People from all around the world gathered in RR last Wednesday

Ken Johnston
Editor

About twenty delegates from around the world and several presenters made the trip to Rainy River for a day of sessions at the World Health Organization’s Safe Communities Conference last Wednesday. They came from Norway, North Korea, Atlanta, Georgia, Connecticut, Alberta, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Australia, Missouri, Sweden and Ontario.
The day opened with remarks from Rainy River and Dawson Mayors, Gord Prost and John Amundsen. That was followed by two songs from Riverview School’s grade 2 and 3 students. They sang “It’s a Small World” and “This Land is Our Land.”
Sessions began immediately thereafter with many of the speakers giving overviews of programs that have worked in their parts of the world. The first presenter of the day was Jan Hill of the Ontario Service Safety Alliance. She talked about how OSSA has been working to integrate safety into small businesses across Ontario.
The second set of sessions held were the I Promise Program at the Rainy River Activity Depot and a presentation on the success of the RR Valley Safety Coalition. Gary Direnfeld, the Executive Director of the I Promise Program outlined how he founded the program which helps encourage safer driving habits by teens. He was cut off by a teen one day on the road and decided to do some research. He was surprised to learn that there is a much higher percentage of teen deaths resulting from non-alcohol related incidents. With that in mind he began developing the I Promise Program which involves a teen-parent safe driving contract. A driving monitoring program is also in place similar to the one that appears on transport trucks. “How am I driving? Call 1-800- to comment on it.” Direnfeld has created a window sticker with a toll-free number on it for people to comment on a teen’s driving.
While he admits that the system which has been in place since January has not resulted in many calls, he said that is a good thing. “The idea is not to catch bad driving but to prevent it,” said Direnfeld.
The next sessions were on the RR District Substance Abuse Prevention Team and on the Safe Community of Waitakere, New Zealand. Presenter Margaret Devlin highlighted the fact that in her part of the world many agencies were overlapping services. By combining efforts they provided better service.
A community luncheon was held at the Legion with about 75 members of the community attending. Key-note speaker Lt. Ed Moses spoke on the move to legalize marijuana. He warned that those in favour of such action often twist facts about the drug. He strongly opposes legalizing what he called another killer like cigarettes and alcohol.
After lunch Martin Nantel spoke about the watershed management program being conducted by the Rainy River First Nation and presenters from New Zealand and Sweden spoke about Safe Kids Programs and Alcohol use prevention. Jim Cumming and Rob Clouston rounded out the day speaking about strategic visioning and the OPP’ies program.
On Thursday Rainy River and Lake of the Woods High Schools sent students to Fort Frances High School where they took part in a youth element of the WHO conference called Youth Link. It focused on work place safety.