By Doug Smith, Vice President of Strategic Partnerships, Lutzie 43 Foundation
Seven months into this series, I want to tell you what I have actually been hearing in these rooms.
It is not “no.” Almost nobody argues that roadway safety does not matter. What I hear instead is quieter and, frankly, more honest:
“Doug, I agree with you. I just don’t know whose budget this comes out of.”
That is a fair answer. It is also the last real obstacle between good intentions and a funded program, and it is the one this month’s edition is built to remove.
In March, I named three blind spots that keep roadway safety out of corporate giving portfolios. The third one was simply: we don’t know where to start. So, this month, I’m going to stop making the case and start handing you the map, the budget owners, the reporting frameworks, a 90-day sequence, and the metrics that will keep the program alive when the next bad quarter arrives.
Why I Am Writing This in August
Because of where you are sitting right now.
Across most organizations, enterprises and companies, August is when 2027 budgets get real. Department heads are building first drafts. Finance has sent the templates. Some of you are already on a second pass, defending line items and cutting the ones nobody can justify. By late fall, the numbers harden. By December, they are commitments.
Which means the window for roadway safety to become a funded philanthropic or giving line in 2027, rather than a good idea somebody mentions again next spring, is open for roughly the next sixty days. Not because we’re running a campaign. Because that’s how your budget calendar works.
A cause that shows up after the budget is built waits a year. Every time.
So read the rest of this as something you can act on inside your current planning cycle, not as a philosophy you will get to eventually.
Start Here: Roadway Safety Doesn’t Have One Budget Owner. It Has Four.
This is the single most useful thing I can say to a company that wants to act and cannot figure out how.
Roadway safety doesn’t fall through the cracks because nobody wants to fund it. It falls through because it sits in the seam between four departments, and every one of them assumes it belongs to another.
- 1. EHS and Safety: Owns incident tracking, training, and the recordable rate, up to the property line. The moment an employee pulls out of the parking lot, the most dangerous thing they will do all day becomes invisible to the safety dashboard.
- 2. Risk Management and Insurance: Owns fleet policy, commercial auto, workers’ compensation, and general liability. This department is already paying for crashes. It rarely funds prevention outside the fleet, and almost never funds prevention for employees in personal vehicles.
- HR, Benefits, and Wellness: Owns health plan spend, absenteeism, leave, disability, and the employee assistance program. This is the team that funds smoking cessation, financial wellness, and mental health support, and does not currently fund anything addressing the leading cause of death for Americans between the ages of 1 and 54.
- 4. CSR, Community Investment, or the Corporate Foundation: Owns grants, sponsorships, employee volunteerism, and the annual report. This is where most people assume roadway safety belongs. It is one of four legitimate homes, and often not the best one.
Four possible owners means, in practice, zero owners. The first tactical step is not a dollar figure. It is a name.
Before you decide what to spend, decide who has ownership. Programs that survive have a person attached to them. Programs that die are the ones everyone agreed with, and nobody owned.
And here is the part that changes the conversation: in most organizations, this doesn’t require new money. Three of those four budgets are already absorbing the cost of crashes. You are asking them to move a fraction of it upstream, from paying for outcomes to preventing them.
Where Roadway Safety Maps in Your Reporting Frameworks
- GRI 403, Occupational Health and Safety. The standard explicitly contemplates voluntary programs that promote worker health beyond occupational exposure. Commuter and off-duty driver safety programs are disclosable here.
- UN Sustainable Development Goal 3.6. A named global target to halve deaths and injuries from road traffic crashes. Very few corporate giving categories arrive with a UN target that specific and that measurable.
- UN SDG 11.2. Safe, affordable, and accessible transport systems, the community-facing complement to 3.6.
- SASB and industry materiality. For transportation, logistics, utilities, construction, and any fleet-heavy sector, driver safety and vehicle incident metrics are already treated as financially material. You are not inventing a disclosure; you are populating one.
- The “S” gap. Most programs are heavy on environmental and governance and thin on social, and the social pillar is where credibility is hardest to demonstrate. Roadway safety is one of the few social commitments that produces hard, countable outcomes instead of sentiment scores.
One practical note on the term ESG itself. Plenty of companies have retired the acronym in favor of sustainability, responsible business, or corporate citizenship. Call it whatever your organization calls it. The substance does not change, and I would rather you make a safety decision than win a labeling debate.
A 90-Day Path, Timed to Your Budget Cycle
Ninety days from August lands you in November with a funded, owned, measurable program instead of a talking point. Here is the sequence, and note that the first thirty days are the ones that matter most, because that is the work that has to be in your hands while the 2027 draft is still editable.
Days 1–30 (August): Build the baseline, this is your budget request
Do not commission a study. There is no time and there is no need. Everything you require is already in your systems. Pull three years of:
- Motor vehicle claims, fleet and personal vehicles on company business
- Workers’ compensation claims involving a vehicle
- Leave and short-term disability cases connected to crashes, including employees caring for injured family members
- Any seat belt, speed, driver behavior or telematics compliance data you already collect
- Your employee footprint by commute distance and market
In nearly every company I have worked with, nobody had ever assembled these numbers in one place. When they do, the number is bigger than anyone expected. That number is your business case, you didn’t have to buy it, and it is the single most persuasive thing you can walk into a budget review holding. “Here’s what crashes cost us last year, and here is what prevention costs” is an argument finance understands.
