Each year, State Farm hands $5 million to its youth advisory board, made up of 30 youths aged 17-20, and asks them to award grants to deserving service-learning initiatives led by youth in the U.S. and parts of Canada.  We think it's a great idea to give this group of interested and dedicated youth the opportunity to fund proposals they deem worthy of support. This year, more than 600 projects applied for grants and 64 were successful, including a SMARTRISK No Regrets proposal.  

This grant will allow two No Regrets schools, Northern Secondary in Toronto and Leo Hayes in Fredericton, to develop distracted driving materials for social media campaigns directed at their peers. These No Regrets teams will run competitions in their schools, challenging students to submit entries in any of a variety of media - videos, posters, online, radio and TV public service ads. Youth from No Regrets schools across Canada will help SMARTRISK and a marketing expert partner choose winning entries from both schools. Our marketing partner will then offer its expertise to help develop a campaign to widely publicize the distracted driving winning entries.  

Best of luck to all the student participants. We'll be sure to share the winning entries with you. 

Logan Van Dyk, 20, of Fort Langley, B.C.,  knows, perhaps better than most young men, how submitting to the wrong kind of peer pressure can lead to serious trouble. 

He admits he just scraped through Grade 12 after falling in with what he now calls "the wrong group of people". Logan joined them in skipping classes and smoking pot.  That summer, his parents kicked him out after he was caught smoking in his room and he went to live with a friend.

Two weeks later, his friend borrowed Logan's downhill mountain bike, coming back to tell him he'd found an awesome jump in a construction site that Logan had to try. When Logan arrived, the friend showed him the 20-foot jump he'd done onto a dirt pile then urged Logan to try it. Logan was dubious and to this day is doubtful the friend had actually done the jump himself, as he'd claimed. "At first I felt unsure and my instincts told me not to do it, but my friend egged me on and I felt obligated to do the jump. I rode my bike to the back of the pile, got as much speed as I could and tried to ride off the side. But when I got to the edge, I was unable to pull up on my handlebars and I did a nosedive straight into the ground. My front shocks bottomed out and I hit the top part of my head, sending my nose into my chest. Right away I knew something was wrong because I could no longer feel my body."

Logan, who hadn't been wearing a helmet or any other gear, spent the next month at Vancouver General Hospital where he had surgery and was told he'd never walk again. He then spent another nine months at a rehabilitation centre. He's since moved into his parents' basement, sees little of these old friends and says he's matured. His family has been very supportive and Logan's long-term goal is to get into sports broadcasting.    

Logan is pleased to present with SMARTRISK No Regrets Live to help students understand that they shouldn't feel pressured by their peers to cross their Stupid Lines. "It's hard," he says. "You want to do something because you want to fit in." But Logan will tell them during the shows, "I'm not telling you to live your life in fear of getting injured. I am simply telling you to listen to your gut feeling before you do something that could potentially harm you, no matter how much your friends tease you or call you names. Because I have learned that being cool for a moment is not worth a life of regret."