![]() ![]() So far, Alibo and Surf Ghana-with the support of volunteers and friends worldwide-have collected and donated over 230 pieces of sports equipment and trained over 200 children in surfing and skating. Through dedication and hard work, the surfing community became an NGO whose main objective is to provide sporting equipment for surfers in Ghana. “When I initially arrived in Ghana, I met surfers on the beach and learned there were no platforms to assist the African surfing scene,” says Alibo, who develops content and events for action sports. Alibo, a native of the Caribbean, relocated to Ghana from France in 2016 and is determined to realize her goal. On December 15, 2021, Ghana’s creative community, volunteers, skateboard enthusiasts, and Accra residents opened the Freedom Skate Park. Sandy Alibo, the brain behind Skate Nation and Surf Ghana, is on her way to turning Ghana and West Africa into a massive recreational and creative destination. As a result, action sports, particularly skateboarding, take on a fresh twist. ![]() He development of Ghana’s first skate park is pioneering creativity and sustainable tourism in West Africa. If you haven’t been, now’s the time! Come see for yourself what the skate community can do when we come together to build something for us all.If you're planning a vacation to Ghana, bring your skateboard, as Freedom Skate Park is set to be the hottest destination in Accra. Every single person who’s ever set foot in this space helped us get to five years and helps power us to keep going for many more. If you’ve ever been to Freedom, thank you. This park couldn’t exist without all the hundreds of skaters, from Trenton, the Tri-State area in general, and around the world, who have come together to contribute their time, their sweat, and blood to make this space what it is. More than just a place to skate when it’s too wet or dark to skate outside, Freedom is a monument to this community. Now, kids who got their first boards at Freedom are ripping our contests and helping to run the park as volunteers. This year, we repeated the process with the ramps from Independent’s Rip Ride Rally, which are getting new life at Freedom.Īt the same time, NJ Skate Shop, Dogwood Skate Shop, and Travel Skate Shop have helped us provide skateboards to more than 200 at-risk kids in Trenton and our volunteers have showed up to teach them the basics. A team of carpenters and metalworkers from Philadelphia and New York came together with our local crew to move and reassemble the obstacles in less than a week. When local skate park construction company 5th Pocket was asked to build the ramps for the House of Vans pop-up in Philadelphia in 2019, they got Vans to donate the ramps to us after the pop-up was done. The community got us started, and the community helped us grow. We worked with our local skate shops to collect used decks and parts that we reassembled as boards for kids who didn’t have their own. We scraped together money from skaters and non-skaters who believed in what we were doing, bought plywood and 2x4s for ramps, pieced them together in a backyard, and trucked them over in a rented U-Haul. We worked with the Mayor and City leadership to transform a historic building that was part of Trenton’s industrial past into a completely free indoor skate park. This need drove us to come together and do something that no one had ever done before. We had an underserved city filled with kids who needed more positive opportunities and a skate community desperate for somewhere to go when it was too dark, cold, or wet to skate outside. There weren’t even any outdoor skate parks with lights. ![]() At the time, Trenton didn’t have a skate park and there weren’t any indoor parks in the entire state of New Jersey. What we did have was a community in need. Most of us hadn’t even built a ramp before. We didn’t have skate industry connections. When we started Freedom five years ago, we didn’t have money. What you can’t see is the incredible effort from the New Jersey skate community over the past five years that made this event possible. We celebrated the only way we skateboarders know how: with loud music, big tricks, and a few slams. We recently kicked off the fifth annual Trenton Winter Skateboarding Program at Freedom Skate Park. ![]()
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