by Tony Hawk
I live in just off of on . Get to and turn right on to and then turn left on then left on and its the house to your right. Got all that? Now Pleeeeeeeeeeeese come. I need to sk8 or I will die.
In 2001, I got invited to do a demo at the grand opening of a public skatepark near Chicago. The community that invited me was affluent—they could afford to fly in a celebrity skater from California as part of their opening-day fanfare. I arrived the day before the big event, and they asked if I wanted to ride the park that afternoon, alone. I jumped at the chance, figuring I’d give it a test run before I skated the place in front of a crowd.
The park, unfortunately, was a joke—a nonsensical arrangement of poorly constructed obstacles. There was no sense of flow: A set of stairs abutted a bank, so if you ollied down the stairs, you’d run into the bank, and if you rode down the bank, you’d slam into the stairs. The ledges were six inches high instead of the standard two feet. And there was a bizarre, narrow, winding sidewalk with tiny unrideable berms on either side. It felt like the park had been designed by someone who knew nothing about skateboarding, and had been built by whatever sidewalk contractor happened to make the lowest bid.
I rolled around the place for a while, blowing easy tricks, trying to find a zone where I could actually do some real skating. After a while, I just gave up.
Some of the parks-and-recreation officials approached and asked me how I liked their new facility. I didn’t to want to hurt anyone’s feelings, but I also didn’t want to lie. I said, “Honestly? It’s pretty bad.”
And they said: “You know what? That’s what all the local kids have been saying. But we told them, ‘Just wait until Tony Hawk gets here. He’ll show you how to ride it.’”
Because of my failed test flight, they decided to bring in a vert ramp to make sure I’d have something to skate for the big demo the next day. After I was finished, they carted away the ramp and gave the kids their crappy skatepark.
Back home, as I started telling this story to friends, it occurred to me that I was in a position to help stop such foolishness from recurring—to fix the ongoing disconnect between the people in positions to build public skateparks and the kids who ride them.
Skateboarding was going through an upswing in popularity at the time, and this one looked like it would stick. The X Games and my video game had introduced skating to a whole new market: spectators. People who’d never stepped foot on a skateboard were now stopping pros like Bob Burnquist and Andy Macdonald on the street, asking for autographs.
More significantly, young kids were buying skateboards like never before; there were more than 12 million skateboarders in the United States in 2001, but only about 2,000 skateparks. And a lot of those parks were bad—as I’d just learned firsthand outside Chicago.
I also knew that many communities were resistant to building any kind of skatepark. The impoverished ones couldn’t afford it. Others were worried about liability. And some feared a skatepark would attract too many punks.
But here’s the thing: Kids are going to skate whether or not civic leaders create a place for them to do it. So they end up skating in spots that city officials or school administrators or local business owners have deemed off-limits. That means youngsters who’d never before been in serious trouble suddenly find themselves getting ticketed or arrested or suspended—simply because they want to pursue a sport that they’re passionate about. And once a kid gets on the wrong side of the law, for whatever reason, his world can speed downhill.
Doing the Charitable Thing
At this point, my video game was doing very well, and I was making more money than I’d ever imagined. So I approached my family about the idea of starting a charity to help build public skateparks in low-income areas. Pat thought it was a great idea. My brother Steve agreed to do the paperwork to get it started, write the grant application, and then work part-time as executive director until it got off the ground. My name was more recognizable than ever at that point, so we decided to call it the Tony Hawk Foundation.
We put together a board that included the three of us, my other sister Lenore, and a trio of people with expertise we needed: Kim Novick, then development director for the Surfrider Foundation, who knew all about charitable fundraising and creating programs; Miki Vuckovich, an old friend and longtime skate-mag editor who had experience lobbying for municipal skateparks; and Pierce Flynn, former executive director of the Surfrider Foundation, who had actually run a nonprofit.
