We are extremely happy to announce that, after many months of searching, we will be moving into our own gym this week! The gym is located on 4216 6th Ave NW in between Ballard and Fremont and is only the third of it’s kind in the entire country!

We want this gym to be expression of the community as well as a place for our coaches to teach – a place to organize and grow as a group in strength, skill, and confidence. An indoor training ground just for us that grows in complexity and challenges as more crazy obstacles are imagined and made

To kick off the gym’s opening we’re hosting a big clinic/open training/potluck/fundraising event on Oct 24th to introduce the local parkour community, our academy students, and all of their families to the awesome space and our plans for it!

Here are the event details:
When Saturday, October 24th from 12pm to 9pm
Where 4216 6th Ave NW, Seattle, WA 98107

Fundraising goal:

$5,000

Schedule:

12pm – 1:30pm Kids Introductory Clinic

1:30pm – 3pm Adults Introductory Clinic

3pm – 5pm Open Gym: A chance to play and explore the facility with the supervision of Parkour Visions coaches.

5pm – 9pm Dinner! Potluck if you can. Bring food and drinks (no soda please), see our plans for the gym, and get to the know the parkour community.

Admission:

Grab your tickets early so we know how many are coming!

We’re really excited about this landmark event, and hope you’ll have time to stop by and say hi!

Click for our project

Update: We just barely missed this by 0.1% !! Thanks for all of your votes!

I’ve been watching the sustainable clothing company Nau ever since they first sent one of their employees up to Seattle for a story on the female parkour scene way back in v1 days. I was impressed with their dedication to giving back they built into every faucet of the company and the amount of great local giving they did (especially back in the beginning of their partners for change program).

So when I noticed them launching their first community grant I enthusiastically jumped in feet first and have already hit the ground running so to speak. Through the awesome help of the American Parkour community we’re already almost at the 100 vote minimum mark before this post is finished! APK has been so fast to action and giving in fact that we’re finalizing a potentially fantastic relationship with them shortly (more on that later).

We need your vote!

If we win we’ll receive $10,000 to put towards our own training center for our academy classes and Jump Washington outreach program, and all we need to be considered is a place in the publicly voted top 5.

There’s 293 other groups in the running and voting ends August 31st so please visit the link below and give us a high rating (5 stars)! More info on helping spread this campaign and win the grant in our resource doc.

http://www.nau.com/collective/grant-for-change/tyson-cecka-1026.html

After launching our Parkour Visions outreach program through the fundraising on GlobalGiving we decided just to change the whole name over as it’s a better fit for our organization than the painfully long Pacific Northwest Parkour Association (more on that later).

The problem is that every bit of time we have right is focused on running the outreach programs (which we’re considering calling the Jump Washington project) and finding our own gym space for our regular academy classes. A redesign of the web site just hasn’t been possible.

Rafe got tired of that though and created the amazing logo you see above Consider this an open call for any graphic designers who want to volunteer and work with us on a new logo!

Some excellent news since our last update! What started as a side project from Janine working with the Spruce Street Teen Crises Center has expanded to a relationship with New Futures serving low-income apartment complexes, the Lincoln Center public after school program, and one or two other groups who are interested in using parkour teachings to improve the lives of those who could definitely use it. This has inspired us to change our name to Parkour Visions and here’s an example from an email I just received for another potential program:

So, we’re trying to think of ways to make our program “not just another program” that the kids participate in and then forget about when they go back to their own environments and personal lives: We want to inspire them. We want them to find their own inspiration inside of themselves. We want to give them hope. We want them to make their own hope. We want to give them tools like social skills, communication skills, problem solving skills, and conflict resolution skills…and we want them to learn these skills without even realizing it through enrichingly fun and awesome activities!!

LIKE PARKOUR.

We were hoping on being able to use the profits from our general classes to fund these types of reduced cost or free outreach programs, but while the classes are growing rapidly they’re not to that point yet (we’re hoping to move into our space this month which will help).

So we reached out to the parkour community by teaming up with AmericanParkour (more on that later) and entered into a fundraising competition on the excellent GlobalGiving site to subsidize the cost for future programs. That was near the beginning of last month…and it worked We’ve raised over $4,500 with your help so far, earned a permanent place on the GlobalGiving website, and are already being featured in another competition this month for sports organizations called Ready, Set, GIVE.

We’re very excited but have a crazy amount of work to do now, so the site may get a bit quiet We’ll make sure to update those who’ve donated through GG (even $10 helps!) as often as we can, and for everyone else – spread the word!

Train safe,
-Tyson

March 15th boasted the first parkour class taught by Parkour Visions at Northwest Crossfit in Bellevue. This was a completely free event open to the public. With thirty-six attendees, two main coaches, and three assistant coaches, the gym was packed and full of movement for two hours. And, excitingly, it was one of the most diverse classes we’ve had yet! The age of attendees ranged from single digits to happily over the hill, and entire families—yes, moms, kids, dads, even grandma!—jumped in to share the lessons of the day.

