In The Field
Hawkesbury and Little Blue Dinosaur working on child pedestrian safety
Freya Lucas
Mar 07, 2023
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Hawkesbury City Council in New South Wales is working with the Little Blue Dinosaur Foundation on a pilot program to boost community awareness about child pedestrian safety.
The Foundation has received Commonwealth grant funding to co-design and implement a pilot project, specifically focused on road safety initiatives to reduce child road trauma, in association with seven Local Government Areas in New South Wales, Queensland and Victoria, including the Hawkesbury Local Government Area.Little Blue Dinosaur is a not-for-profit foundation whose mission is to protect child pedestrians from the ever-present danger of roadways and moving motor vehicles through community education and road safety collaborations with government stakeholder partnerships.
It was established in 2014 following the death of Michelle McLaughlin’s four-year-old son, Tom McLaughlin, due to a pedestrian-motor vehicle crash whilst on a family holiday.
“This pilot program is so very important, and we thank Hawkesbury City Council for being so proactive,” Ms McLaughlin said.
Hawkesbury Mayor Councillor Sarah McMahon welcomed the Council’s involvement in the project.
“Increasing road safety awareness amongst our children and their carers is an important job to do, and I hope that this project will put pedestrian road safety at the top of all our minds,” the Mayor said.
“Ten childcare centres and before and after school care centres from each of the local government areas are participating in the pilot project. In Hawkesbury, the Council will assist by installing metal ‘Hold My Hand’ signs which have been created by the Little Blue Dinosaur Foundation to go outside of each participating facility,” she said.
The participating facilities are:
- Kurrajong Out of School Hours Care at Kurrajong Community Centre
- Elizabeth Street Preschool in North Richmond
- Hobartville Long Day Preschool
- Richmond Preschool
- Glossodia Community Centre Out of School Hours Care
- Wilberforce Early Learning Centre
- Wilberforce Preschool
- McGraths Hill Children’s Centre Inc.
- South Windsor Family Centre
- Greenhills Child Care Centre, South Windsor.
The Little Blue Dinosaur Foundation has partnered with the University of NSW to analyse the causes of child road trauma to identify better approaches for preventing child road trauma and death, and to undertake pilot studies to evaluate intervention methods. Based on the results of UNSW’s research, The Little Blue Dinosaur Foundation has developed a new community awareness campaign aimed at parents and caregivers of young children.
The study will involve a pre-survey of attitudes about child pedestrian road safety; a community awareness/educational campaign with educational resource materials supplied to the preschools and after school care facilities; and, a post-survey of attitudes to child pedestrian road safety to gauge the impact of the project. At the end of the project, the awareness and education materials will remain at the participating centres.
A summary of the results of the project will be available later in the year. For more information about the Little Blue Dinosaur Foundation visit www.littlebluedinosaur.org
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