Skateistan recently announced a massive, three-year partnership with the global women’s sport fund Women Win called Roll Models, which aims to train 72 young women leaders and support them in creating programs and events that will reach 900 girls. The program will be run by Skateistan’s two-year-old Goodpush Alliance program, which serves as a nexus for resources related to skate aid and global skate charity work. The Roll Models project will consist of intensive leadership trainings in three countries: Germany, the Netherlands, and Greece. Trainings will take place in a different country each year, going in the order above. More importantly, the partnership includes 105,000€ in seed funding for participants’ projects. While the announcement itself is exciting, we wanted to know a little bit more about why and how the program is happening, so we hopped on the phone with Rhianon Bader, Skateistan’s Goodpush Manager, to learn more. As any conversation with a smart, engaged skate activist tends to, our interview veered off into all sorts of interesting topics, including the struggle that many people working in the world of what she calls “social skateboarding” face when it comes to mental health.
Interview by Tobias Coughlin-Bogue
How did the partnership between Skateistan and Women Win come about?
We got in touch and decided to try to link up and try to do something together and in the end it worked out. We got funding to do a three year project called Roll Models. It’s pretty sick. Women’s skateboarding is growing really fast but it’s still nowhere near equal. It’s still pretty unbalanced. I think also if you look at the industry or even within social skateboarding, most of the people at the top of these organizations are men. So we’re just trying to promote women’s leadership within skateboarding, and I guess social skateboarding.
Like the NGO world of skateboarding?
Yeah, well, this project comes from more of a community perspective. So it’s for young women ages 15-30 who intend to kind of work on building girl’s skateboarding in their own communities. So it doesn’t necessarily have to be an NGO, it can be some more informal. It’s kind of just leadership and community building, but there will inevitably be NGOs involved. We’re definitely going to be connecting with existing social skateboarding projects in each of the focus countries.
What are those countries?
It’s going to be happening in Germany, the Netherlands, and Greece. We’re already in touch with some of the projects that are there.
I was definitely thinking of Women Skate the World, who I know are in Amsterdam and Athens.
Definitely. Them and obviously Free Movement SB. There are a couple good projects in Germany. What’s cool is that some of these projects already have women founders and stuff, which I think is pretty interesting. They can take part directly in the activities. What is cool with this project is that there are the events and the leadership camps and bringing people together, so building that community within Europe, but there’s also funding. One thing that’s lacking in social skateboarding or skateboarding charities around the world is access to resources.
For sure, you see so many people who are doing it as a side gig but are so stressed. Because they can’t really afford to be doing it.
Yeah, it’s passion projects. Hopefully with this, we can help people to get a bit more stability and grow a bit more sustainably. Or maybe just try out new things they can’t normally afford to try out.
How much will you have to give out?
Over a few years, there will be a seed funding of 105,000€. That’s quite a lot, considering that a lot of these projects are working with almost no budget.
Yeah, any amount of money is huge if you’re just trying to get boards for your skate classes or whatever.
Yeah and it can also be for events and stuff like that. One-off things where people can hold some kind of skate jam or whatever, and have a bit of a budget to do something and have some prices. Rent a venue, whatever they want to do.
Yeah, it’d be amazing to have a women’s contest in Europe! Kind of like Wheels of Fortune.
Totally. I mean it’s up to the people that apply to bring the ideas. We just want it to be something super flexible and for the ideas to come from young women themselves. And to find ways to engage girls and women that are least likely to engage in sports. Maybe if they’re coming from minority backgrounds, they’re facing all kinds of extra hurdles due to legal status or whatever else. For Skateistan, our focus is on working with kids, but this is a Goodpush project. Goodpush is more focused on working with projects — the teachers, the people that are running things, etc. So this is kind of going to be the next generation of that.
We’ve heard a lot more about the Goodpush Alliance recently, and I was hoping to use this interview to ask a bit more about that. For someone who doesn’t know what it is, what’s the mission of the Goodpush Alliance?
So the Goodpush Alliance is basically a knowledge sharing network for social skateboarding projects all around the world. It can be NGOs, charities — but we also want it to be inclusive of projects that aren’t necessarily registered. It can just be one person shows where they’re using skateboarding to do something good for their communities through skateboarding. It was created so that projects can learn from each other and connect. We can pile our limited resources together and achieve more. Trying to have a bigger impact together, basically.
For this particular project, Skateistan’s contribution is using the Goodpush Alliance to find good candidates or to help organize the applications or…how does it work?
So the Goodpush Alliance started a couple years ago, and what we’ve been doing since then is a lot of workshops and trainings. We have online resources and toolkits. This year we had a couple different conferences and such. With the Roll Models project, we’ll be helping to run the leadership camps. So bringing trainings and stuff like that to the table.
Oh you’re actively doing the education via the Goodpush Alliance?
