Behind Campus
Thanks for the chat, Andre. What
was it about skating that hooked you
in the first place?
I’m originally from South Africa and it’s
all about team sports there. Skating
was one thing I could just go out and
do by myself in my younger years.
There’s something about the anti-
establishment ethos of it all, it’s a bit
rebellious and I quite like that. There’re
a lot of rules in South Africa and this
was something I came into contact
with that I could tailor to my own style.
How did you and Tim meet?
I’ve been living in the UK for a while
and decided to study youth work at
Uni when I was 30. Tim and I met
during my final year – I was writing my
dictation on using skate park-based
activities to engage young people,
how it’s an engagement tool and how
the councils in the UK are missing the
mark. They build amazing facilities
where thousands of young people
come every month, but they don’t do
anything once they’re there; there’s
no follow-up work and no-one to
encourage or support them on their
journey.
At the time Tim was a youth worker
running a weekly skate park project
in an old youth centre with portable
ramps every Saturday. I thought “this
is amazing” and started volunteering
for him, but my South Africanism took
over and after three weeks I was like
“man, we can do this way better, and
really DO this”.
Ha ha, was he receptive to your
ideas?
Yeah, I think he’d been waiting for
someone with drive to support him.
It all moved quite quickly when we
decided we wanted the project to be
for the betterment of young people and
the community.
Is that when you decided to set
yourselves up as a charitable
organisation?
We toyed with the structure and
thought of being a charity, but when
we looked into it we discovered that
if you’re a charity and you’re on the
board of directors, you can’t work
for that charity. We didn’t want to
set something up and not be able
to earn money from it, or have to
hand-pick four or five people to
essentially become our bosses. It was
a conundrum, so we decided to set
ourselves up as a social enterprise.
That means we’re a company, but
have a charitable objective. We’re still
regulated by the Charities Commission
but it fell in line with what we wanted
to do.
What made you want to turn it from
a pipe dream into a reality?
There was an election where the
Tories were coming into power, and
we realised we had to think more
business-minded to grow and be
sustainable as the Tories are more
about privatisation.
At the same time, I