I recently received an interesting question from Zak Zabriskie. Zak is a student writing an essay for a school project and I thought I would share my answer here as well since it’s becoming more and more relevant as time goes on:
Would an increase in popularity of Parkour be beneficial or detrimental to the philosophy and fundamentals of Parkour?
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!
It took the IRS almost 5 months to get it to us, but we finally are recognized as an official 501(c)3 not-for-profit public charity!
The reason this is so important is that we are now eligible for tax deductible donations, most goverment and federal grants, support from other likeminded NPOs and corporations, and most importantly it shows our commitment to serving the parkour community through our projects and initiatives!
More to come! For now if you want to help you can donate directly through google checkout or contact us to find out what you can do.
Pretty soon here I’ll be leaving for a week to teach Parkour to young kids in small towns around Beirut, Lebanon on behalf of the US Embassy. Although it’s definitely not the best time to visit, there’s no way I’m passing this opportunity up. Crazy world huh? I love it! More info on APK.
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!
I’m currently on the train (first blog post from the phone) coming back to Seattle from a brief stint in Vancouver, WA to spend some time with my parents and old friends. While there I threw together a quick meeting with some of the driving members of the Parkour community in Oregon to discuss where they as a scene wanted to develop and how to involve them more in the initiatives we’re pursuing in Washington.
When Parkour Visions first opened up classes at NW Crossfit we had an absolutely amazing first class with a lot people there. In the weeks that followed though we found that most of those people at the first class were our supporting friends in the WAPK parkour community who loved what we were doing but weren’t really interested in taking beginner classes themselves (they’d already gained most of that through the community).
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