Our first order of business was to craft a mission statement. This was what we came up with: “The Tony Hawk Foundation seeks to foster lasting improvements in society, with an emphasis on helping children. Through grants and other charitable donations, the Foundation supports programs focusing on the creation of public skateboard parks, and other causes. The Foundation favors programs that clearly demonstrate that funds received will produce tangible, ongoing, positive results.”
Here I am at the Nathan Lazarus Skatepark grand opening in Nederland, Colorado, named after the 5th grader who helped me win big money on Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?
In late 2001, I wrote a check for $50,000 to kick-start the foundation. I also promised to donate future appearance fees. Some of my major sponsors at the time (Activision, Heinz Foods for Bagel Bites, ESPN, and Quiksilver) contributed as well.
From:
To:
Subject: r u high
Dear Tony Hawk,
Were you high when you were on, “Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?”
Shortly after we became an official nonprofit, I got invited to be on a celebrity edition of ABC’s hit game show, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? With an assist from Steve as my “phone a friend” lifeline (he’s not that smart, just good at googling), I won $125,000 for the foundation. Thanks, Regis. (A few years later, Fox TV asked me to be a contestant on its series Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?, also for charity. That time I got invaluable help from one of the show’s “classmates,” an 11-year-old named Nathan, and won $175,000. I was so impressed by Nathan that, in front of the cameras, I promised him we’d help finance a skatepark in his hometown. The park cost about $500,000 total, and we kicked in $75,000. Two years later, I attended the grand opening of the Nathan Lazarus Skatepark in Nederland, Colorado. I stood beside him as he cut the ribbon, then skated for a while in front of a few thousand people. That was a good day. (And it’s a good skatepark.)
To get the word out about the foundation, we issued some press releases, and I began to talk about it in interviews and on talk shows. Jaimie Muehlhausen, my company’s in-house graphic guru, teamed up with my old friend Ray Underhill to build a website (tonyhawkfoundation.org) so communities could fill out our grant application and read tips on how to develop a community skatepark.
As the first wave of applications poured in, some patterns emerged. A big percentage came from small, impoverished rural communities in the Midwest (particularly Wisconsin, for some mysterious reason). We also got a lot of applications from the West Coast: California, Oregon, and Washington, which all have strong skate scenes.
The West Coast applicants tended to want to build big concrete parks with deep bowls designed primarily for older, experienced skaters. The Midwesterners had cheaper, more modest ambitions. Most were small farming towns seeking to buy prefab obstacles (quarterpipes, fun boxes, pyramids) that they could install on existing flat surfaces. A lot of their proposed parks were the exact same size: 14,400 square feet. It took us a while to figure out that they were converting old, unused tennis courts into skateparks.
The first year we donated to parks, we gave away over $350,000 to 105 projects, with grants ranging from $1,000 to $25,000. The applicants had to be legitimate nonprofits, and they had to be working toward creating a public skatepark in an underprivileged community.
This Ain’t No Soccer Field
After the foundation had been up and running for a couple of years, two of our board members took over to run the show. Mi
ki came on as executive director, and Kim stepped up to oversee development and fundraising efforts. Today, the Tony Hawk Foundation has four full-time employees.
In addition to poring over grant applications to determine which projects should receive our money, Miki and his staff have worked to turn the foundation into an invaluable educational resource for anyone grappling with the painful logistics of getting a public skatepark built.
When a skater or parent calls, we tell them how to get their project started and how to push it through the system. When a municipality or local parks-and-recreation administrator calls, we stress the importance of bringing local skateboarders into the process very early, to ensure that they build a park their constituents will actually use.
Dear Mr. Hawk,
My friends and I are trying to open a skatepark in . It is very sad to see that skaters here do not have a place to skate. Would you sponsor us? We will discuss money matters later.
Sincerely,
We remind them that the design decisions that go into building a skatepark are far different from those of such cookie-cutter facilities as basketball courts or soccer fields. No two skateparks are alike. They can be made of concrete, asphalt, wood, steel, or plastic—or some combination thereof. They can range from 1,000 square feet to 100,000 square feet. Too often, bureaucrats heed the advice of reps from a particular line of modular skate obstacles (often made by large playground equipment manufacturers), who sometimes present themselves as unbiased experts but invariably push their own brands.
