Who we are

In 1999, researchers at Meharry Medical College, with funding from General Motors, issued the seminal report, "Achieving a credible health and safety approach to increasing seat belt use among African Americans" (published in 2000 in the Journal of Healthcare for the Poor and Underserved) because injury and death rates among minorities were higher than those of the general population and directly related to the failure to use seat belts. Also in 1999, U.S. Transportation Secretary Rodney E. Slater and Meharry convened the Blue Ribbon Panel to Increase Seat Belt Use Among African Americans.

Insurance and financial services provider State Farm had a long track record working with partners to tackle vehicle-safety issues. The Meharry study offered to State Farm a new opportunity to focus its resources on a major ethnic-based public health disparity in traffic safety. Like other insurers, State Farm understood that failure to buckle up lay at the root of many traffic deaths. What it hadn't known was how disproportionately deadly that failure was for unbuckled African Americans. In 2002 the Meharry-State Farm Alliance was formed.

The Alliance's outreach has since expanded to a wide range of vehicle safety issues. It specializes in teen driver education through service-learning, car and booster seat safety through oversight of the Middle Tennessee Child Passenger Safety Center, and partnership-building through community safety programs. The Alliance's scientific research forms the basis of its education programs and informs policy makers with whom the Alliance has worked to pass safety legislation in multiple states.

What we do

The Alliance works with partners across the country to influence risk-taking behaviors by motorists and their passengers. The Alliance's mission is to encourage correct and consistent use of seat belts, which are known to reduce the odds of death or injury in a vehicle crash by 50%.

How we do it

The Alliance has a three-point strategy for increasing seat belt use.

• Conduct research that provides knowledge about seat belt use and risky behaviors.
• Educate and inform others using knowledge gained from the research.
• Influence public policy using evidence uncovered in the team's research.

These strategies fall under the umbrella of community-building, and the Alliance enjoys partnerships with others throughout the country who share the goal of increasing safety and preventing deaths/injuries on our roadways. To understand how the Alliance--really, anyone--can address risky behavior, read about the Alliance's Developmental Ecological Model.