What can five bucks of reflective tape, navy seals, and a little girl standing beside a highway teach us about how to succeed in road safety?

Last week, our Global Programme and Communications Manager Judy Williams presented a novel Austroads’ webinar entitled “The Importance of Connection in Road Safety and Singing our Success from the Rooftops”.

Judy was winner of the 2025 ACRS Women in Road Safety Award presented by Austroads and shared her insights from 10 years’ working with partners across the world in a unique way – driven not by obligation but rather by inspiration, evidence and empowerment – to make their roads safer.

Participants rated the webinar 4.8 out of 5 stars. It’s an inspirational watch for anyone working in road safety keen to learn more about what makes an effective road safety programme, the importance of narrative, and why we must work together and never give up.

Thank you Austroads for providing Judy with this opportunity to share her insights and experience.

Webinar Summary

Road safety is a team sport – a marathon, not a sprint. The greatest gains occur when many elements synthesise and successes are shared. This webinar draws on experience across more than 140 countries, working alongside partners from every road safety ‘walk of life’ – including governments, development banks, industry, mobility clubs, and NGOs – united by an ambitious goal: a world free of high-risk roads, despite a crisis that claims more than 3,000 lives each day.

From advocacy at the United Nations, to aligning diverse stakeholders around common objectives, to collaborating with communities at the roadside in low- and middle-income countries, the International Road Assessment Programme (iRAP) and its partners are helping make safer journeys a reality.

In this session, Judy Williams, winner of the ACRS Women in Road Safety Award presented by Austroads at the 2025 Australasian Road Safety Conference, examined how a clear vision, strategic partnerships, and active community engagement create the conditions for meaningful and lasting road safety progress, and why communicating success matters as much as delivering it. It explored how connection brings clarity and impact: bringing the right people together at the right time with leadership and evidence; building capacity to deliver strategic implementation plans; unlocking investment and partnership opportunities; and learning through evaluation.

Using practical tools such as the Elements Wheel and SWOT thinking, Judy showed how progress doesn’t require doing everything at once, but through understanding which levers to pull and when, harnessing the power of many through community-building, mentoring, and partnerships.

Finally, the webinar highlighted the importance of making success visible. By sharing outcomes through human stories, compelling narratives, data, imagery, and effective communication, we can inform, persuade, inspire, and accelerate change. Progress comes from showing up, staying connected, learning from setbacks, and never giving up.