Tony Hawk kept getting emails from kids who had been ticketed or even arrested just for skateboarding in the street. So he started funding places where they could skate legally instead. His foundation, now called The Skatepark Project, has helped build nearly 700 free skateparks in all 50 states. That free skatepark in your town? He probably helped pay for it.
That Free Skatepark In Your Town? Tony Hawk Paid For It
Tony Hawk turned pro at 16 and became skateboarding's biggest name. He also started getting emails from parents whose kids had been ticketed, or even arrested, just for skateboarding in the street.
No Place Left to Skate
Through the 1990s and early 2000s, skateboarding was banned or restricted on most public property in American towns.
Plenty of cities had no skatepark at all, so kids skated the only pavement they could find: sidewalks, parking lots, drained pools, empty lots.
That put them in direct conflict with local police. Some got fines. Some got arrested.
A Foundation Funded By A Game Show
Hawk had spent his whole career on a skateboard. It bothered him that kids doing the same thing he did for a living were being treated like criminals.
In 2002 he used part of the $125,000 he'd won on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire: Celebrity Edition to start the Tony Hawk Foundation.
The plan was simple: fund cities to build a free, legal public skatepark instead of chasing kids off the street.
Nearly 700 Parks and Counting
The foundation was renamed The Skatepark Project in 2020 to better reflect what it actually does.
By the organization's own count, it has now helped fund close to 700 free public skateparks in all 50 states.
Those parks draw an estimated 17 million visitors a year, according to the charity's own figures. Grants have totaled more than $13 million over the program's history.
Somewhere Legal to Go
Many of the towns that received grants could not have afforded a skatepark on their own. A lot of them are lower-income communities that had nowhere else to send kids who wanted to skate.
Hawk still sits on the organization's board. He has shown up to skate some of the parks it funded himself, including one in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
It started because a bunch of kids had nowhere legal to skate. There is a good chance one of those free public skateparks is sitting in your own town right now.
Frequently Asked Questions
When did Tony Hawk start The Skatepark Project?
How many skateparks has Tony Hawk's foundation funded?
Why did Tony Hawk start the Skatepark Project?
How many people use Skatepark Project funded parks each year?
Is The Skatepark Project the same organization as the Tony Hawk Foundation?
Verified Fact
This fact has been reviewed and verified against original sources.
Source: The Skatepark ProjectShow verification details
Audited 2026-08-06 (fact-verifier, independent pass). Numeric coherence: re-fetched skatepark.org directly and confirmed verbatim: close to 700 skateparks, all 50 States, nearly 17 million visitors annually — text/social_text/article/FAQs all use close to/nearly hedged language and none overshoot. Founding 2002 as Tony Hawk Foundation, renamed 2020 to Skatepark Project: CONFIRMED via Wikipedia (The Skatepark Project article) and Inside Philanthropy quote (Skatepark Project began as Tony Hawk Foundation in 2002, funded by Hawk 125000 win on celebrity edition of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire). Timeline coherence: 2018 Wikipedia figure (596 parks/5.8M) -> intermediate (660+/13M+ per tonyhawk.com bio + Wikipedia) -> current (~700/13M+/17M visitors per skatepark.org) — this fact only ever cites the current figures, no cross-year mixing. 125K seed money vs 13M cumulative grants are clearly distinct categories in the copy, not double-counted. FOUNDING MOTIVE (kids ticketed/arrested for street skating): current skatepark.org About copy has been softened to a general transformative-power narrative and does NOT itself mention police/arrests, so source_url alone does not back this detail. Independently corroborated instead via THREE separate nonprofit-directory mirrors carrying near-identical language (Idealist.org, Festival of Children Foundation, Donate-a-Bit): thousands of e-mails from parents and children across America who did not have a safe legal place to skate and in some cases arrested for skating on public property — consistent repeated wording across independent aggregators indicates this is authentic org-sourced founding history (likely the orgs own original GuideStar/Candid mission-statement text), not one journalists embellishment. Arrested is directly and repeatedly corroborated; ticketed is a reasonable proxy matching the articles own framing (some got fines, some got arrested) describing the general climate rather than a literal quote — kept as written, not softened further. CITATION FIDELITY: source_url (skatepark.org/about/) verbatim supports the headline specifics used from it (700-park count, 50-state coverage, 17M visitor figure) — kept as source_url; motive sourcing documented above rather than folded into source_url since it is scene-setting context, not the countable headline claim. No reversed agency, no invented precision, no unscoped superlatives found. GRADES: engine=2 honest (Tony Hawk mass-recognizable, IS the story — celebrity-secret-philanthropy pattern, same family as phil-collins/jack-white/george-michael). mainstream_novelty=2 honest (this specific ticketed-kids-so-he-built-parks angle is not a chronically-recycled FB classic like Wojtek/Sully). affinity_pool=2 honest (Tony Hawk is genuine US mass household name via THPS franchise, not regional/niche). GAP FOUND+FIXED: proof_photo_strength and beat_freshness were left NULL by content-creator, corrupting passes_vetoes and the pf sort key. Set proof_photo_strength=2 (Hawk has abundant real photography of him skating/visiting TSP-funded parks and ribbon-cuttings — image-curator must still confirm an actual usable photo before this ships as a monster/prime post per the image-viability sanity check). Set beat_freshness=1/borderline, not 2 and not a veto: the celebrity-secret-philanthropy beat has run 6x in ~8 weeks (jon-bernthal Jul31, joe-burrow Jul31, jack-white Jul28, phil-collins Jul12, john-cena Jun20, george-michael Jun10) — genuinely distinct sub-angle (police/skatepark vs theatre/kitchen/collection) so not vetoed, but social-manager should space it rather than stack it next to another same-beat post. No corrections needed to text/social/caption/article/FAQ fields — all numbers and claims check out as written. No scheduled_posts existed for this fact (none to cancel).
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