Greenville Forward Thinking Creating Community Conversation to Inspire Change

Recently, Brock Koonce (our Program Director) was filling the Greenville Forward team in on the TEDX Salon that Headstrong helped facilitate discussing the role of youth in Greenville’s future. As he was telling us about the presentations, one thing really stuck with me and became an interesting illustration for community journeys. One of the featured presenters is a member of a group of teens in Greenville called Substreet Parkour. If you attended TEDX last year, you saw them perform. But if not, the best way to explain parkour is doing gymnastic-style stunts on everyday objects. For example, if you followed the Substreet Parkour crew around for the afternoon, you might watch them take a flip off an overhang, only to run up a wall and jump off a seemingly too steep embankment.

Needless to say, they make worry-prone folks like myself cringe just imagining how they could get hurt. And my big question, how do they not? Answer: they definitely do. And as Brock continued to summarize the most impressive points of the speaker, he quoted something the young man said…and though this is a quote of a quote, it went something like this, “When I am outside on roads, I can’t even walk in a straight line. All I can think of is how to turn what is up ahead into a jump.” They run ahead, constantly looking for new hurdles to climb, and they get hurt. But they keep going. It is freeing, it is unifying, and it is (for them) just fun.

So I think you might guess where I am going with this. As a community, we always have a road ahead. Some of us can only think of getting to the next destination, putting on blinders for our environment around us. Some only see a steep hill with an end so far off that they have lost hope. Some see it as a race and don’t care how they get there. And some turn the road ahead into a creative journey where the destination is just another stop along the way.

I want Greenville to be like the kid who can’t help but visualize the path in front of him as his own medium for creativity. I want Greenville to be willing to see the road block ahead as a means for a jump — not the end of the road. And even if we get hurt along the way, at least we dared to try, and try again.