PNWPA Blog :: Archives

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.

I’m currently on the train (first blog post from the phone) coming back to Seattle from a brief stint in Vancouver, WA to spend some time with my parents and old friends. While there I threw together a quick meeting with some of the driving members of the Parkour community in Oregon to discuss where they as a scene wanted to develop and how to involve them more in the initiatives we’re pursuing in Washington.

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I’m excited today to announce the launch of PNWPA’s Leave No Trace initiative. Leave No Trace is a philosophy that extends into everything we do at PNWPA, most importantly into our training. It means, simply, that we respect and preserve our training grounds before, during, and after training. It’s a philosophy that Janine (pax) and several great traceurs have been promoting for over a year and which recently has taken hold of the whole North American scene under the Leave no Trace name. It drives our clean-up efforts at local training grounds, is featured prominently in our community outreach efforts, and is becoming a cornerstone of our Parkour classes.

In practical terms, Leave No Trace is both about advocacy and personal responsibility. It means that you as the traceur are respectful of property and don’t leave smudge marks from your shoes on a park wall, and it means that together we advocate for shoe manufacturers to develop non-marking shoes. It means that you as the traceur know which equipment in your local playground can handle your high-impact Parkour practice, and it means that together we work with playground designers and suppliers to install equipment that adults can use too.

You can find detailed information on the Leave No Trace project page where we outline the specific steps that every traceur should take to keep Parkour safe and unregulated. As we continue to develop advocacy plans we’ll update the project page. In the mean time we welcome your feedback and ideas.