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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

Project Spruce Street kicked off this week in Seattle, bringing parkour classes to at-risk youth in the heart of downtown!

Janine Cundy, Tyson Cecka, and Brandee Laird headed downtown on Thursday (May 28th) to kick start an initiative that will bring parkour classes to halfway houses every week, free of charge. Lessons focus on much more than just technique, delving into the importance and joy of pride in achievement, respect for training grounds and community, personal growth, and how to face fear responsibly.

“It’s incredibly rewarding to head this initiative,” Cundy said “these kids deserve to have some fun.  Everybody should have something that they are proud they can do, and this gives that feeling to new kids every week.  We hope that the people we get to know through these classes will look to the Washington Parkour and American Parkour communities as paths to furthering their knowledge of self, and parkour.”

The first class went better than expected, with lots of enthusiasm from the students and a surprising amount of natural talent.  There was an immediate recognition of the need for this kind of program in the facility, and so we anticipate this to be a project that will be growing and changing for a while to come. For more information, please check out -Spruce Street’s website-

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

Join Parkour Visions as we offer our first Bellevue class on Sunday, March 15 from 3pm – 5pm at Northwest Crossfit in Bellevue. The free class will be modeled after our highly successful free monthly workshop in Seattle; it will be led by veteran traceurs Tyson and Rafe and will focus on fundamentals such as safety, running, jumping, climbing, vaulting, and rolling.

Parkour Visions’ future plans call for expansion into the Bellevue area with regular classes, and this marks our first East side offering. If you or someone you know lives on the East side and has an interest in learning Parkour, email us at classes@parkourvisions.org or stop by this free class to learn more about our classes, and membership options.

Northwest Crossfit Bellevue is located at 12121 Northup Way, Suite 110, Bellevue WA 98005.

A hugely exciting new project is in the works, and if everything goes right I’m going to need all the help I can get.

Lately, I’ve been in contact with Spruce Street SCRC, a program designed to be a resource for runaway or street youth between 12 and 17 years old.  If you check out their website at http://sprucestreetscrc.tripod.com you’ll see that their mission is to “provide secure, short-term, non-institutional residence and support services for an average of fifty youth per month. The ultimate goal of Spruce Street SCRC is to reunite youth with their parents or primary caregivers when possible, while promoting the emotional and physical well-being of youth residents. This is accomplished through intensive case management, advocacy and family mediation efforts.”  All in all a pretty inspirational place.

But where do we fit in?  What can we do to help out?  Well, Spruce Street welcomes volunteers to come in and teach programs of all sorts.  Arts, philosophy, health, meditation, the works.  After initial introductions and some talk about what parkour is, and the precedent of it helping disadvantaged youth in Westminster, they’re very excited to see how the PNPWA can help out.  On Monday, I’m heading in to learn more about their facility and what we can do together.

The Parkour Visions is extremely excited about this opportunity, and although it’s in it’s infant stages right now we’re very optimistic of the outcome.  Check in regularly for updates!

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!