It’s through the Goodpush Alliance so it’s coming through Skateistan. I’m the manager of the Goodpush Alliance, so I’ve been the one kind of organizing these events in the past. But what’s cool about these projects is it will also provide opportunities for some of the role models within Skateistan worldwide to teach. Each year, we’ll be able to have two women staff members from the skate schools in Afghanistan, Cambodia, or South Africa who will help facilitate the leadership camps. They’re going to be basically bringing their knowledge from the ground to Europe, which is kind of awesome. It’s usually the other way round, for travel reasons and finance reasons and visas and those kind of things.
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But with the resources you have now, they can afford to come?
Yeah. They can share and learn and connect with other people that they probably wouldn’t usually have the chance to. So that’s going to be super cool. And another thing we’re going to do at the end of the three years is, at the end of the three years, Skateistan and Women Win together, we’re going to make a mental health through sport toolkit. So it’ll be specifically focused on girls and women, and of course it’ll have the skateboarding angle, but it’ll be more about sports generally. Because that’s where Women Win is usually working.
Something I noticed in your press release was that you said that participation rates for women in Europe are super low. Was that relative to male participation rates, or just below what they should be in general?
It’s between 10-20% participation for young women. I don’t know what the ages are there. But it isn’t compared to men, it’s just in general. If you talk to 100 young women, only 10-20 of them are active.
And it should be way higher of that regardless of gender?
For lots of different reasons! Obviously physically it’s way better, but there’s so much research that links physical activity to mental health. It’s definitely an issue. I don’t know what the rates are for boys and young men. It’s definitely higher than that, but it’s probably still not enough given how things are these days.
With video games?
Video games and smart phones! But yeah, it’s really low, and I think Greece had the lowest. It was somewhere around 10%, which is really crazy. So anything you can to promote kids being active is good.
I wholeheartedly agree with that, and I definitely think the mental health benefit of skateboarding is huge.
Yeah, for sure. And at Pushing Boarders, the mental health issue was a big thing. Especially the mental health of people who are running social skateboarding programs, the staff and volunteers. This has been a topic that, from the Goodpush side, we’ve been following up with from other organizations, like Free Movement. We just had a Goodpush summit, like a four-day event at Skateistan South Africa. As part of it, we asked the 25 or so participants what they wanted to do the final session on. They decided they wanted to do it on mental health, so they decided they wanted to do it on mental health. So we had an hourlong discussion and brainstorm on what factors contribute to stress and burnout and depression and all that kind of stuff. Then we talked about what are the needs within social skateboarding, like how can people be supported and what resources we already have.
Kind of preparing that toolkit?
Yeah. And, I dunno, I just see all this stuff as super interconnected. We’re talking about Roll Models, which will have an impact on the mental health of the 900 girls that we hope to reach through the programs, but obviously part of it is that there needs to be more awareness for passionate, ambitious young people who are doing these projects. That they have to look out for themselves as well. Like, I went to Skateistan when I was 26 and I didn’t know anything. And I fully burned out, because I had no one around to tell me about the risks of the work and investing yourself like this. I think that can be part of it too, just building awareness of self-care and that kind of thing.
I was really impressed by both Amber [May Edmonson’s] speech at this year’s Pushing Boarders and the article Will [Ascott] wrote for us as well. I feel like Free Movement, they really see some tough situations. Maybe they’re the canaries in the mineshaft here. That’s a dark metaphor, but…
Yeah, for sure. Because they’re working on the front lines with kids that have gone through so much. You definitely get that secondary trauma type of stuff happening. And I was also super impressed by that article from Will. When I read it, I was like, “Oh my god, I remember feeling all of this, and I would not have had the courage to put that out there.” I think things are changing, and there’s an openness to people talking about things. It’s super good.
Yeah, I was impressed too that, as a cis man from a Western country, he was very able to talk about the deeper emotional stuff without feeling ashamed or embarrassed of it. I dunno, I’m just a big fan of Will in general!
Yeah, and especially because it was based on this thing where he had to take a step back from a project that he founded. Which, I think, for anyone that’s a super painful experience and one that’s filled with guilt and all these feelings. To be writing openly about it so close to the fact is amazing, and I think all that kind of stuff helps other people. Like, anytime any of us are talking about the reality and how we’re struggling, it helps other people. Hopefully through Goodpush and through Roll Models, we can find ways to work on this with these other awesome projects that are going out and doing good stuff.
Yeah, to bring it back to Roll Models, how do people apply, and what will the first phase of the program look like?
Ah yes, a very practical question! We were just talking about that this week. It’s looking like the call for applications for the first leadership camp will be in January, and that leadership camp is likely to be in spring in Berlin next year. Each year the leadership camp will accept 24 participants, and we’ll fund their travel to come over to the camp. Every year will be a different location, so 2021 will probably be the Netherlands and 2022 will probably be Greece.
Skating and learning in Berlin for two weeks, I’m jealous!
Yeah, it’s definitely going to be fun. I have to say, I like my job.
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Check out Goodpush’s website — which includes an online resource center with toolkits, events, and a new discussion forum — to keep up to date on all things skate charity, and for updates about the Roll Models application process.
Photos courtesy of Skateistan.
