Peter Smith posted on August 09, 2009 19:06
A cheque for $25,000 for BRAKE
The Gold Coast City Council presented BRAKE CEO Rob Duncan with a cheque worth $25,000 on 12th of August 2009. This follows on from a $25,000 grant to BRAKE in 2008.
Rob Duncan thanked the council and praised GCCC Senior Road Safety Advisor, Karen Burton, who provides invaluable assistance to BRAKE both in development and roll-out on the Gold Coast as well as assisting in facilitation of community courses on the Gold Coast. The assistance from the GCCC is greatly appreciated as it has taken the lead in ensuring that young people can access BRAKE on the Coast through school or community courses.
The council grant ensures that the program can be provided free of charge to young people and their families. The funds have been used to roll-out the course, development and to be able to provide a coordinator to coordinate and manage BRAKE on the Coast.
In 2007 over 200 young people commenced BRAKE on the Coast. With the assistance of the GCCC – and of course other people and organisations, such as Mudgeeraba Rotary and the Currumbin and Southport RSLs, over 300 young people commenced BRAKE in 2008. This has enable BRAKE to continue to grow to allow access to Gold Coast families and in 2009 over 600 more young people will have accessed BRAKE. With such support from the Gold Coast City Council and the Gold Coast community over 1,000 young people will access BRAKE in 2010 through 11 secondary schools (both public and private) and a number of community courses.
This equates to over 2,100 young people in 4 years and this number is expected to substantially increase due to such grass roots support. In addition to the participant BRAKE ‘course’ a parents program is held for those young people who attend BRAKE. This program is also offered free of charge to all parents/carers of BRAKE participants and is an essential component of the program. Parents/carers are instructed on what their young people have learnt and most importantly, what they can do to, or really should do, to assist their young person in reducing their chances of crashing. Parents/carers are usually quite surprised on how much they can actually do and just how important their role is in this issue – at times it may be argued to be just as important as the role of their young person actually driving the car.
BRAKE is provided free of charge to all secondary schools that are able to facilitate BRAKE. All materials and in-service training are provided by BRAKE so that school teachers ‘facilitate’ the course.
We thank the Gold Coast City Council for such wonderful support and commitment to the safety of young people on the Gold Coast, but also for their commitment to road safety itself.