Frank Watkins, MA Psychology Student, Brings Community Services to the Skate Park
Skateboarding tends to attract individualists, often people who feel that they don’t fit in with groups. Like millions of other Americans, however, they may be struggling with mental health. At the same time, it can be difficult to reach them. Wanting to offer support to skaters where they are, Frank Watkins, a master’s student in general psychology at The New School for Social Research (NSSR), created The Skate Mind Project, which is bringing together the skateboarding community to provide support, build resilience, and address mental health challenges.
Watkins, who has been skateboarding since he was about 12 years old, has close ties to the community, which makes his program particularly appealing to skateboarders. “Skateboarders are a very eclectic group of people, and they can transcend demographic boundaries—young and old, beginner and advanced. One thing they do have in common is that they can be very individualistic people who may feel like they don’t fit into the mainstream and may find themselves out on the fringes. But where a lot of skateboarders are able to come together and bond is through their individualistic and motivated personalities, which drive them to go out and learn how to skate and how to become a part of the skating community.”
A major challenge in providing mental health services to any community is the growing need for and gaps in access to care. Skate Mind brings services directly into skate shops and parks and is also training other skateboarders in community-led mental health strategies. “I know skateboarding very well, since I’ve been doing it since I was a kid, and it lends our program an authenticity when skaters come to our events and hear about our trainings. One thing I reflect on is that if an idea like this was implemented by someone who wasn’t a skater, it would have stayed inside a classroom. But since there’s such a connection with me, and now we have interns who also skate, when we put the word out about the program, it penetrates more than if it was coming from somebody on the outside.”
At The New School, Watkins works with the Center for Global Mental Health, led by Adam Brown, to develop appropriate workshops and interventions for this community. “Adam and I were trying to decide what was going to be our first move, and he thought that doing a psychological first aid [PFA] training inside a skate shop would be a great place to start. PFA trainings teach people skills like how to address other people when they’re going through a crisis—not something super-severe, like bipolar episodes, but just like anxiety or distress. So I talked to the skate shop owner that I’m sponsored by, and we had a good enough relationship where he just agreed to let us use the space outside of his business hours. I did a big social media advertising campaign, I told all my friends, and it just was a grassroots thing that happened. I think our biggest hurdle was getting chairs for people to sit in, since it’s so expensive to rent them. But a church down the street actually donated chairs for the event.”
Watkins has supported the skateboarding community for years and started developing Skate Mind while working at the Harold Hunter Foundation, before joining NSSR. “The Hunter Foundation, a nonprofit created in memory of the legendary NYC skateboarder Harold Hunter, runs programs for inner-city youths including skate camps and clinics. They decided they wanted to start a men’s mental health initiative, so they reached out to me, since I had a lot of connections in the community. We started holding biweekly meetups to discuss mental health topics like conflict resolution and trauma. We would sometimes do arts projects, and we would always tie it back to skateboarding. It was a great opportunity to bring my mental health background and education into the skateboarding community and industry. It went so well that I think it’s how Adam Brown heard about my work.”
Since then, the program has been able to expand, partnering with other organizations like Gotham Park and the Skatepark Project (formerly the Tony Hawk Foundation). Watkins has also received support from his colleagues at the Center for Global Mental Health. “We’re all like family. Although I mainly work on The Skate Mind Project, I’ve helped with other community projects the center does, like EASE [Early Adolescent Skills for Emotions], headed by Janus Wong and Tina Xu, with Adam overseeing the project. I’ve also collaborated with Josheka Chauhan, who leads weekly wellness sessions at the Brooklyn Banks skate park with Gotham Park. We all work closely together at the center, and that has been helpful to me in understanding deeply how these interventions work. I feel like there is a potential to bring more of these tools that they have developed at the lab into the skate community. I feel like we are all always ready to lend helping hands, and I feel like I am just blessed to have the greatest colleagues and collaborators.”