Goodpush Member

It seems like one of the ongoing challenges for a lot of social skateboarding projects is accessing quality skateboards, safety gear (and even shoes!) in the locations where they are operating. 

Is there some way we can get organized to use the extra baggage allowance that traveling skateboarders have to link up with equipment donors and carry the stuff over to skate projects in countries that have high shipping/customs fees?

Thoughts / ideas?

Comments

Great question!

Hi Rhianon, 

Can we do a "Ride Board" here? Travelers can post their travel details, including location, dates, and available cargo capacity. This way project coordinators and even independent skaters in isolated locations can connect to each other to get gear. This would be very cool! 

Ride Board

Shane, I like this idea.

People can either post in here, or, if the idea takes off, could start a thread in each of the regional sections to this forum (ie. Asia sub-forum). People could also put out requests like "If anyone is traveling from the UK to Nepal can you bring a donation of boards we have from a skate shop in London..."

Another idea, is that anyone who is traveling can look at the social skate map and then contact the projects in the areas they are going to, to ask if they can help carry anything over, or offer to bring any skate gear donations they've collected. We hope to be setting up a DM (direct message) feature on this website soon, which would make that relatively easy to do!

There are also organizations like Donate for Skate that do a great job of collecting quality skate gear, so maybe they could use this network to help find people to transport the donations to the various places, or even maximizing the baggage allowance of volunteers who are going over for builds etc. With a bit of organization we could get a lot of gear to places. 

Now, safe storage of the skate equipment... that's another topic!

Hi Rhianon, 

 

Awesome. Great ideas. Also, it would be cool to make this a two way portal so that individual skaters around the world might use it like a "Craig's List" to find gear that they need.

For example a skater in Iraq might post "ISO new bearings to be sent to Suli Skatepark".

Someone might respond - "I have bearings in Paris"

And someone else could see those posts and write "Traveling to Suli in 1 month from Paris and have room for bearings..."

I know that skaters from outside Europe and the US are willing to pay what they can to get decks, shoes, bearings, etc. This would be cool in that it would allow for a certain amount of autonomy and less isolation for them. it would reduce the "white savior donation dynamic" too which I think would be good in the long run. 

I will share this idea amongst our network of skaters around the world. 

Thanks!

 

- Shane 

Wow! 

We really like this idea as we are always depending on foreign donations for our skateboarding material.

Last year, the governement of India issued a rule that says that al secondhand parcels and packages from foreign countries are not allowed anymore. This has the unfortunate effect that some of the stuff we are supossed to get from supporters, are being send back.. 

At the moment of writing this, we have materials gathered for our project at four different locations:

- Hannover (Germany) 

- Belgium

- Mexico

- Copenhagen (Denmark)

 

If anybody is travelling from these places to India in the near future, please let us know! 

Also please keep us up to date if this idea is explored any further!

 

Many thanks!

I think we should just start to use this Equipment sub-forum as the ride board, so @gaetandep you should just start a new thread called something like "Needed: people to carry gear to India from Europe or Mexico" and repost your above message. 

 

Skateboards For Hope has a partnership with National airlines for free excess baggage. However, it must be accompanied by a passenger. Contact Betty@skateboardsforhope.com for support or information. 

skateboard4hope  this is great to know! I went on their airline website and it seems to only be charter planes. Which destinations do they fly to?