Partners for Rural Traffic Safety is a program designed to help communities increase the use of seat belts and address other occupant safety or traffic safety issues. The Partners for Rural Traffic Safety Action Kit is based on the experiences of 15 rural communities across the nation that implemented the program in 1997 and 1998.

Although this kit is oriented toward health care professionals, any community leader can assume leadership of this project. Our goal is to make it easier to carry out the program by providing tools, tips, techniques, and proven methods and ideas, allowing the project leader to focus on the human relations and trust building functions that are outside the scope of this kit. Combining the techniques included in this kit with leadership of your human capital resources will enable your project to succeed.

The materials are presented in chronological order: from deciding whether or not to embrace the process to evaluating the results of the project. Between these two extremes lie the findings of what worked and did not work in the 15 demonstration projects. It is the willingness of those 15 communities to try innovative approaches to improve their community that made this kit possible.

The mission of the Partners for Rural Traffic Safety program is to save lives and reduce injuries. Thus, a primary outcome of this process is an intensive 30-day intervention and enforcement campaign focusing on traffic and occupant safety in the community. The kit is designed to help you plan and implement the campaign, leading to more direct citizen involvement, community education, community development and leadership skill building.

No two rural communities are identical. The people in every community, and the values they hold, are different. The resources available to address issues of concern in each community also are different. Yet, all who live in one of the thousands of rural communities in the United States share common rituals, needs, wants and experiences. The 15 rural sites whose experiences led to this kit are as diverse in social, racial, economic and geographic makeup as the nation as a whole. Take the elements of this kit that fit your community and customize the project to suit your community.

Partners for Rural Traffic Safety is a program that embraces the basic tenets of community organizing and direct citizen involvement in addressing concerns that affect the entire community. By asking citizens and community groups to become active participants in the program, these citizens and groups are more likely to take responsibility for solving problems facing the community.

Community development is a process, not a final product. Indeed, it is the community’s journey of getting to the final product that defines community development. The journey-or the process itself-should allow participants to define and describe common goals that reflect their values and those of the community. Helping participants reach agreement on what those goals should be requires a means to shape the roles of citizens in seeking answers to issues of concern. Basically, these methods are the tools and techniques described in this kit that will help you to organize, assess, and create a program in your community that will achieve the desired results.

Why use a community development process to address traffic safety and occupant protection? Because community development processes are a proven method to help address public concerns, such as traffic safety. Some people say that “using a seat belt or child seat is a private affair and the government shouldn’t be telling me what to do,” but they are wrong. A private affair becomes a public concern when a decision by an individual or group of individuals affects others. The motor vehicle injury problem affects every American, socially and economically. An individual’s private right to choose not to wear a seat belt ends when his or her head hits a windshield. The cost of treating that preventable injury is shared by all of us through higher automobile and health insurance premiums. There are additional costs to society as well: police time to investigate the crash, disruptions to the economy because the victim needs to be replaced at work, and the pain and suffering caused to loved ones. It is estimated that the average American shoulders a $580 per year burden because of motor vehicle crashes.

When a public concern has been identified, it is resolved through one of two methods: an advocacy model or a process model. The advocacy model is based on pitting two or more sides against each other, resulting in a vote with a winner and a loser. The process model uses the community development approach to seek consensus in making decisions that affect the public. The process model relies on citizen input before decisions are made with citizens helping to determine the final outcome. In an advocacy model, two or more solutions (or decisions) are given to decision makers who then select one over the other(s).

On the other hand, community development uses broad-based involvement to make decisions that affect the community. This method creates numerous opportunities for partnership building and collaboration between non-traditional community-sector partners. For instance, in this process we link places of worship with other groups such as law enforcement. When was the last time you saw law enforcement work with the religious community to solve a common issue of concern?

The community development model of decision-making educates residents by providing potential solutions and the citizen’s role in making the community a better place to live. While every community shares common experiences, each community solves problems in its own way. This kit—a process model—provides tools that allow for direct citizen involvement and participation through practical experiential approaches. Principles of adult learning and planning are applied at every level of involvement. The issues are framed in a way that everyone in the community can relate to. Indeed, people are more likely to participate when they can see the direct impact of their involvement. Every 15 seconds someone in America is injured as the result of a vehicle crash, and every 13 minutes someone is killed. It is time to get to work-the effort will be worth it. The following comment is from a resident involved in the demonstration and replication phases of Partners for Rural Traffic Safety: