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Some excellent news since our last update! What started as a side project from Janine working with the Spruce Street Teen Crises Center has expanded to a relationship with New Futures serving low-income apartment complexes, the Lincoln Center public after school program, and one or two other groups who are interested in using parkour teachings to improve the lives of those who could definitely use it. This has inspired us to change our name to Parkour Visions and here’s an example from an email I just received for another potential program:

So, we’re trying to think of ways to make our program “not just another program” that the kids participate in and then forget about when they go back to their own environments and personal lives: We want to inspire them. We want them to find their own inspiration inside of themselves. We want to give them hope. We want them to make their own hope. We want to give them tools like social skills, communication skills, problem solving skills, and conflict resolution skills…and we want them to learn these skills without even realizing it through enrichingly fun and awesome activities!!

LIKE PARKOUR.

We were hoping on being able to use the profits from our general classes to fund these types of reduced cost or free outreach programs, but while the classes are growing rapidly they’re not to that point yet (we’re hoping to move into our space this month which will help).

So we reached out to the parkour community by teaming up with AmericanParkour (more on that later) and entered into a fundraising competition on the excellent GlobalGiving site to subsidize the cost for future programs. That was near the beginning of last month…and it worked We’ve raised over $4,500 with your help so far, earned a permanent place on the GlobalGiving website, and are already being featured in another competition this month for sports organizations called Ready, Set, GIVE.

We’re very excited but have a crazy amount of work to do now, so the site may get a bit quiet We’ll make sure to update those who’ve donated through GG (even $10 helps!) as often as we can, and for everyone else – spread the word!

Train safe,
-Tyson

Is on the 9th this month and will be hosted at Northwest Crossfit’s Seattle location -link to class page- The focus is as always on introducing new people to the fundamentals of parkour and what you need to build an individual practice. There’s a limit of 30 people at the Seattle location so email classes@parkourvisions.org to reserve your spot and be sure to show up a bit early if you haven’t been before to fill out the release (or bring it with you!) Minors need to bring their parents or grab the form beforehand and get it filled out. Come prepared with clothing you can move in and a waterbottle! See you there!

See more photos on the Parkour Visions Flickr group

Is on the 11th this month and will be hosted at Northwest Crossfit’s Seattle location -link to class page- -link to facebook event- We have new freshly made precision trainers to bring to this one to accommodate everyone in the balance warmup and the focus is as always on introducing new people to the fundamentals of parkour and what you need to build an individual practice. There’s a limit of 30 people at the Seattle location so email classes@parkourvisions.org to reserve your spot and be sure to show up a bit early if you haven’t been before to fill out the release (or bring it with you!) Minors need to bring their parents or grab the form beforehand and get it filled out. Come prepared with clothing you can move in and a waterbottle! See you there!

See more photos on the Parkour Visions’ Flickr group

Several Parkour Visions folks will be freezing their asses off today at Seattle’s flagship REI store doing some Parkour outreach on such a busy shopping day. We’ll be braving the cold outside the front doors armed with naught but various flyers and info packets to distribute to the peoples. We’ll be talking about Parkour and Parkour Visions’ mission from about 10am-4pm, come say hi and warm us up a bit!

Jeremy and I just had a great meeting with a nice District Crew Chief from Seattle Parks and Rec at Cowen Park. We learned a lot about the inner workings of park maintenance, park history, park volunteering, and the process needed to fund and build a parkour specific play structure.

We’ll now be able to take back the things we learned about Cowen to the WAPK community (what is safe for training and what is not), add more opportunities for volunteer work for our members (in the loose sense of the word since we haven’t opened membership yet), and followup with the Recreation folks to see what sort of classes, events, and structures we could help get going there!