More about us
Ricardo Whyte
I’ve been skateboarding since I was 12 years old, I’ve learnt a lot from it. The feeling you get when you land a new trick you’ve been working on for months or even years is so rewarding. The feeling skateboarding gives me, even when I’m cursing, is one of the greatest feelings I know. It’s frightening, exhilarating and most importantly fun.
Skateboarding kept me healthy as a child and as an adult. It also helped me to make a lot of friends. I usually found it hard to make friends at school. I knew I had Asperger’s and I was aware of how difficult it was for me to communicate with others. In a skate park setting, small talk is easy. “That was dope” , “how do you do that?”, “How long have you been skating?”, and just like that you’ve made a potential friendship and next thing you know you’re skating with each other every day.
I started skate coaching at a YMCA youth camp in Nottingham. I never taught skateboarding seriously before, and I had no experience with children. But I knew that this was a unique job and I wanted to see how far I could take it. I went on to work at FLO the indoor skate park in Nottingham which gave me a lot of experience skate-coaching.
I moved to London just before the pandemic and started my own private skate school, Ricoskateschool, in 2021. In my first year of doing this I taught over 200 students in south London. During this time, I realised there were a lot of other kids in the area that had an interest in the sport but didn’t have the gear to get started. This got me thinking about getting a charity together to get more people skating.
Miguel Nyberg
I have been skateboarding for more than 15 years. As a teenager, I felt drawn to it because it was rebellious. I quickly fell in love with the sport and started doing it nonstop. It became a bit of an escape from the emotional turbulence of going through puberty and all that that entails. I would spend whole days at skateparks. To me, the skatepark became, and remains to this day, a place to exercise my creativity, forget about the stresses of everyday life, and make lifelong friends.
I am also an aspiring academic. My undergraduate studies were prolonged and convoluted. I switched between programmes and explored many subjects, from anthropology and philosophy to biochemistry and physics. I ended up getting a degree in cognitive and clinical neuroscience. After getting my bachelor’s degree, I thought I’d follow the path of least resistance and got enrolled in a clinical neuroscience MSc at UCL. At some point, I got anxious about not doing what I really wanted to be doing and I ended up withdrawing from that programme. I spent the rest of the year skate coaching and planning an idea out for Skate Haven.
In 2022, I got enrolled in a new programme at UCL called ‘creative health’. It is about the changing healthcare system in the UK. The healthcare system is currently going through a crisis. Healthcare workers and patients are not receiving the support they need. Voluntary organisations are increasingly contributing and helping to form a new, integrated care system that employs creative programmes and social prescribing. Organisations like these are trying to provide support to some of the people who have suffered the most from these unfortunate circumstances: people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds with complex health needs. My master’s dissertation at this programme is going to be centred on the work we do at Skate Haven.