The Harold Hunter Foundation works with skaters to address issues in their communities. In the past we've piloted HHF In the Classroom, an International Skate/Service Trip to the Dominican Republic, and partnered with the Mt. Ollie Baptist Church in Brownsville to run three regular summer skate programs, providing skate day camp scholarships for children in Brownsville, Brooklyn, serving 40 youth. With the arts education organization City Lore, we ran the Kickflip digital media training program, an intensive summer program in game design and coding hosted at Parsons School of Design. Addressing the creative nature of skaters, we started the Filmer Project, an apprenticeship program through which we worked with video and photo skater interns who assisted in producing all of our video content. The Filmer Project has remained an active program since 2014. Filmer Project interns and apprentices participated in the production of nearly every video on the HHF YouTube channel since 2014. In 2021 we launched the Brownsville Skate Project through which we offer instructional skate clinics 3-4 times/week at the Betsy Head Skatepark.
During the pandemic, we worked with skaters, community members, and corporate partners via an iterative program development process to develop the Creative Careers Program a suite of workforce readiness programs that are uniquely equipped to address skaters’ specific challenges in seeking opportunities for post-secondary skills, training, certification, and employment including a cohort-based Creative Careers program, the Grow with Google Scholarship Program. We now engage influencers, skate collectives, corporate partners, artists, and skaters in a variety of positions throughout the creative industry to co-create a series of workforce readiness and career exploration workshops, career panels, artist talks, and events designed to help NYC skaters start or grow careers in the creative industry.