RSE is in a unique position to bring together a wide representation from the community – from the government agencies we work closely with, our highly respected corporate partners, road safety advocates, Police members, Rotary Clubs and Volunteers and school communities – our reach is wide.
This year, we decided to harness some of the shine from the yellow spotlight of National Road Safety Week and direct it onto a number of worthy groups and individuals. With the presentation of our annual Supporting Excellence in Road Safety Awards, we honoured the enormous community effort that goes into bringing the life saving RYDA road safety messages to our young road users.
Awards events were held in Australia and New Zealand. Scattered throughout our newsletter are short profiles on each of our winners.
Part of the focus of National Road Safety Week (NRSW) is to ask every member of the community to become an ambassador for road safety and actively ‘drive so others survive’.
In addition to, and along-side our awards events, we couldn’t resist the opportunity to get our students and partners involved in NRSW to help spread the message far and wide.
We developed blank number plates that acted as #DriveSOS pledges and asked our community to personalise their plates as a pledge to share our roads as active and thoughtful citizens.
To highlight the importance of the message, we set up a static display of various road users as a backdrop to a RYDA program day and our Sydney awards event. Walking through and interacting with the display our students and guests had an opportunity to experience the road from different perspectives – from the cabin of a large tipper truck to the vulnerability of a child’s bicycle.
In New Zealand we set up photo-booths at our RYDA days where students had fun with our #speak up megaphones and discussed ways that they could use their voice for road safety.
Finally, we developed kits for our corporate partners to help them conduct staff activities to raise awareness at their various locations and in their communities. A number of them hosted morning teas, distributed media releases and put up posters.
Bridgestone even hit the streets of NZ, video camera in hand, to record students speaking up for the change they want to see on their roads.
It was incredibly rewarding to be a part of such an important week of activities. For more photos and reports on each of our events, visit www.rse.org.au/nrsw.
