Opportunity Cars is a network of more than 150 nonprofit organizations dedicated to increasing private automobile ownership for low wage working families to support their ability to find and retain quality employment. Cars programs promote economic well being and job security by distributing cars directly to families, making low-interest loans for car purchases, and facilitating matched savings for car down payments and purchases.

Access to private automobile ownership is an important component of an effective transportation strategy to help build healthy communities and strong economies. Employers, welfare administrators, and the unemployed have long asserted that transportation barriers are a key obstacle to employment and success once on the job. Today, two-thirds of residents in metropolitan areas live in the suburbs, and two-thirds of new jobs are located there as well. It's therefore no surprise that 88 percent of workers drive to their jobs. Left behind are central-city poor residents without cars, who have become increasingly isolated from the American economy, and rural residents who have few public transportation options. As a number of scholars have documented, the steady movement of jobs out of cities and into the suburbs has helped create and sustain the concentrated poverty that is now endemic to America's urban areas. Because new jobs tend to be located in ever-expanding suburbs poorly served by mass transit, poor central-city and rural residents find themselves living further and further away from economic opportunities. (Adapted From Auto-Mobility, by Margy Waller of Inclusion and The Mobility Agenda)

Opportunity Cars programs are located in urban and rural areas in 33 states, and over 10,000 families in 2005 gained access to private automobiles through a Cars program, transforming their lives and giving them a previously unimaginable level of economic security, safety, and freedom.