Our story, as told by Executive Director and Co-Founder, Nathan Witt

It all began with the sentence “Why not?”

To set the scene, I was 21 years old and had just moved against my will from Dallas back to my hometown because the campus housing I lived in shut down during the pandemic. This is not a fairy tale or love story by any means. I moved to Mineola when I was four, and I when I finally left I swore I’d never come back. My friends and I were the punk kids that had been smoking since middle school and got suspended for things like fighting, sneaking off campus, or one time stealing chemicals from the chemistry lab and using it to prank our gullible friend. We dug pretty deep holes for ourselves, moving away was my chance to restart.

For me, the seed that became the nonprofit actually started in Dallas. I discovered a passion for making music and a love for skateboarding. Those two hobbies helped me finally sober up from alcohol and weed. Two years after I moved away the pandemic sent me right back to Mineola. Those first months back were the trenches. I went from Dallas, a place that felt like the world was at my fingertips, to Mineola, a place that has almost as many retirement homes as it has stoplights. There was no nonprofit in my mind. I reached out to this little church that had a run-down skatepark just cause I personally needed to skate. I was obsessed with this podcast called “99% invisible" at the time and they had an episode about how a kid and his dad built a skatepark. I thought to myself, “How hard could it be?” Well…

If I had any clue how much work it was going to take, I probably would have never started. But if I had any clue how many great things would come out of it, I would have started 10 years earlier. A little kid and his dad did it, how hard could it be? I just started calling anyone I could think of. My uncle had a swimming pool, so I asked if he knew anyone that made pools. He told me to ask the Mineola Chamber of Commerce. I called them. They gave me a number, but he didn’t do concrete pools. So I called the closest town with a skatepark and asked who they had do it. That company came out and said, “You’ll never raise enough money.” I called friends of friends, followed leads, and made a million cold calls. What people never talk about when they tell these stories is how many days are spent feeling like you’re going nowhere. They suck, but they’re important because those are the days that teach you the skills you’ll need three years into it.

Meanwhile, as I’m raising a couple thousand dollars for new wooden ramps and still chasing concrete, I started to meet the high schoolers that wanted to skate the new ramps we had built. I freaking loved those kids, still do. They had my sense of humor, liked the same music I did, had some struggles like I did, and that’s when I realized they were my friend group of the next generation. So when they told me they had just started smoking weed and they were thinking about trying psychedelics, I realized I had an opportunity. I also realized maybe my friends and I weren’t doomed from the start, we were just bored and trying to find answers in this confusing world. I was ranting to anyone that would listen. These kids had nothing better to do than get in trouble. The least we owed them was the opportunity to choose a different path. It was in one of those conversations, on my back porch, when I was talking about how music had helped me turn around my life that I said to my dad, “It’s not like every kid can have a music studio in their backyard.” He sat back, took a moment, and responded with just two words, “Why not?”