Different Sports, Same Goal

I came upon this article in the newspaper on the way back from practice tonight, “Street cricket project ‘helps bowl out youth crime in 15 boroughs’”. It wasn’t just the interesting oxymoron posed by the title “street cricket” that caught my eye, but also the connection between a sporting activity and youth crime reduction. Since the use of parkour as an agent for positive social change is one of the primary things that I’m investigating during this journey, I’ve been very interested to see how other organizations are using different sports to accomplish a similar goal. To me, the most impressive part of the article was the fact that the program has already reached 94 schools in 15 boroughs around the city, with an estimated 13,000 children- all since July 2008.

I was intrigued and a quick Google search brought up the “StreetChance” website . Reading through the site not only strengthened my admiration, but also answered a lot of the questions that I had about the program, its funding, and the actual effect on the neighborhoods. All in all, I was pretty impressed, and seeing such positive results for the program has been encouraging for my own research.

For those that might be curious to see the parkour side of things, and also one of the big inspirations behind my Watson project, "Jump Westminster" is a great video and gives a taste of some of the work done by Parkour Generations.