Days 31–60 (September): Choose one entry point and assign the owner
One entry point. Not a strategy document, not a task force, one program with a named executive sponsor, a dollar figure, and a launch date, submitted into the 2027 draft while there is still room to move. If you want a pre-built on-ramp rather than designing one from scratch, our new partnership tiers below are exactly that, and they are structured to drop cleanly into a budget line.
Days 61–90 (October): Launch, and set the measurement before you do
You don’t have to wait for January. Launching internally this fall gives you a quarter of real behavior data to defend the 2027 line item with while the budget is still being finalized, and it means your people are safer for the holiday driving season, which is the worst stretch of the year on American roads.
Put the 43 Key Seconds safe driving initiative in front of your people: a 43-second commitment before every drive built on four things, Clear Head. Clear Hands. Clear Eyes. Click It. Mentally present and unimpaired. Phone away. Eyes up and scanning. Belt on, driver and passengers, every trip.
Baseline your metrics before launch, not after. A program that cannot show a before-and-after is a program you will be defending from memory in twelve months.sponsibility. The absolute safest community your company will ever build is the one right outside its own front door.
Where to Start: Our New Corporate Partnership Tiers
Everything above works whether or not you ever call us. But I will be honest about why we built what I’m about to describe: it came directly out of conversations mentioned at the top of this article.
Companies continue telling us they were ready. But… There was no defined on-ramp, no clear sense of what a first-year commitment looked like versus a serious one. So, last month the Lutzie 43 Foundation unveiled a tiered corporate partnership structure. Three levels, each with defined programming, defined deliverables, and defined ways to measure what you got.
Every tier starts in the same place: your employees and their families – essentially, your first and primary community. Not a logo on a banner. Not a table at an event. The people who drive to your building in the morning and drive home to their kids at night.
ENGAGED Partnership
Built for organizations that want to move now and prove the value internally before scaling. This tier brings the 43 Key Seconds safe driving initiative inside your walls, into onboarding, wellness programming, safety meetings, and fleet training, with participation and behavior metrics you can report inside the first quarter. Low barrier to entry, real behavior change, and a clean business case to take back to your leadership when it is time to expand.
IMPACT Partnership
For companies ready to extend past the parking lot. Multi-year commitments let us build programming that compounds: sustained employee and family engagement, licensed Safe Driving Summits in the markets where your workforce lives, works, and plays, and support for the PFL “Prepared for Life” Scholarship.
INVESTMENT Partnerships That Move the Needle
This is the tier for organizations with the reach to change outcomes at scale, across a full workforce, a full fleet, employees’ families, and every community in your operating footprint. Deep, multi-year, co-built programming; roadway safety named as a stated priority in your corporate responsibility reporting; a multi-market summit presence; and a sustained scholarship pipeline. These are the partnerships that do not just protect one company’s people. They change what the standard looks like for an entire industry.
If you are looking for a place to start, start here. Full tier details, programming inclusions, and investment levels are at lutzie43.org/corporate-partnership, or reach out to me directly at doug@lutzie43.org and I will be happy to walk your team through them and help you find the right fit for your mission, your footprint, and your budget cycle.
A Word on the PFL (Prepared for Life) Scholarship
It appears in the mid and enterprise tiers, and it is the piece companies most often skip past, so let me be direct. Funding a Prepared for Life Scholarship is not a feel-good line item. It is a direct corporate investment in the next generation of roadway safety advocates, students already leading safety work in their schools and communities, carrying it into vocational programs and universities, and eventually into workplaces like yours. Corporate dollars determine how many of them we can support. That is as clean a link between a check and an outcome as philanthropy gets.
And the standing caveat from May still holds: it doesn’t have to be the Lutzie 43 Foundation. There are outstanding organizations doing this work across the country. Pick one. Just pick one this year.
Gratitude First, and Then a Different Kind of Ask
Before I go one more sentence, I want to say something plainly, because it would be easy to read everything above and hear it wrong.
The organizations that sponsor our individual campaigns, our events, and our specific outreach efforts are a very large part of the reason this Foundation has reached the schools, campuses, and communities it has. Those contributions are not lesser. They’re not a steppingstone to something more serious. They fund real programming that puts the 43 Key Seconds safe driving initiative in front of real students, real employees, and real families. I’m grateful for every one of them, and I don’t want a word of this article read as diluting or minimizing them. If that is what your organization does for us, keep doing it. We need it, and we will keep asking.
What I want to point your attention toward, specifically inside your 2027 planning, is something additional: support at a foundational, partnership level. Beyond a single event. In support of the larger mission.
Here’s the part nonprofits rarely say out loud
We have budgets too.
