Winning team shares ‘Safe Rides, Safe Youth’ campaign

Presenter: Lane Transit District is spotlighting different nonprofits at its monthly board meetings, and April 15 the board recognized Connected Lane County. Development Coordinator Shannon Pocan:

Shannon Pocan: My name is Shannon. I’m the development coordinator at Connected Lane County and the mentor of this team.

Connected Lane County is a local nonprofit. We serve youth ages 14 through 24, who have barriers related to education and employment. We connect them to hands-on career-connected learning and STEM learning opportunities, paid internships, job training, mentorship, wraparound support, and more.

codeORcreate is our free three-day hackathon where youth step into roles as designers, developers, and problem-solvers. They work in teams to support with support from industry mentors, and they take on real community challenges and build tangible solutions. 

This year the challenge was made possible by the generous support of LTD. So thank you again.

In just one weekend, we saw some measurable impact. So after the event, the number of students who felt confident designing a real-world solution nearly doubled. There were strong gains in teamwork and problem-solving with most students shifting into higher confidence levels after the event. And we also saw increased awareness of LTD services.

So before the event, many students didn’t know that transit is free for K-12 students. And afterward, far more students reported feeling confident in explaining and using that pass. And most importantly, students reported being more likely to use public transit and recommend it to their peers in the future.

These results show that when young people are given the opportunity to engage with real-world challenges, they don’t just build skills, they build confidence, awareness, and a stronger connection to their community.

Again, we’d like to thank LTD for your generous support of the 2025 codeORcreate challenge, and I’m happy to hand it over to our winning ‘Team THIS,’ who I had the privilege of mentoring, to present their project. 

Ira: Hi everyone. We are Team THIS (Theo, Hanesh, Ira, Simon) and this is our presentation, about awareness campaign, ‘Safe Ride, Safe Youth, Moving with Confidence.’

And I will introduce: This is Theo. This is Hanesh. My name is Ira, and this is Simon. So our challenge was to create an awareness campaign that will educate young people how to use LTD buses and know their rights.

We figured out that a lot of youth don’t know how to report unsafe behavior and to whom to report this unsafe behavior. Also, they don’t know how to use feedback form on LTD website and sometimes online form doesn’t provide a quick action in the moment.

So our goal was to educate young people to teach them how to report, through the LTD website, how to identify and talk to the LTD officer, how to report to Customer Service. And also we proposed additional safety measures to make real-time reporting easier and yeah. 

So, about target audience: At first we thought about youth and young adults. Also, we want to include some students because they’re also using LTD buses to ride to school and to the clubs after school.

Parents and guardians are also an important part of a target audience because they’re worried about their children. So our name and slogan, ‘Safe Ride, Safe Youth, Moving with Confidence’ reflect our target audience and it’s easy to understand.

So, let’s move to the deliverables and Hanesh.

Hanesh: So we designed some deliverables including our social media strategy which includes one infographic and two video reels, and we also created two bus advertisements, which will be present inside of each LTD bus, and of course this presentation.

So here’s our social strategy. So first we plan to launch QR code ads inside the bus so that when an incident happens on the bus, people can scan the QR code to report incidents in real time.

And we also plan to share three social posts over the course of two weeks, using youth-friendly graphics and videos. And our plan is to reach the youth, and also the parents and guardians. 

So our first post is going to be an awareness reel. Our second is going to be an infographic more tailored towards the parents and guardians.

And our third, it’s going to be another video instructing youth to report unsafe behavior at the station and more focused on the youth. So now we have Simon with the infographic.

Simon: So my infographic starts out with a statement: ‘Youth safety, know your resources, move with confidence.’ I designed this first page very intentionally to be very colorful and have fun graphics, specifically in a scrapbook style, to be very attention grabbing towards youth and young adults.

I also wanted to include a more Oregon side, so making sure that we had a local picture, that actually was from one of our colleges. So, young adults. The second page, this infographic states, kind of, if you feel unsafe or if you want to learn more, here are some ways that LTD has to feel safe and to make sure that they have your back.

So, this includes talking directly to an LTD safety officer, also making sure how to identify them and using Customer Service. Again, how to identify Customer Service, requesting a night stop and when this is available, being able to report through the LTD website and making sure that everybody knows that LTD spaces are a safe place.

Putting attention on these two, I personally had a experience on the LTD bus that I felt unsafe. I did not know how to report, and when I tried to find the report forms, I got confused and couldn’t figure out which form to use. So I really wanted to show attention to how to find this report form and make sure that youth knew how to use.

And I also didn’t know, that I could report to Customer Service. So making sure that every youth and young adult could know that customer service had their back is very important. And Theo, with the ad campaign. 

Theo: Thank you, Simon. The flyers I designed were made to be placed inside the buses. My main focus was accessibility and ease of use, so I made both English and Spanish versions. I also focused on making the flyers easy to read and simple to use. The first set of flyers focuses on reporting unsafe passengers or passengers that make other passengers uncomfortable.

The second set of flyers focuses on filing complaints, giving compliments, or giving general comments about LTD drivers.

Hanesh: So I made some video content to post. Our first video is because many youth don’t know how to access the LTD report forms, and this video is an engaging way to teach youth how to access these forms. And it’s an accessible video meant for both youth and also parents and guardians to be able to understand it.

So now we have our inspiration. 

Ira: Yeah, I’ll talk about my inspiration. We used blue colors, which is the colors of LTD for this presentation. And also for me, a blue color it’s something calm and safe. Yeah. 

Simon: When trying to find inspiration for my infographic, my mind originally went to the Cascadia Wildlands Instagram posts, which focus on a scrapbook kind of style post, which is easy to read, has really 3D-layering looks and cute graphics, which personally engaged me. So I thought it would also engage other youth.

Theo: I was mainly inspired by LTD’s existing advertising, to stay coherent with LTD’s branding, especially since it’s already very accessible in its work to put attention onto important information. 

Hanesh: My inspiration for making the videos was my past experience. Around from roughly 2020 until about 2023, I was making videos for a YouTube channel. I was moderately serious about it, so I decided to use those skills to make the two videos you saw earlier today and also to edit the videos.

Presenter: LTD welcomes the winning team at the codeORcreate challenge, mentored by Connected Lane County. You can learn more at their website, ConnectedLane.org.