Help build a park in Afghanistan

May 15, 2008 @ 10:46 AM

A skateboarding project in Kabul, Afghanistan called Skateistan . Basically we want to build a skate park in Kabul and then hand it over to Afghans to manage. The project founders Sharna, Travis and myself lived in Kabul last year and started skateboarding with kids there and found it to be a great way to interact with them and they were super keen to learn. We only had 3 boards last year but this year we have 30 brand new setups from Blackbox, 30 pairs of new Fallen shoes and a heap of second hand boards to impress the kids with. TSG have sponsored us with safety equipment and Convic are designing the park for us. Any sort of coverage would be rad and we can give you interviews with the skaters in Kabul. We really want to give Afghan youth a voice and give em a chance to have a little fun.

Things that help us are skate media coverage (mags, posts on websites) with links to our site skateistan.org . At the moment we need cash to send the equipment we have from Switzerland, Germany and Australia to Kabul so if people can donate a small amount via our paypal donate button on our site that would be really rad. The 2 other founders and myself have agreed to do this on our own money, so any money donated to the project goes 100% to shipping donated equipment over.

If anyone is interested in representing the project in the UK and can hold fundraisers (ie bowl jam) we would definitely welcome them on board.

Another idea is maybe to print skateistan tshirts in the UK or make products with Skateistan branding where some of the money makes it back to our project. We can send over files for logos etc

We would also like to collect old skateboards for the project but at the moment we are still trying to send over the ones that have already been donated, so that might be an idea for down the track.

If any pros want to come and visit us once we have some ramps built I think it would give us some great coverage. Renton Millar has expressed interest and Mike Vallely’s film maker has been in touch with us. 

Contacts of other possibly interested people help alot. 

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