The award was presented by the ACRS patron, the Governor-General of Australia, His Excellency Sir Peter Cosgrove, at a ceremony attended by over 250 of Australia’s foremost road safety professionals and advocates on November 13 at the Grand Hyatt, Melbourne.

The Kindy Kits project in its original format was a road safety education program designed specifically for kindergarten children in the Bathurst region. 

The program was designed in 2006 with the intention to fill a pressing need to educate very young children across the Bathurst community around road and bicycle safety matters.

In 2009 the program widened to encompass an environmental/recycling component. The reason for this was in acknowledging the early success of the program, it was understood that Kindy Kits was a very good way of engaging with kindergarten children across the region.

It was believed that an environmental message could be added to the existing road safety messages without confusing the audience or diluting the importance of the original road safety messages. 

Kindy Kits is an excellent example of a community road safety project gaining strong support and working well.

This project displays how to engage and deliver important road safety messages face-to-face to one of the youngest road user groups to encourage and assist them to adopt life-long positive road safety behaviours.

During its eight years of successful implementation, Kindy Kits has proven how to establish and consolidate ongoing relationships with school communities, work collaboratively with other internal  departments of council and work collaboratively with community organisations. 

It has also promoted and delivered the important messages of road safety and caring for the environment to kindergarten students and their families in the Bathurst area.