The road safety team brainstormed road safety issues in the surrounding community as community service members, utilising all possible resources, identifying the real issue, and carrying out several activities to fund their actions.
The ideas
Preparing a regular meeting (every Saturday, for 90 minutes)
• Reflecting on previous road safety projects
• Planning the project with students
• Looking for real issues that hinder road safety in the surrounding community - utilising all possible resources
• Creating ‘mind maps’ of all factors that hinder road safety (physical, human, etc.)
• Labelling and inferring causes and effects of such issues on the community as a whole. Looking for celebrities (these are supposed to be role models, teenagers usually imitate them) and others who suffered from these issues.
Narrowing ideas
• Identifying the real issue in the surrounding community: A trouble spot that leads to school and where many paths meet
• Searching for information, utilising all possible resources to help solve the narrowed issue. Fixing the trouble spot near school where many road paths merge, causing traffic jams and possible crashes between cars coming from different directions.
• Planning several fun awareness activities to raise enough funds to fix this trouble spot: Adha dinner, karting, basketball game, car wash, etc.
The initiatives
Our Actions are Physical and Educational.
Physical: Meeting the head of the municipality and convincing him to take action by fixing the identified trouble spot, thus decreasing the possibility of cars crashing into each other. We offered the money we raised from previous road safety projects mentioned before.
Educational: Believing that education is the core of change, we met the principal and handed out a ‘petition’: teaching road safety concepts in our school (from KGs to high school level) , requesting mandatory driving lessons for grade 11 so that they won't graduate before taking driving lessons agreed upon with parents as well. "If you can't prevent it, teach it.” The principal welcomed the idea.
