The Indigo Skate Camp, based in South Africa’s Valley of 1000 Hills is a former NGO whose work focused on empowering Zulu youth through skateboarding. In its after-school programs, Indigo provided young people with opportunities for supplemental education, mentor and leadership roles, and good space to learn, grow, and skate. The Indigo Skate Camp started its skateboard programs in 2001, making it one of the first of its kind alongside today’s hundreds of social skateboard projects worldwide.
Free Movement Skateboarding is another community working to empower youth through skateboarding. The organization’s work initially focused on displaced youth living in Athens, but quickly expanded to build solidarity between Greek youth and those applying for asylum in the EU. Every week, staff and volunteers pile into the FMS van with boards, safety equipment, and a set of mobile ramps for various skate sessions throughout the city. Youth from diverse backgrounds unify around FMS skate sessions and the instructors that they call friends.
Traveling to Durban, South Africa in 2010 and Athens, Greece in 2019 to volunteer with the Indigo Skate Camp, and then Free Movement Skateboarding, was done as part of my studies. Both volunteer placements used the arts as a platform for service-learning projects and would not have been possible without the support of the Social Justice Research Center and Haub School of Environment & Natural Resources at the University of Wyoming. For a deeper look at the project in Athens check out my thesis Psychosocial support through skateboarding: Photo novella with displaced youth in Greece (2023).
