Once a year, when the stars align (or our full team gets together to collate data from the past 12 months operations) an Annual Report is born. This year's annual report was named...2022.

2022 was a year of massive change for Skateistan, beginning with a very rocky start. The Afghan government was taken over by the Taliban in August 2021, causing chaos, fear and uncertainty for our staff and students. Skateistan’s Afghan programs had to be put on pause for the first time since our organization was founded in 2008.

In early 2022, we slowly rebuilt our activities and our Afghan team starting in January with emergency food packages for the families of our students. We are very proud of our Afghan team who not only relaunched our work there, but also achieved an incredible 59% girls’ attendance despite the constantly changing rules in Afghanistan around education for girls.

The crisis in Afghanistan led us to rethink our strategy. We always intended to increase the number of locations Skateistan is working in but we had to think differently about how to be more agile and ultimately reach more children, faster. Focusing on local ownership, girls’ inclusion and integration of displaced youth, we successfully expanded from 10 locations in 2021 to 25 locations in 2022 through our Skateistan in a Box model. Through the experimentation of programming, Skateistan began running skateboarding and educational programs in refugee and resettlement locations for the first time. The main reason being many of our Afghan staff who had been forced to flee their country. Our former Afghan staff members ran Skateistan programs in Belgium, Germany, Albania, Sweden and the USA.

Our Goodpush Alliance has continued to deepen its support for social skateboarding projects around the world. We were stoked to coordinate the launch of the very first Pushing Against Racism Fund, promoting more diversity and inclusion within skateboarding worldwide. This was coupled with the launch of the Goodpush online platform that has had 20,000 downloads of resources and has elevated 834 skateboarding-based social initiatives in more than 100 countries with new free e-learning courses.

As we live in increasingly uncertain times, all of us are dealing with changes, and Skateistan’s ongoing ability to adapt is demonstrated by the very quick and successful change in our approach. We are committed to supporting more young people who are leading social skateboarding initiatives in their own communities and we continue to be driven by our love of skateboarding and the desire to provide quality education and safe play spaces to children.

Read the full report here