Kia ora koutou!
First off, a massive thank you to everyone who took the time to fill out our community feedback survey. When the board stepped into these roles nearly a year ago, we promised to listen and do our best for our community. We ran this survey because we wanted your unfiltered thoughts so we could get to know you better and take those insights into consideration when making decisions that impact the future of SBNZ and skateboarding within NZ. You didn’t hold back and we’re so thankful for that! We received a total of 49 responses from a variety of demographics across Aotearoa, so we wanted to share our findings with you.
21.7% of the feedback explicitly praised our National events over the last few years, noting the important part they played in creating a sustainable pathway for our aspiring athletes. Many of you also noted that our social media presence has improved and that our board members have been much more visible on the ground, which is a good first step in getting more involved with community events.
Roughly 19.6% of you highlighted an imbalance between high performance and grassroots, stating that we feel too focused on our elite athletes and you want to see that same energy put into the local scene – and you’re totally right! Since skateboarding became an Olympic sport, SBNZ saw a big shift into the high performance space. It was needed at that time and we’re forever grateful for the work that previous board members and Ian, our High Performance Director, have put into creating all the policies and frameworks behind it. Now that the high performance side of things is running smoothly, it’s time to shift our focus back to you – the community.
21.7% of the responses focused on geographic gaps, noting that the South Island and smaller regional towns feel left out of the loop regarding event tracking and support. We also saw a massive demand of 37% for SBNZ to act as a stronger advocate with local councils on park designs, alongside another 37% calling for better support and coaching pathways (more on that to come!)
Right now, we are a voluntary board of just 7 people and in all honesty, we may not have the capacity to fix all these issues alone, but we don’t want to use that as an excuse either! Instead, we want to open the doors to you. We’re still in the discussion stages of this and how it’ll work, but we’re wanting to explore the idea of starting a few specialised sub committees that run underneath the main board. Through these subcommittees we hope to better connect with the skateboarding community moving forward so that we can continue to ensure better outcomes for skateboarding and skateboarders.
At the end of the day our goal is to build a National Sporting Organisation (NSO) that skateboarders in NZ can trust regardless of your gender, where you live, or how good you are on a board. That all starts with hearing your feedback, transparency and connecting with more of you, more often!Over the next few days, we will publish an update on our website detailing what we’ve been up to since the new board was formed last July and keep you as updated as possible with all the projects we’ve been managing this year.
If you want to see change in the Aotearoa skateboarding scene, we want to give you the platform and the backing to help us make it happen.
Let’s build this together!
Ngā mihi,
Sophee Hills
Co-chair of Skateboarding NZ