When Youth Advocacy in Action for Safer Roads launched in Jamaica earlier this year, the vision was clear: equip 150 secondary school students with road safety knowledge and leadership skills, enabling
them to design and lead their own advocacy campaigns.
Over the past few weeks, the project has taken an important step towards that goal by preparing the facilitators who will bring the programme into five schools across Jamaica.
Between 7 July and August 11, YOURS delivered five hybrid Training of Trainers sessions, with facilitators joining in person from the JN Group Corporate Office and YOURS trainers connecting remotely. The sessions combined YOURS’ learning methodology with the content facilitators will later deliver to students, exploring how humans learn, facilitation skills, road safety, advocacy, getting your message across and planning.
But the process was not only about learning how to deliver a session. It was about preparing facilitators to help young people recognise the role they can play in the issues affecting their everyday lives, and design an advocacy campaign that will improve road safety in their school surroundings
Reflecting on the pilot workshop, Natalie Burton, Project Officer at the Jamaica Youth Advocacy Network and one of the facilitators, captured the shift they wanted to encourage among participants: “We helped them to shift from just saying, ‘this needs to be fixed,’ to ‘how can I ensure this is fixed?’
On August 19 , that learning moved into practice. Five facilitators came together with 13 young people aged 15–23 for an in-person pilot workshop at the JN Group Corporate Office. It was an opportunity to
test the sessions before taking them into schools, while giving young participants the chance to explore road safety issues in Jamaica, advocacy tactics, how to communicate with different audiences and how their own voices and experiences can contribute to change.
For Alexander, 17, from St. George’s College, the pilot also opened up the possibility of taking a more active role in road safety. “I see myself as somebody who may take up that road or encourage others to take up that road.”
His reflection speaks directly to an idea at the heart of Youth Advocacy in Action for Safer Roads: young people are not only beneficiaries of road safety initiatives. They can be partners in creating solutions, bringing their experiences into conversations about the mobility systems they navigate every day.
Now, the project is preparing for its next phase. The programme will move into five schools, reaching 150 secondary school students through access to YOURS Academy online courses, an in-person advocacy and communications training and hands-on campaign development. Students will explore road safety issues affecting their daily lives and use what they learn to design and lead their own advocacy campaigns.
The experience and lessons from the pilot workshop and the upcoming school training will also contribute to the development of a Youth Pilot Toolkit, capturing learning from the project and contributing to a model that can support youth-led road safety initiatives across FIA Region III.
Implemented under the iDrive4Life programme by the Jamaica Automobile Association (JAA) and JN Foundation, in collaboration with YOURS – Youth for Road Safety, the project is moving one step closer to its goal: creating opportunities for young people to move from learning about road safety to actively shaping conversations around it, with the tools, knowledge and opportunities to lead change in their communities.
