There is a lot to be said for the impact of positive role models. With women’s skateboarding finally starting to get the attention it deserves, Women Skate the World are filling in the gaps between volunteer networks and skate NGOs – ensuring that women are present to encourage and inspire female skaters all around the globe.
Women Skate the World is an initiative set up by Amber Edmondson and Nanja Van Rijsse, after meeting earlier this year whilst volunteering for SkatePal in Palestine. We caught up with Amber, who is currently in Iraqi Kurdistan teaching workshops and supporting the locals at the brand new Suli Skatepark, built by Make Life Skate Life in Sulaymaniyah.
Words: Ruby Mateja
Hey Amber, tell us a bit about your mission!
Sure. We’re working with skateboarding NGOs globally to promote women’s skateboarding – this means getting female volunteers involved with skateboarding projects in communities around the world, providing positive role models for girls and women interested in skateboarding, and also working with the local skate scenes to help them expand their activities. We showcase different girl skate communities around the world, giving them a platform and linking up girls worldwide to ensure female presence within these NGOs and skateparks.
Why is it so important to have female volunteers present?
It’s not always the case with the young kids, but in many of the contexts that skate charities operate in, the older girls are not allowed to have contact with men. This can be a massive barrier – so it’s important to have other girls there to teach and encourage them.
And you want to train the locals to become instructors/skatepark managers themselves?
Yes, we’re working not only to teach girls and women skateboarding, but also to train them to be coaches; giving them work experience and leadership skills as well as building a sustainable girl skate scene that doesn’t require outside support.
Having been to Palestine to volunteer myself, I know that I had a few concerns before going out there; was it safe crossing the border, how to respect traditional values, etc. So I reached out to a girl volunteer who’d been there before…
Yeah exactly, we’re trying to set up a platform to make information more accessible and on the ground, keeping a balance of informative and informal – researching and providing important information about these places, but also giving quick little tips like ‘Arabic phrases to help you teach skateboarding’ and ‘How to beat the heat and get a good night’s sleep’ in Palestine.
You met Nanja whilst volunteering in Palestine – did you have any plans for a project like this before you went out there, or how did it come about?
She was my roommate for the first month I was there, so us meeting was totally random. I’d quit my job before heading out to Palestine, not knowing what my plan was exactly, but knowing that I wanted to create something. Then being out in Palestine, you know what it’s like when you’re volunteering – we were sharing this room with two little twin beds and we’d just fire ideas back and forth to each other.
“I’d quit my job before heading out to Palestine,
not knowing what my plan was exactly,
but knowing that I wanted to create something”
I started contacting projects like Make Life Skate Life and Skate-Aid, just seeing if they needed any female volunteers, not knowing what would come of it really – but because of the set-up of me and Nanja in that little twin room, as I was doing stuff she would get more and more involved. It naturally came together as we started to see shortages of female volunteers and thought that might be what was stopping them from getting involved.
So it began…
Yeah, we decided we wanted to go beyond Palestine, keep travelling around and promoting women’s skateboarding with different NGOs – making sure that skateparks are not labelled as male-only spaces and showing the importance of play in conflict areas.
When all you hear of a place is the scaremongering in the media, I can see why some people would struggle with the idea of going somewhere like Kurdistan or Palestine. But when you arrive in these places, what I’ve found is that you’re met with the most friendly and welcoming communities. Normal people living family lives, who are happy that their kids have been introduced to the world of skateboarding.
That’s the thing with these places, like Palestine or Iraqi Kurdistan, when you’re gearing up to go a lot of people are like ‘ah you’re so brave’ or ‘it’s dangerous there be careful’ – then you get there and it’s literally safer than Manchester; and much more welcoming. You know, you’d have to be careful if you went into the city at night and hung around the bazaar – but you know, it’s the same in Manchester, it’s the same in London.
“When you’re gearing up to go a lot of people
are like ‘ah you’re so brave’ […] then you get there
and it’s literally safer than Manchester”
It’s really hard to know before you go somewhere whether it’s just the media telling you it’s not safe or what the actual situation is like – that’s why we are setting up these support networks, for the women wanting to go out to support these projects in occupied territories or recent war zones, just to have someone to reassure you that it is safe there – to be careful of certain areas; some vital dos and don’ts.
