Parkour jump in London

Monthly Update – September 2022

Every month, we will be putting together a monthly update on our website to keep you guys updated with everything that has gone on at Parkour UK.

A Full Team

In September, Simon Vardy settled into his role as Workforce Lead, taking over Kieran’s previous role.

Simon will be helping us accelerate the development of our Level One Coaching Qualification & our Level Two Coaching Qualification. Simon’s role will also look for new opportunities for the workforce. Simon is an experienced performance coach with a demonstrated history of working in the higher education industry and professional sports up to the elite level.

Our previous workforce lead, Kieran Wylde has moved positions at Parkour UK and will be working in our membership lead role, helping accelerate our memberships here at Parkour UK.

This finishes the employment of people from our employment day we ran back in June of this year, with a team now working in digital support, workforce, and membership

It’s really exciting and brilliant having a team now at Parkour UK. Chris Grant (PKUK’s head of development) is always ecstatic about logging onto the weekly all-hands meeting and seeing a team full of people working together.

Parkour UK Meets With The Board

In the closing weeks of September, the full team traveled to Brighton for the quarterly board meeting. We were able to report our progress in a way that we hadn’t before, with Lynn, Callun, Simon, and Kieran all presenting to the board in their area of expertise, following answering the questions the board had asked them.

We spent time discussing each of the areas that Parkour UK is currently focusing on, and spent some time together, before having some lovely food.

It was really great having the full team together, in one place, to discuss Parkour UK’s current path, projections, and areas of focus.

The Parkour UK Team – (left to right) Callun, Lynn, Kieran, Chris, Dan, Simon.

Below, we have summarized some of the topics of discussion, and steps going forward in different areas of the organization.

Membership: We spent a large chunk of the Tuesday discussing what our membership might look like, trying to categorize the community to look at what we might be able to offer in terms of knowledge and services across the whole of the community. This includes improving what we have already (such as coaching), but what we can also do to help support content creators, freelancers, athletes, etc. It was an exciting conversation that we are excited to get the ball rolling on. This is where Kieran, our Membership Lead, will be focusing his work in the next 6 months to a year.

Digital and Story Telling: Callun and Lynn reported to the board about our socials with really good statistics and measures. Our socials have received a tonne of engagement, interaction, and positive comments since the digital team came on board back in mid-July. On top of this, Lynn has also been working on a huge mapping document trying to capture the name, location, and purpose of different parkour teams, organizations, groups, and freelancers across the country within the parkour space.

Workforce: With the new school year starting, we are getting back into schools, and running Teacher CPD courses. We have also mapped all the dates for Level 2 courses through 2023, which will be announced once we are confident that the materials are going to be ready. Our plan is to announce the courses for the whole year to allow some flexibility to allow you to book. We will, eventually, work towards this for the Level One courses also.

Toolkits

Something that did pop up during our discussion was the toolkits we have on our website. We have a bunch of free toolkits available on our website, which you can find here. There is a range of toolkits, including “How to start a university society”, a “Business” toolkit, and “Risk Assessment” toolkits, all available to you, so please check them out.

Email Updates and Facebook Group For Members

We are currently working on building up our email newsletter for our member organizations and individuals again. This had some traction before, but earlier this year it dropped off a little bit. Now, with the digital team onboard, we have the capacity as an organization to fill these tasks to a standard we are happy with.

Storror’s Big Wall Open

Of course, we couldn’t do an update of September without mentioning Storror’s monumental street event, the “Big Wall Open.” – Callun visited the event, watching it all unfold.

The event was brilliant. It was amazing seeing how many people turned up. Not just parkour practitioners, but young children and their parents, many of who don’t train in parkour, they have just come down and appreciate the sport, speaking with the community, and getting to know more about the sport. Storror’s impact on the sport we love has been incredible, and I know this event has cemented itself as one of the sports’ best, but as a stepping stone to get so many other people into parkour.

Callun speaking about the Storror Big Wall Open

Community Posts

At the start of September, we started rolling out a weekly post of some movements from the parkour community. The feedback from these posts has been amazing, with the community loving the idea of us using our platform to show the progression and practice of those within our sport. Make sure you use the hashtag #ParkourUK so we can see your clips! Remember to also follow us on Instagram, @ParkourUK