Click for our project

Update: We just barely missed this by 0.1% !! Thanks for all of your votes!

I’ve been watching the sustainable clothing company Nau ever since they first sent one of their employees up to Seattle for a story on the female parkour scene way back in v1 days. I was impressed with their dedication to giving back they built into every faucet of the company and the amount of great local giving they did (especially back in the beginning of their partners for change program).

So when I noticed them launching their first community grant I enthusiastically jumped in feet first and have already hit the ground running so to speak. Through the awesome help of the American Parkour community we’re already almost at the 100 vote minimum mark before this post is finished! APK has been so fast to action and giving in fact that we’re finalizing a potentially fantastic relationship with them shortly (more on that later).

We need your vote!

If we win we’ll receive $10,000 to put towards our own training center for our academy classes and Jump Washington outreach program, and all we need to be considered is a place in the publicly voted top 5.

There’s 293 other groups in the running and voting ends August 31st so please visit the link below and give us a high rating (5 stars)! More info on helping spread this campaign and win the grant in our resource doc.

http://www.nau.com/collective/grant-for-change/tyson-cecka-1026.html

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