In 2007, we collaborated with a nonprofit called Skaters for Public Skateparks and the International Association of Skateboard Companies to draft, print, and distribute a 128-page Public Skatepark Development Guide (publicskateparkguide.org). It quickly became the go-to guide for anyone looking to create a public skatepark. We also field a flood of phone calls and e-mails from skaters and officials who have specific questions, and we’ve compiled a public database of municipal officials who’ve succeeded at building skateparks and who are willing to give advice to their peers in the parks-and-recreation world.
At the time this book was written (summer 2010), the foundation has provided technical assistance to some 1,700 communities, and awarded more than $3 million in grants to more than 450 low-income communities in 49 states. (Time to step up, Connecticut.) About 350 of the parks that have received our money are now open, serving around three million skaters annually. Based on those numbers, we figure the foundation has helped to create more than 10 percent of the estimated 3,000 skateparks in the country.
Celebrity Backscratching
One of the keys to the foundation’s growth has been our annual “Stand Up for Skateparks” benefit. It’s one of those high-end fundraising events in which well-heeled people pay a few hundred dollars each to eat good food, watch famous performers, and bid on donated auction items. Only ours is far from black tie. It’s aimed at kids, and the food is mostly tacos, burgers, hot dogs, and macaroni and cheese. And the entertainment comes in the form of skateboarders and BMXers doing a demo on my vert ramp.
The first one was held in 2004 at a Pinz bowling alley in Los Angeles. The band Blink-182 played, and a bunch of celebrities whom I’d met over the years (Tom Green, David Spade, and Jon Favreau, among others) showed up. We grossed more than $700,000 that year. More important, we planted seeds for future events.
Turns out that one of the richest guys in Southern California, grocery chain magnate Ron Burkle, has a son who loves skateboarding, and after the first event Ron graciously invited us to use his 14-acre estate in Beverly Hills for the next fundraiser. Word got out that our first one had been very kid-friendly, with lots of giveaways (free skate shoes, free backpacks, video games, and toys), and we drew the attention of several celebrities with kids who skate. People like Sean Penn, Jamie Lee Curtis, Lisa Kudrow, Kathy Ireland, and Chuck Liddell (shredordie.com/video/tony-hawk-ride-presents-stand) lent their names to the event and donated generously. We realized we had a fundraising hit on our hands.
In 2008, we decided to hold a secondary event in the Hamptons, in New York, introducing a whole new crowd to California-style fundraising. That one didn’t raise as much money as we had hoped, so in 2009 we moved the secondary event to Las Vegas, where it did very well and where we’ll keep it for the foreseeable future.
But the primary event will remain in Beverly Hills. We’ve drawn some cool celebrities over the years, including Lance Armstrong, Andre Agassi, Benicio del Toro, Pamela Anderson, Johnny Knoxville, Travis Barker, Mia Hamm, Howie Mandel, Leeza Gibbons, Sean “Diddy” Combs, Fred Durst, Jakob Dylan, Flea (of the Red Hot Chili Peppers), John Fogerty, Kenny G, Arsenio Hall, Ed Helms, Anthony Kiedis, Dylan Bruno, Stefan Lessard, B. J. Novak, Trent Reznor, Russell Simmons, and Victoria Beckham. In addition to Blink-182, we’ve had musical performances by Perry Farrell, Social Distortion, and Rancid.
The annual Stand Up for Skateparks fundraiser has turned out to be the foundation’s greatest single source of revenue. In recent years, we’ve added a live “pledge drive” format, in which guests are asked to donate money to a specific skatepark project in an especially needy area. At the 2007 event, over the course of about 15 minutes we raised $80,000 for a park in Compton, the notoriously gang-infested city near Los Angeles. Since then, we’ve also held live pledge drives for parks in New York City, San Diego, Las Vegas, and Watts.
