Safe Kids Val Verde Seeks to Expand Child Safety and Injury Prevention Work

Car Seat Safety Inspection conducted by Safe Kids in partnership with state agencies.

Safe Kids Val Verde County is a branch of the Safe Kids Worldwide Coalition, founded in 1998, that works through Val Verde Regional Medical Center to bring health and safety experts, educators, non-profit organizations, foundations, local and state agencies, parents, and caregivers together to prevent and reduce childhood injuries. 

“It’s more than just scrapes on the knee or regular things like that,” Safe Kids Val Verde Coordinator Luzelena “Lucy” Cazares shared. “It’s more of preventing injuries in motor vehicle accidents, with bike safety, sleep related deaths, things of that nature.” 

The non-profit organization, in partnership with various coalitions and safety programs, often holds events that bring awareness to various child safety issues. Holding bike helmet fittings and giveaways during a recent BMX event, Car Seat Safety Events during Child Passenger Safety Week, and more. “Depending on the month, there’s usually some kind of observance for sleep related, SIDS awareness month, care seat safety months, for example,” Cazares elaborates. “That’s one of the big pieces of our local organization, doing the car seat inspections. I’m a certified child passenger safety technician, so I’m able to meet with people one on one to do education on making sure their car seats are installed correctly and that their children are buckled in and secured in their car seats.” 

Though Safe Kids hopes to gain more funding in the near future to be able to continue its work and provide items like bike helmets and car seats to the community, the coalition’s involvement with the Val Verde Regional Medical Center has helped with some of their funding needs. “They help with a small portion of their funding going towards Safe Kids, but mostly through having my position as the coordinator, leading the coalition.” 

Cazares shared that this is her first position directly related to injury prevention but she has a background in social work and has worked with children in multiple capacities, including non-profits and non-profit clinics. “This position was like meshing those two things together, the health aspect and working with children, and then adding injury prevention, but I’ve always loved working with children." 

Most of the day-to-day work of the coordinator is community outreach and setting up at different events like health fairs around the city with other partner organizations and presentations for entities like the SFDR-CISD ACE (After school centers on Education) Program, parent presentations and so on. “Being able to spread awareness and education is the main goal,” Cazares said. “One of my goals is to start working more on getting funding to provide more safety resources that families need.” 

One of the events that Cazares, in collaboration with other agencies and local organizations, has planned for the community is a bike rodeo, hoping that it “gets kids involved in the community and helps teach them safety when it comes to bicycles.”

“Hopefully at this event in May, I’ll be able to do a helmet giveaway for kids and they’ll hopefully be able to stay and get some education on bicycle safety as well.” Cazares concluded by sharing that her biggest goal for Safe Kids is to re-build the coalition back up fully, as it died down during the COVID-19 Pandemic and has been slowly ramping up again since. “I really wanna start working on building the coalition and building those relationships that we should have through those other community agencies, so if there is anyone that is already working with kids or interested in injury prevention in any capacity, helping with car seat events, bike safety, home safety, etc, that they just reach out to me so that they can be looped in to the planning of these events and we can build this back up.”