Center for Safety Equity in Transportation

rural • isolated • tribal • indigenous

Safety Equity and Transportation in Tribal Communities – Navigating Collaborative Approaches and Indigenous Partnerships

  • Completed

    CSET Project #: 1709

    Project Funding: CSET and UI

  • Start Date: September 2017

    End Date: January 2020

    Budget: $120,000

Principal Investigator(s)

Rula Awwad-Rafferty

  • Environment and behavior interaction
  • Factors affecting quality of life in the built environment: physical, cultural, social, and psychological
  • Culture and resettlement: resettlement of cultural groups, elderly, health care applications, and military
  • Adaptive reuse applications and community building
  • Sense of place: place attachment and identity, conflict and place, security and place attachment
  • Vernacular architecture Interdisciplinary design education
  • Experiential approaches to understanding the physical and metaphorical parameters of interior spaces
  • Studio applications

Project Summary

The power of community-engaged research lies in the opportunity to listen, learn, and develop sustainable /resilient co-authored products that have the potential of greatly impacting the quality of the environmental and quality of life for the communities served. These types of engagements succinctly reveal gaps, inequities, and potentials that often are not reported or misunderstood. This proposed research aims to identify effective approaches for community engagement and foster relationships that lead to revealing these inequities in the transportation safety equity paradigm relative to specific tribal communities.

This project will strategically build and sustain outreach with and into three tribal communities (Nez Perce, Coeur d’Alene, and Kalispell) with whom the University of Idaho has memorandum of understandings for the first year of the five year CSET duration. We will:

1) effectively engage relevant parties needed for larger research efforts,
2) better evaluate what work has been done and the effectiveness of existing programs,
3) establish a baseline understanding using existing and relevant data to inform and evaluate CSET safety efforts, and
4) utilize data generated for targeted projects in future grant years.

Project Products

1709_Rafferty_CSET_Final_Report.pdf