Focus goes on Grandma to get safety message across

By MATHEW DEARNALEY

Road safety educators are being urged not to overlook the power of Pacific grandmothers in trying to convert diverse communities to their cause.

"If you want babies to be buckled up in a car, grandma has the power in the family," Lita Foliaki, Pacific programme manager for Waitemata District Health Board, told a community road safety conference in Auckland attended by more than 300 educators.

"She does not drive, but grandma is the person you focus on if you are looking at babies in cars - not the parents, because grandma can overcome, grandma is to be converted."

Tongan-born Ms Foliaki said the Land Transport Safety Authority, organiser of the inaugural three-day conference, had to understand competing economic and cultural pressures facing Pacific groups if it wanted them to make road safety a priority.

"I mean, the car is not working very well, you can't really afford to fix it," she said.

"There are many members of the family, and if you put a car seat in the car, that means two other people plus grandma can't fit into the car - it doesn't have a warrant of fitness and shouldn't really be on the road.

"You can't take people out of their cultural or their economic status, it is unrealistic to preach to people a change in behaviour without change in their circumstance."

Organisations such as the safety authority also had to understand that many Pacific people attended to their own physical health only after meeting obligations to their families and churches.

Although not wanting to underestimate the complexity of the challenge, Ms Foliaki said funders and providers had to achieve cultural and professional competence at high levels to support efforts of frontline staff in forming partnerships with Pacific communities.

"If you want to work with these communities, at which point of the decision-making process of this whole industry around road safety do you think community people should be involved?" she said.

"Are they only the doers, and not the thinkers and designers?

"Because if community engagement and the road safety message delivered into the community is an important strategy, then the importance is reflected in where in the organisation those insights and strategies have got to be decided."

But she also had advice for those on the front line, saying successful community workers spent many years building relationships based on reciprocity, or mutual help.

A prime example was a non-Pacific woman who had worked with the same Auckland community for 30 years and could get its members to respond to her priorities, such as road safety, because of the attention she had given their needs over that time.

"Reciprocity, it's another principle that makes the village work - in the village we don't have a welfare system and we help each other ... it's reciprocity, it is not charity."