Like every large enterprise and small business reading this, and like every roadway safety advocacy group, coalition, and 501(c)(3) working alongside us, the Lutzie 43 Foundation has real fiscal planning requirements. Not only around campaigns, events, and outreach, but around the operational, overhead, and staffing costs that make campaigns, events, and outreach possible in the first place. Same pressures you have. Same calendar you are working right now. The same need to know in October what we can commit to in March.
Event-by-event sponsorship funds an event. It cannot fund the person who plans the next forty of them.
When we can budget against committed, partnership-level funding, the math changes on our side of the table. We broaden campaigns. We host more summits, expand our footprint in more markets, in more of the communities where your employees live, work, and play. We sustain and add to the outreach team that actually delivers the programming. And we plan the mission with confidence instead of hope.
Which brings me to the phrase I would ask you to keep
If you take one thing out of this article, take this one, because it is the whole thing in five words.
Reactive Regret to Proactive Responsibility.
That’s exactly what the 43 Key Seconds safe driving initiative asks of a driver, four habit-changing decisions before the car moves, instead of a lifetime of wishing those decisions had been made. Clear Head. Clear Hands. Clear Eyes. Click It.
It’s what this series has asked of Corporate America for eight months, fund prevention on purpose and intentionally, instead of quietly absorbing the cost of crashes you never tried to stop.
And it’s what I’m asking of you as a funder, planned, committed, partnership-level support built into a budget, rather than reactive giving assembled after the need appears.
Same principle, three applications. We’re not asking anything of you that we are not asking of ourselves, or of every driver we reach. Be proactive in your support.
What to Measure So the Program Survives Budget Season
A program that cannot be measured gets cut the first-time margins tighten. Track from day one:
- Seat belt compliance rate, observed, self-reported, or telematics
- Preventable crash rate per million miles, for fleet operations
- Motor vehicle claim frequency and severity, year over year
- Employee participation and pledge completion rates
- Absenteeism and leave days attributable to crashes
- Community reach, students engaged, summits hosted, scholarships funded
Two rules. First, report leading indicators alongside lagging ones. Behavior moves before crash numbers do, and if you only track crashes you will look like you are failing for the first eighteen months. Second, put the numbers in the same report as everything else you measure. Roadway safety earns permanence when it stops being a story and starts being a row in the table.
One Honest Caution
Do not do this with a poster.
A flyer in the break room and a line in the newsletter will not change how anyone drives home tonight. What changes behavior is repetition, leadership that visibly models it, and a specific action small enough that people will actually do it. That is the entire design logic behind 43 Key Seconds: not fear, not statistics, not a signed pledge in a drawer, four decisions, forty-three seconds, before the car moves.
If your senior leaders do it and talk about doing it, your workforce will. If it lives only in a slide deck, it will not.
My Ask This August
Philip Lutzenkirchen was twenty-three when he died. He wore number 43 at Auburn, and the people who knew him talk less about the football than about how he made a room feel, the joy, the loyalty, the way he pulled people in. In June 2014, he made a set of decisions on a single night that cost him his life and cost another family theirs.
His father, Mike, and the Lutzenkirchen family have spent more than a decade since making sure those decisions teach something. Live like Lutz. Love like Lutz. Learn from Lutz. That is the whole Foundation in nine words.
So, this month I’m not asking for a check. I’m asking for two things that cost nothing and that both fit inside the window you are already working in:
- A name. Who in your organization owns roadway safety? If the answer is nobody, that is the finding, and it is a finding you can act on before the 2027 draft closes.
- A baseline. Thirty days, data you already have. Find out what crashes are already costing you and put that number in front of whoever is holding the pen on next year’s budget.
Everything else follows from those two. And when you are ready for the third step, it is already built and waiting at lutzie43.org/corporate-partnership, an on-ramp at every level, from a first-year commitment to a partnership that changes what an entire industry expects of itself. We will help you pick the entry point, build the programming, set the measurement, and write the reporting language that makes it defensible to your board.
Roadway safety has never lacked evidence, urgency, or solutions. What it has lacked is an owner. Be the company that assigns one.
Hopeful,
Doug
doug@lutzie43.org | www.lutzie43.org
Hopeful,
Doug
doug@lutzie43.org | www.lutzie43.org
This Article Is Part of a Continuing Series, “My Challenge to Corporate America.” Explore the Series:
- Part 1 – A Challenge to Corporate America: It’s Time to Make Roadway Safety Part of Your 2026 Philanthropic and Social Responsibility Plans
- Part 2 – The Real Cost of Employee Roadway Incidents: What Companies Don’t See
- Part 3 – Roadway Safety: The Overlooked Philanthropic Opportunity in Corporate America
- Part 4 – Driving Is the Most Dangerous Thing We All Do Daily, So Why Don’t Companies Address It?
- Part 5 – The Power of Early Adopters: How Leading Companies Shape a Safer Future
- Part 6 – What I Learned on the Road, and What the 100 Deadliest Days Demand of Us Right Now
- Part 7 – How Corporations Can Influence Safer Communities Where Employees Live, Work and Play