Skateboarding advocacy and events nonprofit

Northwest Arkansas Skateboarding Foundation

Take a broom to Eureka Springs. That is the sort of thing the Northwest Arkansas Skateboarding Foundation writes down, in a guide to eight public skateparks, Bentonville out to Prairie Grove, written the way a rider would put it rather than the way a parks department would: what each park's obstacles are and, for most of them, whether they are metal, fiberglass, or concrete; that Bentonville's lights and Siloam Springs' stadium lights stay on until 11 p.m. while Gravette has none; that Eureka Springs collects sticks and Gravette loose rock, so both are parks to sweep before you drop in. Roy Rodezno started the foundation in 2018 with a founding board out of the scene's own businesses — the owner of Stash Skate Supply, a co-founder of the regional outlet Gnarkansas.com — and on KUAF he put the reason plainly: cycling here had a nonprofit to voice what it wanted, and skateboarding had nobody a city could call. He told the same interview about turning up at a Bentonville public-input meeting for a new park with a proposal of his own, the Wheelsports Garden: skateparks opened out, with green space in between, so families can picnic and watch rather than only ride. The wider ask has the same shape. Not one flagship park but a set of smaller modern ones with greenspace around them, sited off the Razorback Greenway — the Skate Gardens of Northwest Arkansas, it calls them — put to a region that already funds trails and green space, in exactly those terms. The parks are the cities', not the foundation's; what it holds is the record and the ask. If you ride, the guide is where to start.