Nonprofit Groups Brake for Old Junkers : Charities: Instead of asking for money at year’s end, more organizations are steering toward that heap taking up space in your driveway.

Who would want to be presented with an old, clanking, broken-down gift?

If the old gift happens to be a car, lots of people--who not only will accept it but who will go out of their way to ask for it.

Such institutions as the American Red Cross, Make-a-Wish Foundation, Chabad, National Kidney Foundation and Jewish Educational Center have stepped up their radio spots this month with pleas like this: “Don’t dump your old lemon. Give it to a worthy cause. We can squeeze some life out of it.”

While some concentrate on public service announcements, others are plunking down good money for drive-time commercials. The campaign details differ, but the message is essentially the same: Give a gift that really matters--and reduce your taxes.

“These commercials have really proliferated in the last few months,” says David Ysais, director of community services and editorials at all-news KNX-AM (1070), which is airing spots from as many as four competing groups. “It’s unusual and something we haven’t seen before, but considering the amount of cars in Southern California, it’s a smart approach.”

“You have to be creative as a nonprofit these days,” says Joey Coburn, development coordinator for the National Kidney Foundation, Capital Area Chapter, in Washington, D.C. “Overall, donations to charities are harder to come by.”

Although additional organizations are jumping on the bandwagon daily, the major nonprofits seeking car donations say they have fine-tuned their systems over the last few months to make it painless.

“You’d be surprised how many people have a couple of cars just sitting in their driveways,” says Rachel Resnick of the Jewish Education Center in San Francisco, which may have originated the idea. “Sometimes they owe the IRS some money and decide to donate a car, sometimes there has been a death in the family. We’ll take cars in any condition.”

Coburn calls Southern California “an open market waiting to happen.” Her chapter started its “Kidney-Car” program two years ago, and the response was so good (1,816 cars in the 1994-’95 fiscal year) that it has expanded to a national processing center with an 800 number to include chapters throughout the country, she said.

Working with a computerized system, the group sends each caller forms to fill out about the gift car, including the odometer reading. When the donor returns the information with the car title, it is processed immediately and the car is picked up. The foundation has contracts with a towing company and an auction house, which sells the cars for them.

“We provide free towing,” Coburn says. “We take anything as long as it has wheels on it, but we have a mechanism for getting it off the location in case the wheels don’t work.”

Like most programs, they also take boats, trailers and other transportation objects. (At L.A. radio station KABC-AM [790], staffer Bill Leonard reports that one caller donated a horse, which was accepted.)

Mattie Pil of San Francisco’s Jewish Education Center believes that her group may have originated the whole idea of donating cars in an organized way to charity. She and her husband, Rabbi Bentzion Pil, founded the center 11 years ago to serve the growing community of Russian immigrants, including helping them with housing and transportation.

“We’ve been accepting donations of cars for a long time,” Mattie Pil says. Operating on a shoestring and casting around for new ideas for fund-raising, her husband had the “brainstorm” two years ago to turn to radio spots for car donations. “We tried it for two weeks in December: Donate your car and get a tax deduction,” she says. “People were calling us like crazy.”

When they repeated the campaign in January, people were still calling to make donations. With additional processing centers in Brooklyn and Torrance, JEC repairs the cars, which are given to immigrants in need or sold to raise funds. Last year, Pil says, selling cars raised about $500,000.

The typical gift is a 1984 Ford or Datsun with more than 100,000 miles, says JEC marketing director George Youngerman, but there are exceptions. He took a call recently from a man who said he’d like to donate a 1986 Nissan 240SX. Youngerman asked him about the condition and the caller replied, “I’m driving it right now.”

“He’d heard the message on his car radio and picked up the car phone to give us the car he was driving,” Youngerman says.