The Foundation for Ashley’s Dream has a clear-cut mission. We will aggressively gather and focus resources on reducing the threat of drunken drivers every day until it is gone.
The measures of our success and progress will be declining rates in the injury and fatality counts attributable to drunken drivers in our community, in our state, and in our nation.
To accomplish our goal, we employ multiple strategies. We call them “The Five Ps”.
Make people aware of the threat to them and their loved ones by shining the light on the horrible physical, emotional, and personal losses delivered by drunken drivers every hour of every day. Drunken drivers must be revealed as the imminent, ubiquitous, and personal danger they are to all of us — as real a danger as smoking or AIDS, threatening our loved ones, and ourselves, whenever we pull out of a driveway.
For those who are active in the cause, for those who seek to make an impact on the problem at any level: family, school, community at large, state, or nation. We must give them money, information, manpower, recognition, rewards, education, and any other form of help we can imagine and effect. Currently, two key activities for The Foundation are awarding college scholarships to cause activists and giving grants to individuals and organizations for cause related projects.
Focus on creating real-time, on-site activities, processes and systems that keep drunks from being allowed to slide behind a steering wheel. If, for example, you can convince the bars in your community to agree to provide a breathalyzer test to every departing patron who intends to drive, think how much safer your kids and parents and spouses might be.
Those inebriated whom we fail to prevent from driving — those who get through the defenses — must be detected on the roads and removed. We must actively support every police or citizen law enforcement mechanism that is effective in finding drunken drivers on the road and getting them immediately off. Your loved ones cannot be hurt if we remove the threat that is currently at large on our streets and highways.
This means having strong laws, aggressive prosecutors, and severe, deterring, well-known, and consistent punishments. It also means having courts that will order strong punishments and effective behavioral correction processes, and correctional institutions and agencies that will carry them out.