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| HOME ABOUT CANDOR - SUPPORTING US SEARCH | ||||||||||||||||
All monies received will be used to advance the Trusts work and aim of reducing the NZ road casualty and death toll.
Is a euphemism that is not helpful. It communicates that there is a necessary trade off in blood and tears for the convenience of modern transport
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Support and membership Your choice to take up membership expresses support for Candor's kaupapa. Whether or not you decide to be active in the organisation we greatly appreciate just the fact that you've joined. Please mention whether it's your preference to be active, or not, when Emailing us. Membership is free but a joining fee of $5 or donation of any amount will be gratefully accepted from those able to give it. Many thanks to those who join or make donations. Contact Volunteers at
Wellington Office - candor@xtra.co.nz P.O. Box 35 224, Naenae, HUTT CITY Alternately you can deposit payments to; Candor Trust account: no. 01-18240005976-00 at the ANZ Bank. Deed and volunteering Our Trust Deed can be viewed at the Companies office website. It provides for Candor to branch out from its core work once this is well addressed and to appoint more Trustees from our membership role. Opportunities for members wishing to volunteer their skills and time the challenges and opportunities are abundant.Our Members are kept up to date with with activity and progress reports by Emails sent out fairly regularly. Another benefit may be that knowledge gained through your membership enables you to have a positive influence on others. Our volunteers all help out in unique ways - can you? Organisation History Candor Trust was begun 2004, and registered as a charity active in road safety in 2005 by the families of Mary Radley (60) who died after a drugged driver suddenly crossed the centre-line on State Highway 1, and of a younger woman killed in a drug related crash in the lower North Island. It's overarching objective is to reduce the high occurrence of impaired driving in NZ, and Candor is the only local charity set up to benefit all NZ road users of all ages by reducing the harm wrought by all adult substance abusers who may get behind the wheel. Trust members are highly active with raising the DUID issues profile, and with other lobby groups the Trust has secured an undertaking from Government to fix impaired driving law - in tatters as it relates to drugs. The founders were motivated by an awareness that while harm caused by the combination of drugs and driving is significant and rising there exists a real lack of agencies having specialised knowledge and a charter that would enable them to be pro-active in addressing this issue within NZ communities. An underpinning value to Candors work is the belief that sustaining a road toll due to budgetary stinginess - renamed 'affordability' in policy documents is a morally repugnant stance for a reasonably wealthy Nation to take. It is well understood by the populations and Governments in other Countries with similar terrain and wealth to New Zealand's that yearly blood baths can be almost eliminated if infrastructure is updated. The only reason Government Officials constantly claim we are doing well against the 1970's is that our roads are half a century behind the times - New Zealand is stuck in a time warp to accept one in fifty will be slain on the road and like the less violent countries we could halve tolls in a decade with ease if we cared to. It's a fact well acknowledged by safety professionals that education and enforcement (band-aid interventions) are no substitute for safe road engineering eg extensive centreline dividers, & they're less economic in the long run. "Road toll" is a dirty word (or 2) because it's laden with the idea there is an inevitable price we must pay just for freedom of movement - in blood and human anguish. While this was once the case before Swedish Road Safety geniuses came up with bright ideas near a decade ago. it is no longer much of a truism. Every time this phrase is uttered it reinforces an unhelpful sense of powerlessness. Which breeds apathy. Some other Organisations are educating youth about road safety issues but their primary focus has and continues to be upon drink driving education. High risk groups for drug driving are males under 40, women under 25 and following (way way behind) women aged 50 to about 65. Candor primarily focuses upon educating adults who use drugs and sees the work done by other groups with youth regarding drink driving as a good foundation to build upon given that drink driving is a perennial issue. The law currently allows drug impaired driving so long as the person is not grossly drug impaired. The law also makes drugs like P and marijuana illegal yet the Alcohol and Drug agencies today work under the "harm minimisation model" which would not presume to tell addicts to "cut it out" but rather to "do it safely". All of this puts Government agencies in a double bind. If Government was to tell driving illicit drug users how to take drugs so that their driving won't be grossly impaired (the standard of culpability under current law - marked for fixing) then that wouldn't only be a waste of effort, it would also be tantamount to condoning non driving related offenses under the Misuse of Drugs Act. Another issue which needs addressing is the general lack of any support structure tailored to meet Road Victims special pressing needs. We seek to meet this need in a small way while advocating for Government to "step up." What We Do - Community Activities and Current Projects We have workers based in Wellington and Christchurch but we're building our support base so we can eventually be active and effective in many communities around New Zealand. A major priority is to attain members, sponsors and more volunteers to help build up our capacity. Also we see the "Candor web" as a valuable offering of an educational resource within which is much of use to those after self help or wanting to get the message out to their community - before we can. The development of resource kits is complete so our volunteers are now distributing materials. We are developing content guidelines for adult education seminars with the expert aid of Margaret Oster. Her presentations were so effective in communicating the drug driving message and lowering the road toll she was lately honored with New Mexico's Woman of the Year Award. We are extremely grateful for her help. Members are trained in presenting apt material to groups. We offer or take high school / marae / club / driving school / professional organisation / Government and prison bookings for presentations. We attend community events. Our free services extend as far afield as the volunteer pool or tours by our core workers allow. We offer moral support in the form of 'befriending' and a listening ear from those who have been in the same circumstances to the co-victims of road-way (particularly DUI) homicide - and free pamphlet sets for the recently bereaved. Another thing that keeps us busy is making submissions where issue advocacy is required. As per the Trust Deed we seek to build bridges toward working co-operatively with other groups.
Excerpt from a foreign newspaper article - New Zealand's teen situation is no different Andrew Murie, chief executive officer for MADD Canada, said protecting passengers -- teenage girls in particular -- from drunk or drugged drivers is difficult. "For some reason, they will make smart decisions about not driving themselves but then they will get into a car with a boyfriend who is grossly drunk," he said. Mr. Murie said parents have to take greater responsibility for the behaviour of teenagers, and control access to car keys as a way of limiting impaired driving. Mr. Murie said a lot of parents are strict about the issue of drinking and driving but they remain too lax about drugged driving. "Lots of parents are aware of drug use by their teenagers but they do it themselves so they don't take the issue seriously," he said. In the survey carried out for Green Flag (UK) of drivers aged between 17 and 24 years, almost a third know someone who takes illegal drugs and drives regularly. One-in-ten also said they were likely to take illegal drugs over the festive period and more than half said someone they knew would take illegal drugs. Worryingly, almost a third had been a passenger in a car when they knew the driver had taken illegal drugs. |
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