society

Invest in the future? Good.
Investing in the kids? Brilliant.

May sound corny, but we really do believe in the future of the children. And to prove it, we put an awful lot of our time, money and energy into loads of different educational programmes and events aimed at giving those that need it more opportunities.

Here’s a few of them:

Once upon a time, in a country far, far away…

You read it here first. Hosted by the International Institute for Children’s Literature in Osaka, Nissan started the program in 1984 and every year since then we’ve encouraged young writers to enter their work into our “Nissan Children’s Storybook and Picture Book Grand Prix”.

The really cool part is that winning works are not only published, they’re also donated to the public libraries across Japan and nursery schools near Nissan places of business. Isn’t that a novel idea?

The writing's on the wall for us…

To show all the great works from our Storybook and Picture Book Grand Prix, we get together with the National Children’s Castle in Tokyo. We do this every spring and we’ve called it the Nissan Joyful Storybook and Picture Book Exhibition.

 

We display the colourful storybooks, hold creative workshops for the kids and we even recycle some of our cars to make exhibits. It’s great fun and become so popular, it’s now a spring vacation event attracting over 30,000 children and parents every year.

And we like it because it brings out the kid in all of us.
‘I want to make a robot for my dad.’

Hear some more of the kids’ comments and see the latest books at the 16th Nissan Joyful Storybook and Picture Book Exhibition.

What are you doing in, oh say, 2050?

We sponsor lots of things, but one we really like is the ‘The Science of Survival –Your Planet Needs You’ which has run at The Science Museum in London and is now running at Liberty Science Center in New Jersey. There you can see how you’ll live in 2050, and if you want to take a peek into the future now, click here (no time travel/swirly tunnel thing required).

If you're so clever, you do it

The Nissan Monozukari Caravan is a cool little educational program we started in 2007. Basically, we let students be us for a day. We divide them into seven or eight member teams - each is assigned a role, such as assembly, logistics, inspection - in order to make two vehicles.

 

At the end of the day, the kids come away learning that bringing together small ideas and working together in one group, can lead to something much bigger.

We’re also into the arts in a big way and a green way. In 2007, we gave four of our ultra cool eco cars, X-TRAIL FCVs (fuel cell vehicles) to transport the artists between music events during the festival.