The Road Safety Trust’s next grant funding round provides an opportunity for road safety teams to take forward one of four projects that have already been funded and completed.
The Trust says the four projects ‘lend themselves to being progressed by new organisations to make a difference to road safety’.
They cover: improving safety through neighbourhood schemes for traffic calming, tackling mobile phone use by drivers, improving driving behaviour through mindfulness and using data and intelligence to understand who is causing serious collisions.
It is the first time the Small Grants Programme will provide funding that focuses on supporting previously funded and completed projects to the implementation stage.
The four projects
‘Community Corners’
Community Corners is a low cost, community-led, street design approach to traffic calming, trialled by TRL in 2018. The Trust is looking for more trials and evaluations to gather supporting evidence of the link between road design and driver behaviour.
‘Mobile Engaged’
Using the Mobile:Engaged Compendium produced as a resource by Keele University, applicants are invited to trial one or more of the practical interventions featured in it, or conduct evaluations to tackle mobile phone use by drivers.
‘Improving Driving Behaviour through Mindfulness’
Research undertaken by Nottingham Trent University indicates that mindfulness can have positive effects on a range of safety-related behaviours such as speed variance and driver focus. Applications are invited to trial this mindfulness research in a practical way to improve road safety.
‘Targeting Road Injury Prevention (TRIP)’
This project uses data and intelligence to understand who is causing serious collisions and to develop road safety campaigns. Applicants are invited to further trial the ‘culpability tool’ and analysis from the previously funded project run by Addenbrooke’s Charitable Trust with Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Road Safety Partnership in another geographical area of the UK.
Eligible applications will build on the previous learning and evidence through pilots and trials of new innovations, expanding successful trials across a new area and/or evaluating existing interventions.
This Small Grants round has a total budget of £180k with between £10k and £30k for each successful application. The application process is open from 22 March until 26 April 2022.
Each application should have a lead organisation in the UK which must be a local public sector organisation, charity, not-for-profit social enterprise, or community interest company.
Universities can also apply but this must be in partnership with one of these organisations.
To support interested applicants, a webinar is taking place on Thursday 24 March with the Trust’s grants team. Click here to sign up.
Sally Lines, chief executive of The Road Safety Trust said: “This is the first time that we have run a grant funding round offering the opportunity to take forward a project that has been funded and completed but which holds the potential to improve road safety in other parts of the UK.
“The Trust felt that it was time to support these exciting projects to their next stage towards implementation.
“Applications should outline how they are able to take one of the four areas of work forward through trials, further insight and evaluation to help reduce deaths and injuries both locally and across the UK.”