142: Skateistan: From Afghanistan to The Oscars | Oliver Percovich

The Leadership Enigma

Oliver Percovich is the founder of Skateistan which won the Oscar in 2020 for best documentary and a BAFTA. Oliver's story is an amazing example of how one person can create a movement for real change.
Oliver is an Australian who decided to go to Kabul with his girlfriend in 2007 with nothing more than a bag of clothes and 3 skateboard decks. In 2009, Oliver founded Skateistan, which initially operated out of a small skatepark in Kabul. The organisation quickly gained popularity and expanded to include a school that provides free education to children in grades 1 through 9. Skateistan is now providing skateboarding and educational programming to over 4,000 young people each week.
Kabul in 2007-09 had a lot of International presence but nobody really understood what was going on at ground level. Oliver's curiosity and human centred approach meant that he quickly became trusted by the local communities. As soon as he started skateboarding in the streets he became something of a local attraction, especially with the children who were seeing this for the very first time.
Oliver was fascinated how the girls especially, wanted to get involved when local tradition prohibited them from attempting many hobbies. He started using an empty fountain to allow the girls and boys to try skateboarding, (half the population is under 15 years old). He gave the girls preferential treatment to let them try skateboarding yet he only had between 3-7 boards at any one time. The girls quickly became better than the boys in a society that normally promotes the boys first. Oliver also realised that the skateboarding was uniting children from different ethnic and socio economic groups in the area.
At this point, little did Oliver realise that he had started a movement. The challenge for him now was how to scale. Oliver had no resources yet he decided to link the skateboarding to education and schooling whereby he would pay some of the girls $1 each to help teach other girls and also get them off the streets begging and back to school. He was now changing lives! Now he was thinking bigger.
After the age of 12 girls and boys needed to be separated in public and so Oliver realised that he needed to try and find an indoor facility to make sure that girls and boys could continue skateboarding in a private facility.
Oliver took advantage of a chance meeting with the incoming President of the Olympic Committee who decided to come and see the sessions at the fountain for himself. He was blown away and decided to give Oliver land for the indoor facility which he had funded by the Canadian Government, again based on an chance meeting. Momentum was now with Oliver, the Norwegian, Danish and German governments now came into the project and in October 2009 Oliver built the largest indoor sports facility in Afghanistan for children which also included 4 classrooms for the children. Success and social impact led to more success as the facility was seeing 500 kids in a week and Oliver insured that at least 50% of them were girls.
Oliver is an amazing example of resourcefulness over resources and the power of how one person can lead dramatic and sustainable change.
Today, Oliver has 12 projects around the world 3 skate schools in Afghanistan. He also has a knowledge sharing network that has inspired a lot of other social skateboarding projects to pop up around the world. He is now connected to over 850 projects in over 100 countries. All resources are available free to these projects as they are not seen as competitors but as an extension to their purpose.
Skateistan has received many awards including an Oscar for Best Documentary and a BAFTA.
https://skateistan.org
You can also find Oliver and Skateistan on Inst

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