By Kathy Gallant

M.L. MADD hosts successful open house

Apr 26, 2017 | 10:08 AM

The Meadow Lake chapter of Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) is an active community organization. The group is continually recruiting more volunteers, and always strives to educate and spread awareness to the public about the perils of impaired driving. To that end, they held an open house on April 25 in the conference room at the Northwest Health Facility and welcomed a few new faces.

The event involved a recap of the volunteer, awareness, and fundraising endeavours that the chapter was involved in over the last year. This list included working with local authorities to conduct traffic safety checkstops, attending school rallies, and participating in memorial walks in Meadow Lake, Dillon and and Pinehouse. Last November, they had a flag-raising at City Hall for annual Red Ribbon Campaign, movie nights at Dynasty Twin Cinemas, and a float in the Stampede Parade. The chapter also gives out a yearly scholarship to a graduating student who is persuing a career in emergency services.

Newly-elected president Lucinda-Jo Toews was happy with how the event went. She was a member who originally got involved in Students Against Drunk Driving as a high school student.

“It was good, and we had a few new members come out,” she said. “We will always welcome more.”

The open house also included interactive activities including a ‘Sum-it-Up’ game where people guess how many servings are in certain beverages, and using impaired vision goggles that visually mimic inebriation to do simple tasks like walking in a straight line.

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Board member Stephen Pollock said the group strives to stay as visible as possible in their attempts to get their message out to citizens.

“We’re active on social media,” he said. “We’re also working at updating our website, we have a phone, email. People can help as much or as little as they’d like with our activities.”

He said the group’s main concern is doing as much as possible to discourage people from making a choice that would could ruin lives.

“What we want people to take away from our advocacy and messaging is that if you want to drink, it’s fine – we just don’t want people mixing alcohol and vehicles,” he said. “We want people to be brave enough to their friend or loved one and tell them that they shouldn’t drive if they’re impaired by alcohol or drugs.”

In a 2015 Statistic Canada study, Saskatchewan recorded the highest impaired driving rate among the provinces. There were 575 incidents per a population of 100,000. This rate is considerably higher than that of any other province; Alberta ranked next with a rate of just over half that of Saskatchewan (314 per 100,000 population).

kathy.gallant@jpbg.ca  

On Twitter @ReporterKath