A $1,000 Grant, Two Skate Camps, and Two Kids Who Kept Coming Back
Updated: Sep 14
Most people who follow JSAW know us for what happens on the water, at the skate park, or on the snow. Fewer people know about JSAW Worldwide.
JSAW does several things through the Worldwide program: we lead mission trips, provide chaplaincy for professional skaters, consult ministry leaders, and make grants to action sports ministries around the world.
This post is about the last one.
The idea behind the grants is simple. There are people all over the world quietly running action sports ministries out of their own pockets. A skate ministry that meets at a public park on Tuesday nights. A wake ministry working out of one boat and a lot of borrowed gear.
They don't need us to come run their program for them. They know their community far better than we ever will. What they need is a little bit of capital at the right moment to get their mission moving and do ministry.
So our donors fund the grants, we write them, and then we ask the ministry to tell us what happened.
Earlier this year we sent $1,000 to FCA Action Sports and ReANIMATE in Rochester, New York, as a matching challenge for two skateboarding camps. Their report came back a few weeks ago, and I want to walk you through it, because it's a good example of what these grants are actually for.
They did the hard part
We sent it as a matching challenge rather than a straight check, which meant the team in Rochester had to go out and raise against it. So they did.
Twelve of their donors met the challenge and beat it, putting $1,540 into the camps. Those twelve are FCA Rochester's people, not ours. That's a list built over years of showing up at parks in Western New York, and it's the reason a modest grant turned into a fully funded season.
It kept going after the match closed, too. Someone gave $150 specifically to cover food. Someone else gave $25 to be held as a scholarship for a future camper who couldn't otherwise afford to come. Two new monthly donors came on board. And once the camps were on the calendar, two local skate shops donated boards, T-shirts, hoodies, and hats for a Best Trick contest, while ReANIMATE contributed seven decks, three complete beginner setups, and stacks of stickers and shirts.
That's what makes a match worth doing. It doesn't just add money. It gives a ministry an opportunity to go ask, and gives their people a reason to say yes.
Two camps, two very different days
The Flower City Work/Skate Camp was part service project, part skate session. The camp went to work on Breaking Free Skatepark at a genuinely hard moment for its owner, putting paint and supplies into a park that needed both.
That choice says a lot about how this team operates. Skate ministries live or die on whether the local park trusts them, and showing up with paint and a work day buys a kind of credibility that showing up with flyers never will. They served the park first. The ministry followed.
The FCA Regional One-Day Skate Camp at Perinton Park in June was the first regional camp of its kind in Western New York. Campers, parents, volunteers, two skate shops, ReANIMATE and FCA staff, all in one place for a day of coaching, skating, and the Best Trick contest.
Across both camps: 23 registered campers, 16 volunteers, and more than 60 Bibles and Gospels of John placed in kids' hands.
Both parks stayed open to the public the whole time. That was on purpose. When the Gospel message went out at the end of each day, it reached campers and parents, and it reached skaters who had shown up to the park for a completely ordinary Tuesday and decided to stay and listen.
The number that actually matters
Two skaters who came to the one-day camp are now attending weekly Bible studies.
Twenty-three campers is a good day. Two kids who keep coming back is a ministry.
That's the metric we care about in the Worldwide grants, and it's the one that's hardest to manufacture with money. A grant can buy Bibles, lunch, paint, and a permit. It cannot make a fourteen-year-old show up on a Wednesday night eight weeks later. That happens because somebody in Rochester learned his name, kept showing up at his park, and gave him a reason to come back.
The FCA Rochester team put it better than I can in their report. They said they aren't trying to create Christian events for skateboarders. They want to be present in the places where skateboarders already are.
What's next in Rochester
The Flower City camp is becoming an annual thing, and the relationship with Breaking Free Skatepark keeps deepening. The regional camp went well enough that the team is looking at a multi-sport version for 2027. That $25 scholarship is sitting there waiting for the kid who needs it.
Their longer vision is a repeatable model across Western New York: camps that lead to relationships, relationships that lead to Bible studies and mentoring, and mentoring that leads to people who go on to do this for someone else. If that works there, it works in a lot of other places too.
That's the whole idea behind the Worldwide grants, and it only works because the ministries we fund are the kind who will do what Rochester did with it. To FCA Action Sports and ReANIMATE: thank you for letting us have a small part in it. The work was yours, and it shows.
"By this My Father is glorified, that you bear much fruit; so you will be My disciples." John 15:8
Two ways to be part of this
Leading an action sports ministry? JSAW Worldwide exists to come alongside ministries like FCA Action Sports Rochester with grants, coaching, and resources.
→ Apply For A Grant
Want to fund the next one? Gifts to JSAW Worldwide support grants like this one, where a modest investment multiplies through local matching, local partners, and local relationships. → Give to the Action Sports Ministry Fund
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