Tony Hawk skateboard park funding deadline looms

Skateboarders with boards -- but no appropriate place to ride -- have a few weeks left to apply for a Tony Hawk Foundation skateboard park grant. The deadline for the annual grant-making process is March 2 for the awards to be announced in April.

Skateboard star Hawk's foundation has awarded more than $2.3 million to partially fund nearly 400 skatepark projects nationwide in the past six years. The foundation reports that 256 of those projects now are open and being used by an estimated 2.3 million riders annually.

The grants range from $1,000 to $25,000 for the planning and construction of parks. The Hawk foundation focuses its grants on proposals for parks in lower-income neighborhoods. The program is national in scope, and last year awarded $10,000 grants for skate park proposals in Imperial Beach and Ukiah.

Many of the projects that win funding are proposed by skateboarders. Here's how the foundation described the evolution of a park in Needles that was awarded a $25,000 grant earlier in the decade and  opened in 2004:

This project was spearheaded by eighth graders who lobbied the City after spending a year investigating design, safety issues, insurance and liability problems, and fund-raising possibilities. The determination of these youngsters got the City's attention, and for the first time in a long while the needs of the local kids became the focus.

At the time of applying for a grant, they had held numerous fundraisers (including a dinner for local Hell's Angels), approached local organizations, and successfully raised $90,000. The ambitiousness and determination of the young skaters, as well as the immense community involvement was impressive, and the THF Board of Directors gladly awarded them a $25,000 grant.

In all, they spent three years raising money, and when they still came up short of their $200,000 goal, the City stepped up again, donating more money to the project so that the original design would not have to be scaled back. On January 3, 2004, Needles opened its 12,000-square-foot concrete park designed by Wally Hollyday.

According to the foundation's guidelines, "public skateparks should be designed and constructed by experienced contractors. We also believe that local officials should treat public skateparks the same way they treat public basketball courts or tennis courts, meaning that anyone may show up and use them anytime, unsupervised."

Here is a link to the 2009 grant application.

-- Greg Johnson

Photo: Tony Hawk at Spike TV's 2008 Video Game Awards at Sony Pictures Studios in Culver City. Credit: Michael Buckner / Getty Images for Spike TV

Comments

[Aric]

Plz put a skatepark in Washington DC we realy need 1 , O and I saw u on suit life of zack and codey . Good look . . . . .sk8 4 l!fe

[Austin]

please put a skate park in ham lake MN, pingers park