 A lot of these kids are being pelted with all different challenges and people trying to belittle them or question who they are as people. Our kids only see what is right around them and what is right around them is often not very uplifting. I'm kind of giving this opportunity to help kids who have a choice to make in life. Do they check out and unplug like I did or do they push themselves to become the best version of themselves? When I was growing up I didn't have like a role model who intervened and wasn't like stern and wasn't like, hey kid, wake up, you got to clean up your act. You need somebody to hold you accountable because when you're 16 you know it's difficult. I think that success in any way shape or form in life is a product of opportunity and in our economy income has a lot to do with opportunity. My parents, they were busy working in order to just kind of like make ends meet. So a lot of the supervision wasn't there just because they had to work so much which kind of like led me to do whatever I want because nobody was watching me and nobody knew whether I was going to school or not. I left El Salvador with my husband because at that time in the 80s you know the civil war started and we were in danger. We came from a different society and in order to make a living we had to get jobs. In order to get jobs we had to leave the kids alone. Most of the time his mom was working, me I was working. We dedicated all of our time and our love to him and it was really a hassle. We don't have nobody else in this country. Nobody who can help us to educate him, to guide him. A lot of the negative influences around like skateboarding and just kind of like accelerated that. I got into all that negative juvenile behavior. Like ditching class, doing graffiti, hanging out with like bad kids doing drugs. So in 10th grade I just decided to drop out from the school. I got a job for working the graveyard shift in a grocery store. The place ends up getting robbed at gunpoint and at that moment like I started to question everything that I was doing up until that point. There has to be something bigger, there has to be something more fulfilling. So I went to school, I graduated from college and that's what started my trajectory to kind of like reintegrate myself into society. The way I found Stoked it was a way for me to get back into something that was more fulfilling than what I was currently doing because I was just feeling empty in a way. Alright so everybody has a board right? Do you want to do the classic ones yeah? I like it huh? Stoked is a mentoring organization built on the principles of action sports. We take kids that are at risk or have less opportunity and put them in situations that will inform who they are as a person and empower them to succeed. Skateboarding teaches you perseverance, determination, relentlessness. Really makes you push against your own self because you know that it's going to lead to accomplishment and success and with anything in life you know you're going to fail, you're going to come to roadblocks, you're going to face and meet challenges but it's like that determination to just keep going. You know the word fail? What is that? It stands for first attempt in learning, fail. So whenever you fail it's not that you're a failure, it's different. It just means that you're trying something that you didn't try before and it's just one step to actually getting good at that. Their stories vary but you know you're talking about like people who come from broken homes don't have anything to eat, I guess the one overarching theme is that you know they're coming from you know deficient backgrounds. Most of our kids are coming from single parent families. We have kids who are homeless, we have kids who are living out of their van with their families of five, kids who have lost their parents due to gang violence, we have some students who are involved in gangs which is why they are here. Stoke teach me how to be like confident and like not be scared to fall down. They teach me how to like communicate with other people, I get to express my feelings I guess. When I get on there I feel like I'm free and I can do like anything I want. I definitely see myself in the kids that I work with they just want a sense of belonging. Looking back in my life it's like I was missing a community when I was growing up and going through a lot of the stuff that I was going through. It's crazy to see what happens when kids put two and two together that I'm not just here for fun. This is actually empowering my life. You don't have to be a saint, you don't have to be perfect in order to help other people. At the end of the day it's just like when you're gone like what's your legacy on another person so I think at a minimum that everybody should be striving to like at least help just one person or change somebody's life because it only takes one so I'm not trying to change 300 people's lives or everybody who I come into contact with but if it's just one then I know that when I die that I left some sort of like positive impact on others. If you like what you saw please click the subscribe button and leave a comment below. Thanks for watching!