Meanwhile, over the past decade or so, I’ve been invited to several fundraisers organized by other sports celebrities, including Muhammad Ali and Andre Agassi. The Agassi event is the big sports-celebrity charity gala of the year. It’s held in an arena in Vegas, where Agassi grew up, and the performing musicians have included such huge names as Celine Dion and Reba McEntire. Andre is an amazing philanthropist who has single-handedly financed a school for troubled kids in his hometown. At his event, I agreed to donate a free private skate performance and a tour of my office (and lunch) for 10 people. I was stunned when two separate people bid $50,000 for that package, for a total of $100,000…just to see me skate!
In return, Andre donated a private tennis lesson at one of my events, which brought in $10,000 for the Tony Hawk Foundation. You might notice that my donation earned more for his foundation than his did for mine. But don’t get any ideas. It’s not that people are willing to pay more to see Tony Hawk skate than they are to learn how to hit a tennis ball as hard as Andre Agassi does. It’s just that his event attracts a richer crowd.
Clearly, I need to poach his guest list.
Flipping Flapjacks and Mowing Lawns
We select our grant recipients based not only on financial need, but also on how much evidence they provide that the local community is coming together to support the skatepark project. That’s actually become a key factor: Have residents, especially local skaters, rallied around the project? It’s also become one of my favorite things about the foundation, and about skateparks in general.
The foundation’s true mission, it turns out, goes beyond simply giving skateboarders a curvy place to play. We’ve discovered that the benefits that derive from the process of getting a skatepark built, while not tangible or quantifiable, can be just as valuable as the product itself. If it’s done right, a skatepark project can teach young people a lifelong lesson in the power of perseverance, and remind adults that kids with funny haircuts and pierced lips not only can be good people, but also can get things done.
Despite all of the mainstream credibility that skateboarding has received in recent years, many adults still regard skaters as disrespectful troublemakers. Business owners chase them away. City officials pass ordinances to impede them. Police give them tickets. Stigmatized as outsiders, many skateboarders grow up feeling disenfranchised, and the institutionalized image of skaters as delinquents becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
In a lot of towns, though, a skatepark—and the effort that goes into getting one built—has proven to be the perfect hammer to break that cycle. At its best, it works like this: A skater get
s in trouble (maybe a ticket, maybe a call home from the principal) and complains to his mom and dad that he has no place to skate. His parents persuade him to write a letter to City Hall, or to attend a city council meeting. The kid gets some friends together, puts on his cleanest shirt, sits through a boring meeting, and then makes a nervous but respectful plea for a skatepark. City officials, impressed by the courteous request, decide that it’s a good idea and order their parks-and-recreation staff to look into it. The city agrees to donate land for the skatepark but requires the skaters to find the money to build it.
With the help of one or two city officials and a handful of parents, the kids form a committee and spend the next year or two raising money and community awareness. They apply for grants. They hold car washes, barbecues, raffles, and skate-a-thons. They do yard work for their neighbors and donate the wages to the skatepark fund. Eventually, the whole town rallies behind the determined youth brigade. The police chief writes an editorial in the local newspaper praising the kids for their efforts. The local Lions Club holds a pancake breakfast, and the hometown newspaper runs a photo of some beribboned World War II vet flipping flapjacks for skaters.
This is when attitudes change. The kids realize that the adults really want to help them, and the adults realize that the kids are willing to work hard for this thing they love. Most important, the kids discover that they can actually accomplish something by working within the system rather than beating their heads against it or sitting at home complaining about it. They learn how to communicate in a way that will encourage adults to listen, and they go from feeling alienated to empowered.
I don’t want to sound sappy, but I’m convinced that when teenagers, parents, police, politicians, business leaders, and civic groups all get together and push the same wheel, and that wheel actually turns, the effort alone makes the world a slightly better place.