Santa Ana Safe Mobility Ambassadors Initiative
Organization: Latino Health Access
Funding Request: $500,000
Project Summary
The Santa Ana Safe Mobility Ambassadors Initiative is a planning and capacity-building project led by Latino Health Access (LHA) with the vision of building community capacity and power to improve transportation and mobility safety. It is designed to strengthen collaboration between the City of Santa Ana, the Santa Ana Unified School District, and community members to identify and address the drivers of disproportionate vehicular injury and death in working-class neighborhoods of color. While the City has ongoing traffic-safety and active-transportation efforts, these are often developed without sustained coordination, shared decision-making, or meaningful input from the people who rely on active transportation, and the project is built to close that gap.
The core strategy is power-building rather than conventional outreach. Drawing on popular education methodologies and the promotor/community health worker model, LHA and its partners (The Bicycle Tree and Santa Ana Active Streets) will identify, train, and mobilize local champions as Safe Mobility Ambassadors through school assemblies, trainings, community pop-ups, and educational bike activities. These activities double as structured, community-centered data collection points where trained Ambassadors co-lead grassroots data collection on travel behaviors, safety concerns, and barriers related to municipal codes, and map community assets. LHA and the Ambassadors then synthesize findings, present them back to partner entities, and develop collective guidelines for collaboration on active transportation solutions grounded in ongoing community engagement.
Project Descriptions and Transportation Equity
Santa Ana’s transportation challenges are acute: home to 316,000 residents in just 27 square miles, the city sees 50% of households without vehicles and 50% of collisions involving motor vehicles, per its Vision Zero Safety Initiative. With 77.3% of residents Hispanic/Latino and divested zip codes also majority Latino, low-income communities of color are simultaneously the most at-risk for traffic violence and the most dependent on active transportation for commuting to school and work. Compounding this, the City’s installation of infrastructure with limited community engagement has intensified traffic violence and exposed system gaps, and the absence of community-driven education and system navigation has reinforced the criminalization of active transportation in disinvested areas, with youth penalized for e-bike use on sidewalks or cycling in restricted zones like Downtown Santa Ana, where code updates were never communicated to impacted communities.
The project advances transportation equity by centering the needs and voices of these at-risk communities in active transportation planning. Its engagement is itself a power-building approach: the promotor model positions community members not as participants in a predefined process but as leaders, experts, and co-designers, with bilingual Promotores walking alongside residents to support leadership development and create pathways into decision-making spaces. Activities are held in schools, neighborhood spaces, and community hubs where residents already gather, facilitated in English and Spanish, and designed by Safe Mobility Ambassadors to be accessible across literacy levels and aligned with local norms. A specific equity aim is to reduce the transportation-related criminalization of low-income communities of color by co-designing educational outreach that communicates municipal code updates, addressing a barrier that has fallen hardest on youth.
Community Benefit
The initiative benefits households with limited or no access to a private vehicle in low-income areas of color, those who walk, take transit, cycle, or use e-bikes to commute, and who face higher exposure to traffic risks because they live where infrastructure offers limited designated non-automobile travel. Two priority groups are emphasized. Older adults aged 65 and over, who use alternative transportation or walk and are more susceptible to serious injury, experienced 75 pedestrian injuries and two fatalities per SAPD data, and the project’s culturally and linguistically relevant education will address their needs around awareness, visibility, and safe crossing and cycling. Youth, the most affected by transportation inequities and the most criminalized, saw 57 children injured while walking between 2023 and 2025, and the program prioritizes the most divested, high-collision zip codes (92701, 92703, 92704).
Engagement activities intentionally involve residents typically excluded from planning, through active participation in listening sessions and convenings between the School District and City that inform the future design of school-based classes and community pop-ups. Priority populations not only shape the design of activities but also build their capacity in the broader implementation and infrastructure of active transportation, and data collected from listening sessions support community-informed school and community education that increases understanding of clean transportation safety, facilitated by LHA Promotores. Crucially, the project works to reduce the criminalization of low-income communities of color by co-designing outreach that delivers municipal code updates to the communities affected.
Partnerships and Structure
The partnership uses grant funding to support early-stage, cross-sector partnership building tailored to Santa Ana’s transportation inequities, with decision-making power embedded in the community through structured feedback loops and collaborative spaces. The roles are organized as follows:
Latino Health Access (Lead Applicant): Coordinates and facilitates meetings and listening sessions among collaborators and mobilizes bilingual Promotores to collect data from these convenings, informing program design. LHA brings more than 12 years of experience leading community engagement for Active Transportation Plans, Complete Streets and Vision Zero efforts, Safe Routes to School programs, and SCAG-funded safety campaigns.
Santa Ana Unified School District (Sub-Applicant / Co-Designer): Identifies and advocates for the challenges students and their communities face in commuting, contributes to a future Bike & E-bike school program drawing on best practices from other districts, and collaborates on school-based education through assemblies and trainings. (LHA notes a verbal commitment and an existing MOU, with a formal signature pending due to staffing and scheduling constraints.)
Santa Ana Active Streets (Community Partner): Engages participants through community walks, bike rides, and traffic garden events that let residents experience safety challenges firsthand and provide real-time feedback.
The Bicycle Tree (Community Partner): Supports engagement through bicycle education, repair clinics, and hands-on safety demonstrations, particularly for youth and low-income residents.
Equity is built into the structure by positioning community partners as trusted messengers who ensure accessible spaces and resources for residents who may not participate in traditional public meetings, and by mobilizing Safe Mobility Ambassadors to facilitate peer dialogue, co-lead data collection, and support community-wide planning. LHA works with its systems-level partners to build in processes for community input and leadership throughout the planning process, using collaborative listening sessions and a final convening to surface priorities, build shared understanding, and identify alignment across institutions and community members.