Community participation in road safety awareness programs and initiatives

Road accidents are among the main causes of unnatural fatalities in the United States and other developed countries, and cost several billions of dollars every year. Increasing public awareness of how to protect from traffic injury is considered as an important area that necessitates a broad approach involving implementation of a mixture of communal, environmental, governmental and educational strategies together with law enforcement.

A considerable amount of road safety measures have been introduced by the U.S. government in recent times, yet, community interest and involvement will be advantageous as part of a comprehensive approach. For this paper, the word 'community' indicates people living in a particular geographic region in a city. This study will discuss my experience of participating voluntarily in a road safety program for community welfare in my area. For this study, community members included children, men, women of all age groups belonging to different families, ethnic backgrounds and professions living in my neighborhood. The extent of Community participation ranged from nominal or passive involvement. It was my duty to motivate community members to participate in this program. Some of them mostly young children, house wives and older adults merely contributed in watching road safety awareness dramas, documentaries and commercials. Most of the teenagers and young adults showed an interest in active contribution. I motivated them to design and execute road safety programs and participate in street theatre. Nevertheless, it was not an easy job for me to convince considerable numbers of the community members to actively participate in the activity.

1. What was observed during the experience?

The community development program is usually referred to a project where members of a community participate in a community activity as a major constituent of program. (Day, 2006) It was observed that social awareness on various issues like road safety can be enhanced with little community involvement, and that community participation can be served as one small segment of several road safety initiatives. In long run, it can make a considerable contribution as part of a coordinated and all-inclusive approach to increasing community safety. Road safety programs are expected to be more useful when the members of a society believe they have a responsibility to increase awareness and work towards its achievement.

It was observed that it is helpful to prepare an outline for community development program far in advance to its implementation in order to create the 'ideal' circumstances for community involvement. Nevertheless, funds and responsibility to arrange such programs in order to increase road safety majorly belongs to the concerned government departments and community involvement is beneficial in this regard but cannot substitute them and their responsibilities. However, community programs better serve as an extension to support and make agency driven programs more effective in achieving goals. (Bell and Newby, 2000) Hence, it is effectual to include community participation as a constituent of the overall road safety program.

4. How can you help make a difference with this group?

It was observed that a difference in the road safety awareness can be brought effectively by encouraging community participation in social awareness programs like road safety. Hence, my priority was to select and design suitable programs for the community that will impact every member of the society and help them becoming more aware of road safety measures. I requested community members to take part in such programs in future too for welfare of this particular region. Due to my efforts, local committee started to receive financial and professional resources from the government that will help increase community development. Such facilities will support the community committee members in implementing effective strategies to arrange social awareness programs in future. The committee will serve as a medium for the community members to share their concerns regarding social issues in the community like road safety that will be conveyed to the concerned government authorities if needed.

I will achieve success in encouraging community member's contribution in the social awareness programs by communicating with the active members of community, low cost media promotion has proved to an effective tool as a key approach for public communication. This community activity provided an effective picture of how local policies can be put into practice at relatively low spending and offering noteworthy benefits to the community. I hold support from local leaders, which are expected to be more effective in comparison to other approaches that do not involve significant involvement of community.

Nevertheless, barriers in large scale and continuous participation of community members exist. Such barriers are quite a lot and most of these are connected with one another. I have decided to take care of such issues whether they include personnel or planning issues. As I have realized that, if properly planned and resourced, community contribution possesses the potential to contribute in decreasing in traffic injury and deaths.