Stop, collaborate and listen
Today on the blog we are chatting about collaboration. Bonus points to those of you who got the song reference in the title! There are many advantages to working together with others, especially in a SADD context. When we are trying to spread our road safety messaging, it can end up being quite a big task. Using our networks, recruiting people for one off favours and asking for help in general can be extremely helpful if done well.
Who can you collaborate with?
When it comes to the answer to this question, the options are almost endless. Firstly, it’s a great idea to find like-minded peers who care about their community like you do. Let them know that they don’t necessarily have to join your group to take part in keeping your community safe, even just volunteering to put up posters, letting their friends know about upcoming events, or mentioning road safety or Kaitiaki o Ara to their friends is a massive help. Word of mouth is a really powerful tool for spreading the word.
Your Kaitiaki o Ara group:
Collaboration within your group is hugely important for success. Remember to look at your strengths and what each person brings to the group. How can you delegate tasks based on those strengths? If you’re struggling to recruit or people have moved on and you have low group numbers, check out these blogs on recruiting for SADD:
https://www.sadd.org.nz/sadd-blog/2021/recruiting-new-students
https://www.sadd.org.nz/sadd-blog/2022/recruiting-people-for-sadd
School staff & teachers:
It can be extremely helpful to have passionate school staff on board with your group! They can help organise events, book spaces like the school hall for you, and can help you spread the word.
SADD Delivery Leads:
Do you know who your Delivery Lead is? They are here to help! Collaborating with them can help open up the door to new resources, new connections, and new events such as workshops and conference. Check out our team here to learn who is in your area to support you: https://www.sadd.org.nz/contact-us
Community partners:
Community partners are massively helpful when it comes to collaboration and can really take your event/activity to the next level! Kaitiaki o Ara has great connections with New Zealand Police, Fire & Emergency NZ, local councils, and heaps more! They are really great at assisting with resources, funding, offering words of wisdom, and can bring legitimacy to your activities.
Recently, Mark met up with Zyon who is a SADD National Leader from Roncalli College in Timaru. They were joined by Daniel, a Road Safety Coordinator from the Timaru District Council, and Deb, a School Community Officer from New Zealand Police. They chatted about their experiences with collaboration and how it has worked for them in the past.
What is your experience with collaboration?
Deb: “It lightens the load.”
Zyon: “It can be done in many different ways, it can be really interactive or it can be like; cool, you do this, you do that. It’s very mixed, it depends on who you get at Roncalli. Sometimes you get groups who are really interactive and have lots of ideas, sometimes you get groups who just assign tasks to each other.”
Daniel: “I think collaboration is a group effort, my experience with that goes over decades. I’m a very community-oriented person, collaboration is key to having a successful programme.”
What success have you had with collaboration?
Zyon: “Every group project in year 9 & year 10, they were all really successful! There was like a whole bunch of teachers who would put us in groups, they would just split everyone up randomly and it worked really well. With all the committees at school, within those committees you’re given roles, you’re given the leader and it just runs. We have the pink walk, that’s collaboration, we have international women's day; that was a collaboration as well.”
Deb: “When we get together, between police, council, engineering and road safety and WAVE as well. Working together and looking at an issue from all of those different aspects, is so much more successful than us battling away trying to solve something on our own.”
Daniel: “You can avoid duplication by working together. A successful project that comes to mind is a school patrol meeting that we had with South School where we started a conversation and now lots of changes have actually taken place as a result of that.”
What are the challenges that come with collaborating?
Zyon: With every collaboration, everyone has so many ideas. If you have a limited amount of time and a certain subject to be focusing on, not everyone wants to get involved. It can be hard to capture people’s interest once their idea has kind of been dismissed. You need to show that you are still including these people.
Daniel: “Getting rid of the clutter, getting rid of the distractions. I think for me that is the hardest thing to do because everyone wants their opinion heard and they all go off on their own ideas. It’s hard to get them focused. Even today as we sit here, we’ve got great people but we’ve also got lots of different inputs and it can be hard to see through all of that clutter.”
Deb: “Strong personalities or strong leaders. A lot of times with collaborations you’ll get the leaders coming to the table. We’ve all got our own agendas, within my organisation we need to be seen doing a certain thing. For you guys and students, you want a certain thing out of it as well. We need to try to meet all the needs.”
What kind of projects do you like to collaborate on and what kind of projects do you prefer to go solo on?
Zyon: “Anything like speeches, I prefer to do that on my own. I prefer to write it myself and then send it to someone for checking, rather than trying to write it together. I think the interactive activities are the best to work together on.”
A big thanks to Zyon, Deb, and Daniel for meeting up and sharing their thoughts!