Yesterday’s post focused on the Chase Academy, Inc. , a private non-profit located in Daytona Beach, Florida. In nearby Jacksonville, The Autism Society of North Carolina ’s Onslow County Chapter and the Autism Skateboarding Foundation , or A.Skate , will offer a skateboarding event for children with Autism next month.
A.skate (which stands for ‘Autism: Skating with Kids through Acceptance Therapy and Education’) is an Alabama-based nonprofit whose goal is to teach kids with Autism to skateboard and teach awareness to a demographic that might not otherwise know about Autism…
…For as many skateboarders as there are in the world, our community is quite small. The world got a little smaller when [longtime Eastern Skateboard Supply sales representative, John Pike] found out that the girlfriend of Faith Skate Supply owner Peter Karvonen has a 7-year-old daughter with autism named Sasha. Pike has been Karvonen’s sales rep for 14 years now. Since both have a connection to autism, it began to click together. Before long, Karvonen’s girlfriend – Chrys Worley – and Pike had teamed to form the non-profit 501c3 organization, A.Skate, dedicated to raising awareness about autism in the skateboard community.
…It is believed skateboarding and board sports are a good fit for autistic kids because they are not social creatures. “The reason autism and skateboarding fit is you don’t need a coach or a team,” Pike explains. “You can skateboard on your own. What’s great about skaters is that they’re an eclectic group of people that are accepting of all different demographics of people. Our kids are different, and we know they will be accepted into this society and they’ll have fun.”
It’s been proven hundreds of times over with every skate clinic A.Skate offers along the Eastern seaboard. “Peter put Sasha on a board one day and it just worked. She was instantly happy,” Worley remembers. Ever since, Worley has been getting autistic kids together every weekend in places all over the Southeast. A.Skate clinics give kids a chance to try skateboarding out. The sounds and feel of a skateboard calm many of them and they’re drawn to it. Most kids are first-timers and just sit down and cruise on their butts but the joy is evident at all stages.
Worley boasts A.Skate’s success rate.
“We have yet to have even one child that doesn’t respond well to the clinics,” she said. “Hundreds of kids … and every one of them has had a positive experience. There is one tiny child in the Veteran’s Park video that Peter was skating with and [the child] was talking up a storm. At the end of the video you can hear him saying, “Again! Again!” His mom told us he hadn’t spoken in five months prior to that. It is therapeutic for them. I wouldn’t know the child had little to no language if his mom hadn’t told me because he didn’t stop talking the whole time Peter was working with him.”…
Here is a link to a video on the work of A.Skate in Cork, Ireland (A.skate holds a clinic there, at Touchwood Skatepark, every last Sunday of the month): Askate Foundation Cork.mov - YouTube
(sources: http://www.starnewsonline.com/article/20130312/ARTICLES/130319879 ; A perfect fit - ESPN )