Here in Suli I arrived without accommodation, not knowing anyone, and now I’m staying for the whole month with a family that I met at the skatepark; the community is much like what we experienced in Palestine.
Is there much of a skate scene going in Iraqi Kurdistan, and how has the new skatepark been perceived?
There is a small and growing scene – there’s a few guys who have been waiting like two years for this skatepark to be built. They get a bit annoyed sometimes by me taking over the park to teach all these four-year olds, but I just explain that more people skating means that more parks will be built. Nobody’s going to build a park just to benefit a few young men – it’s not going to happen. People build parks to empower women, to support children, to bring people together; I tell them if you want more parks you’re going to have to get involved in this
What’s the perception there about female skateboarding? I know it’s early days, but does it seem that the general consensus is that anyone can give it a go?
Definitely, it certainly helps that I am the only one teaching at the moment – for a lot of the locals their only perception of Western skateboarders is me. They must think that we’re all women!
“Their only perception of Western skateboarders is me.
They must think that we’re all women!”
There’s been a couple of times where I’ve been teaching a young girl and a few of the guys have tried to dissuade me saying ‘she’s too young’ etc. Then a couple hours later she’s skating down the flatbank and coming back in fakie and it’s like BOOM, that’s why I’ve been putting the hours in.
For the young kids that you’re teaching, did they know about skateboarding before? Because this is Iraq’s first skatepark right?
I’m not sure, because I’ve heard from locals that there might be one in Erbil, but then because of the miscommunications it’s hard to work out whether it’s a skatepark, a skate spot, or just that some people skate there. You know like in Palestine you get people referring to the skate park like: ‘are you coming to the ski yard?’ And you’re like, ‘yeah I’ll be there.’ This is definitely the first official one. I think that many kids were unfamiliar with skating, but because of the location of the Suli Skatepark – within a public park – many local kids and parents can see what’s going on and naturally come over to give it a try.
What are your own experiences with skateboarding – have you been skating for a while?
Not long at all! I used to skate as a kid but I stopped when I was 14, because of parties and, ironically, boys. Then last year I went along to a girls’ night in Manchester with a friend – the first time I’d been back on a board for 14 years- skating a board with my old high school nickname on it.
Why did you get back onboard?
I think a part of the reason I wanted to do this was because as I got into my twenties and kept thinking ‘ah I’m too old now’ – and it’s one thing being 26 and skateboarding but when you’re shit at it – it really feels like something you can’t do. But once you start skating the idea of ‘being good’ dissolves and you just get on with it.
Yes, and overcoming that fear is the most liberating thing. At my first skate session there were girls not yet in their teens skating together with women in their fifties, it was incredible…
Part of the reason that I want to be shouting about it all is because it’s the exact same things that always hold people back – whether it’s getting on a board, going to Palestine, whatever, the whole thing is ‘I can’t do it because of X, Y, Z’ – You can. You can do it, you can make it work somehow. Someone asked me recently ‘why skateboarding?’, ‘why not football or basketball or something else?’ – It’s not that I especially want people to skateboard, it’s more that I think a lot of people are held back by fear. Whether it’s fear of getting hurt, fear of what people will say, fear of looking stupid, – that’s what I’m working to get rid of. Trying to fight the fear around things. All these reasons you have in your head telling you why you can’t do something – skateboarding or volunteering, starting a course, going somewhere different – if you have the right things in place you’ll just go ahead and do it, do you know what I mean? And when you do it you think why didn’t I do this earlier!
And when you make that step quite often that’s the time when everything else starts to fit into place.
Exactly, that’s the main thing that’s inspired all this. There isn’t a good reason not to do the things you want to do. Just work it out, and if you fail you fail, just try again.
If you would like to donate to Women Skate the World or find out more, you can do so here: www.womenskatetheworld.com
And if you are interested in volunteering at Suli Skatepark, send your application to info@makelifeskatelife.org
