The word “advocacy” sounds like a fancy political term, but advocacy is what one is doing whenever that person is promoting the new skatepark. Whether they are expressing a plan to skaters, telling neighbors how the project is coming along, or presenting a concept to the Parks and Recreation Board, they are advocating.

Advocating for skateboarding and skateparks is more a lifestyle than an activity. If a person is serious about the future skatepark, he or she will come to live and breathe skatepark advocacy. This chapter will help a person become the best skatepark advocate possible.

Every skatepark, large or small, is the direct result of a dedicated advocacy effort.

The process of creating a community skatepark starts with a vision and ends with people skateboarding in the new facility. Advocacy is one of the essential components of that process, but it also has its own kind of rhythm. When a person is just starting out by talking to their friends about “trying” to get a new skatepark built, they are in the infant stages of advocacy. As the advocacy phase matures, the people they need and want to talk to about the skatepark concept will change, as will the message. At first they may be coworkers or fellow skaters whom the advocate recruits to assist in the effort. Later, they will be more influential community leaders who can lend resource support (such as land owners like the Parks and Recreation Department) or civic support (such as the Police Department or School District Superintendent), or who hold the keys to reaching a wider audience (such as a local television reporter or newspaper editor).

The skatepark process itself is sequential. In the beginning the advocate focuses on the problem and explores different conceptual solutions, and later approaches the community and its leaders to share that vision, raise money, influence design, and so on. Advocacy is interesting in that it permeates all of the different stages of skatepark development. Throughout the process, most advocates find that the skatepark message changes, matures, and becomes more effective in the same way that a story gets better the more often it’s told.

Some may remember the popular television commercial that had a person telling two friends about a product, who each then told two friends, who told two more friends, and so on until the television screen was filled with people talking about the product. That’s the chain reaction effective advocates will be starting, except in this case the product is a local skatepark. The first step is getting the network going, quickly followed by making sure they’re communicating positively about the idea of a new skatepark.