Leo Poulet

Hello, Leo. Thank you for your time. We are here at your place, 35 degrees, we just manage. In order to have the correct information, could you just tell us: who are you?

I’m Leo Poulet, 34 years old soon, no recently. I live in France. I have skateboarded for 22 years now. I work at building skateparks and build them professionally in France. And I have  an association that builds skateparks around the world in poor countries.

That is the association “Wonders around the World”. You go into other countries, just poor countries, third world countries, to build skateboard parks. I read about you and I know that you are very successful. You’ve built many skateboard parks already in your life?

I don’t know how many. But with “Wonders”, we have done 20 projects in the last five years.

That’s a lot, because you have to go there and build them from scratch.

First, we build a connection with the people there, with the citizens. We make contact with them and work with them to get the land and try to manage the finance. And then we come with 20 volunteers and build the skatepark. It ‘s a long process.

I work with volunteers, I do the plans, the project, everything. It needs a lot of tenacity, curiosity, taking risks, all these things. We have to work fast because we don’t have much finance. You can’t feed a lot of people for too long. You can’t give them housing for too long. So, we have to be fast.

Everything needs to be very precisely prepped before we come, before we show up. And if everything is good and in good condition before we come I can finish the project  in five weeks. It depends on the size, but we always try to not go too big so we are able to finish it in a short time.

Why do you think you have come so far? 

I have to start from the beginning of the story.  I taught skateboarding for six years, and then I quit and started to travel, just to travel. But I got bored with travel alone.  When you keep getting the best views, the best countries, the best sunsets, I don’t know, for me it was like every day is the same, even if you are travelling.

When I went to Nepal, to help building a skatepark, I saw all these volunteers killing themselves in the sun and completing an enormous amount of work, my mind and heart were blown away. At that time I didn’t know much about construction, but my mind was just blown away when I saw what they were doing.  And I realized that they did all the work for free, they volunteered. There is such a great motivation and so much love behind it. And I was like, “Okay, this is for me. I’m only going to do this.” And then I just kept doing it, loving it from the bottom of my heart for three years jumping from one project to another.

I traveled the whole world doing projects and learned a lot. I still can’t stop, and I don’t want to stop, for sure. I’m committed to these projects, which I love, and I hope I will never have to do something else ever in my life. There are so many smiles behind what we do. The kids are always smiling because they start to do skateboarding. You know, when you bring this to somebody else, kids in a really poor country for example, it is going to be a life changer, for sure. It’s going to be a banger and it always works. We have seen it. We get confirmation again and again within the projects.

And as much as the country is poor, or at war or any kind of hardship the harder it is, But I am going to bring something that is going to help them to escape, improve and thrive.

The impact on the children’s daily life is huge and they learn a lot. It is a school for life.

Scientific studies have been done on skating. The moves and keeping your balance have an impact on the brain. It is scientifically proven that with skateboarding you influence the structure of your brain through the process of neuroplasticity.

What you develop the most, what you learn the most is how to fall, and to get up again, to fall again and to never stop getting up. You want to get to the goal, so you finish what you have started. If I want to learn new tricks, I’m going “to kill myself” in order to get there. When you learn this as a child, when you grow up, you know how to fall and more importantly you know how to get up again, Nothing is going to stop you in your life in general. You learn how to fight when you get in trouble.

When you have an objective, you’ll achieve this for sure. It just pushes you. You learn stuff for your life. You learn to fight; you learn to redo and redo and stand up again and again. Being passionate, you learn a lot of things. This is what I said the most to parents when I was a skateboarding teacher: as soon as you give me your kids to learn how to skate, their life’s going to change, you have to know it.

Stuff is going to be different afterwards, and it always changed their life.

When you leave these parks, do you first give instructions and teach them to skate, so they can give the skills to other kids?

No, we don’t do this. When we build somewhere, it’s because people are already skating there, and they are asking to have a place to skate because they don’t have any. We would never go somewhere where there’s absolutely no one skating and put a skate park there. Because other NGOs are doing this, and I definitely respect the way they work. But for us, what is important is to provide the space. We don’t do the after work.

With our project the local people have to do the after work, because we’re just providing the space, and they have to take care of the space, and because they already know how to skate, they can teach people. It makes sense because if you give everything, the teachers, the skateboard, the skate park, they just consume and you have to do this forever. You’re never going to stop if you start to give lessons, if you start to give jobs to them, if you start to give skateboards. As soon as you stop, it would be very hard for them to survive. I mean, they’d find a way, but they could have problems.

What we do mainly is to try to have at least 50 skateboards that we leave there. It’s also because we don’t want to put a flag there. You know what I mean? The current problem of NGOs, I would say, is to say that they build a park there, and continue working there, and they’re working in 24 countries.

It’s not our approach. What we like is to give them something and then go back to our country.

To do all the after work you need a lot of money, and we don’t have any. But we go there because we get back their smile.  It’s the best salary you can get. The smiles from kids and even adults, you know, to see people enjoying what you did, you can see it on their face.

You’ve reminded me of something. We built a park in Syria with another NGO. As soon as we finished building the park, you could see on the face of the kids that they had never had as much fun as this before.  When they start using a skateboard, and the skateboard is moving, you can see on the face that they have never had this feeling before. They never had that much positive energy. And others have the benefit. You get the compensation that they have something they can do and learn for life. Yeah. If I could have this as a salary in my own life, I would say, “I don’t need a job.”

Where do you get your inspiration from to create these parks? 

We get contacted by the locals. And then from this, we exchange a lot of emails to know who they are, because we also sometimes get emails from the kids in the middle of Africa. They get our email address, but sadly we can’t do this with everyone. So, for example, when we get in contact with a local association or something, we have to explain the whole process to them. And then sometimes the money comes from a private sponsor that pays for everything. The country can do a crowdfund. Sometimes it’s just a crowdfund running for two or three years, and then at some point the amount of money is sufficient.

And then we start. I mean, as soon as we get to 20 or 30 volunteers we come. And then you have to have good weather. In most of the countries we go to you cannot build for 6 months of the year because we use concrete.

And how do you recharge your batteries? 

I skate.

I surf too. I have a fantastic girlfriend that I like to hang out with and do some hiking and be with friends. But mainly I skate a lot because my body is getting tired, so I try to keep skating as much as I can.

Do you have a utopia? Do you have sort of a vision of an ideal world for all of us?

I don’t know if I really have the answer for this, but I mean, the best way for me would be to grow vegetables and that no one has to work, no one has to spend time on jobs and just enjoy their own life. But in reality, we have lots of wars, we have lots of injustices, and so one approach would be giving and making sure that others are well.

Taking care of each other. I mean, it’s the main point. If everyone does this, I think we could live without politics, if we could all help and respect each other, we would not need anything else. So, we are back to showing respect and taking care of people. So easy. I don’t think it’s going to happen, but it would be the best world for me.