We started with a balance course to ease into activity, practicing ‘touch’—acute physical awareness—with variation challenges of walking forwards, backwards, and sideways while balancing on rails, thin boards, and navigating over boxes. Next, a vigorous quadrupedal warm-up, traveling through the room after Tyson follow-the-leader style over, under, and through. Everyone received some extra burn courtesy of Adam in the conditioning that followed, had a water break, and were grouped out to hit the basics. Here, the youngest enjoyed their own lessons with Janine while the older cycled through their stations—safe falling, jumping,  landing, and rolls. All ages regrouped for the movement techniques that followed: vaulting, climbing, and jumping precisely. There was something distinctly delightful about watching people shimmy like monkeys on the bars during Rafe’s climbing work, hanging and swinging around—for many, recalling and reclaiming the playground years they’d thought passed.

It’s always so inspiring for me to see and meet people exploring new movement, pushing through the intensity of exercises, and ending the day smiling with pockets full of new skills. It’s also a huge delight that in the recent classes, more families have been showing up together; I wish my family had had parkour class to go to! How cool would it be if you could say to your parents and siblings, “Lets go jump!” and have everyone know exactly what you mean? Seeing so many people come to train together is the reason I love and want only to share parkour, to bring individuals closer to their bodies and build solid communities of healthy, moving people.

We received an overwhelming amount of good feedback from the class, such as, “I thought enthusiasm and clarity were great,” and,  “There was a good variety of skills taught.”  That “everyone was friendly and motivating and helpful,” is not only something for us to be proud of, but for us to acknowledge and continue to strive toward in every class and clinic we teach. Feedback of any constructive nature is greatly appreciated, so if you attended and want to comment further, please do! You may comment to the blog, or send your thoughts to classes@parkourvisions.org.

I’d like to thank everyone who showed up to make this class possible; being shown the interest is all we need to be there. Great job to everyone who jumped at this opportunity to learn something new, and keep an eye out for us in Bellevue!

More photos from Parkour Visions events can be found <here> on Flickr.

The report speaks for itself, check out PNWPA on SeattleIAM and vote it onto the frontpage!

Confluence Creative team Joshua B. Johnson and Bridget O’Neill pair up with members of Parkour Visions to bring you Parkour For The People. Emerging on the streets of Europe, taking names on YouTube and leaping onto the big screen, Parkour has an underground appeal the world over. But it’s here in Seattle we found a tight knit group of Tracuers working together to make Parkour accessible to the masses. The Pacific Northwest Parkour Association, or Parkour Visions, is a not-for-profit designed to get people of all ages outside and moving. Experienced Traceurs teach students the fundamentals through classes, training exercises, and strength building activities. If you would like to give Parkour a try, you can find more information at www.parkourvisions.org. Special thanks to: Green Lake Park, Gas Works Park, Tyson Cecka, Rafe Kelley, Brandee Laird, Janine Cundy, and Adam Truesdell

If you like the piece head over to SeattleIAM and vote it onto the frontpage so we can get this stuff spread!

Join Parkour Visions as we offer our first Bellevue class on Sunday, March 15 from 3pm – 5pm at Northwest Crossfit in Bellevue. The free class will be modeled after our highly successful free monthly workshop in Seattle; it will be led by veteran traceurs Tyson and Rafe and will focus on fundamentals such as safety, running, jumping, climbing, vaulting, and rolling.

Parkour Visions’ future plans call for expansion into the Bellevue area with regular classes, and this marks our first East side offering. If you or someone you know lives on the East side and has an interest in learning Parkour, email us at classes@parkourvisions.org or stop by this free class to learn more about our classes, and membership options.

Northwest Crossfit Bellevue is located at 12121 Northup Way, Suite 110, Bellevue WA 98005.

Sounds like a lot, doesn’t it?  Well, when 35 traceurs get together with “three brooms, three dustpans, two (very) small rakes, six pairs of rubber work gloves, and about four thousand gallons of elbow grease”, gathering up 21 bags of trash from a favorite training ground doesn’t feel like quite as much work.

Rochester Parkour held their first Leave no Trace/ Beginner’s Parkour Workshop earlier this month at Manhattan Square Park in Rochester, New York. It was a smashing success, drawing out a humongous crowd to not only learn about Parkour, but also spend time cleaning up their training environment. Read more about it at their blog!

We’re thrilled that so many communities lately have been embracing the Leave No Trace idea and integrating it into their jams. This is something that is really important for Parkour in the long term and really just comes down to common sense. Has your scene been teaching about LNT? Let us know in the comments!

It took the IRS almost 5 months to get it to us, but we finally are recognized as an official 501(c)3 not-for-profit public charity!

The reason this is so important is that we are now eligible for tax deductible donations, most goverment and federal grants, support from other likeminded NPOs and corporations, and most importantly it shows our commitment to serving the parkour community through our projects and initiatives!

More to come! For now if you want to help you can donate directly through google checkout or contact us to find out what you can do.

Pretty soon here I’ll be leaving for a week to teach Parkour to young kids in small towns around Beirut, Lebanon on behalf of the US Embassy. Although it’s definitely not the best time to visit, there’s no way I’m passing this opportunity up. Crazy world huh? I love it! More info on APK.