The Defender Service Awards are back this year to give even more to charities in need! There are more winners, bigger prizes and bigger vehicles. Each winner received a custom built with more room for passengers and equipment! Every single aspect of this has even grown.
What are the Land Rover Defender Service Awards?
It is an event that celebrates charitable organizations such as search and rescue groups, disaster relief programs, conservation organizations, humanitarian society groups and more, by providing the tools and equipment needed to help them to expand operations.
model and $25,000 from category sponsors, including KONG, ei3, Pelican, OUTSIDE Interactive Inc., and dentsu x.
Each runner-up in the top five categories with 10,000, and Chase awarded the top five finishers in each category $5,000. There was $125,000 in overall prize money to further recognize each organization’s service.
Category winners by chosen by public votes. Approximately 220,000 votes were cast for the top 25 finalists.
Who are the winners of the Land Rover Defender Service Award?
1. Pelican Search and Rescue Award: Savuetage Benevole Outauais: Ottawa Volunteer Search and Rescue (Ottawa, ON)
Since 1996 Savuetage Benevole Outauais – Ottawa Volunteer Search and Rescue has been there to help. It is a federally incorporated, charitable, volunteer search and rescue group in Western Quebec and Eastern Ontario.
Their mission is to provide search and rescue services, provide assistance during emergencies, and provide public education programs to help people enjoy the great outdoors safely.
2. Dentsu x Veterans Outreach Award: Patriot Service Dogs (Marion County, FL)
Patriot Service Dogs provide veterans with trained service dogs free of charge. Each dog is trained to assist with PTSD, mobility issues, traumatic brain injury, and military sexual trauma.
The dogs are also trained by female prisoners to give them hope and something to be proud of. The group supports all honorably discharged veterans who would benefit from a guide dog.
3. KONG Animal Welfare Award: Appalachian Bear Rescue (Townsend, TN)
Appalachian Bear Rescue (ABR) rescues and cares for orphaned and injured black bear cubs until they can be returned to their natural habitat. They also raise public awareness of living with black bears and study aspects of their return to the wild.
Over the past 26 years, they have helped 360 black bears in nine different states and the National Park Service.
4. Ei3 Community Service Award: Mercy Chefs (Portsmouth, Virginia)
Mercy Chefs is a faith-based, non-profit disaster relief organization that provides professionally prepared, restaurant-quality meals and clean water to victims, volunteers, and first responders in natural disasters and national emergencies.
They partner with existing like-minded groups to further their mission of providing food services to underprivileged communities across the country. To date, Mercy Chefs has served more than 20 million meals in 150 disasters, 29 states and 12 countries with the help of more than 10,000 volunteers.
5. Outside Interactive, Inc. Award for Environment and Conservation: Green Lake Association (Green Lake, WI)
The Green Lake Association realizes that our lakes are in trouble. Human impacts and climate change jeopardize land and resources, so they’re taking steps to safeguard Wisconsin’s deepest natural lake and shape its approach to cleaner lakes within the Lake Michigan Basin and throughout the world.
They recently restored a missing brook trout species that had been missing for 70 years and minimized the bloom time of the harmful algae from a few weeks to a couple of minutes.
But the Defender Awards didn’t stop there
Every organization has received a Defender, the largest ever, and has a learning curve. The controls and settings are a little different from traditional American vehicles.
Then, Land Rover took each winner to the Biltmore in Asheville, North Carolina to teach them how to operate their vehicle properly. Each winner spent hours in the woods learning how to use the correct off-road settings.
The Land Rover School involves crawling over logs, winching properly, navigating mud and ruts, what to do if the SUV slips, using the hill descent control feature, and skipping the plank.
Each winner also attended a course on how to properly maintain their vehicle. That way, they can make quick fixes in wilderness or disaster areas instead of having to figure out how to call a tow truck.
Learning to work on the Defender 130 can also reduce repair costs and workshop delays. Useful information includes how to change tires correctly, how to replace the battery, where the spark plugs are, and how to change the oil.
Land Rover has equipped these organizations with an incredibly capable tool to facilitate their efforts to serve diverse communities. They have also provided them with knowledge crucial to success in the wild.
