With Wax Bars, Woonsocket Teens Launch Campaign to Build Skateparks Nationwide

The first step to turning around a city starts with its young people being invested in the community. 

If the young people have nothing to do and nowhere to go, there aren't many positive options left aside from leaving.

Leave it to a group of Woonsocket teens who decided to attack the problem head on and launch a campaign to get a new skate park built in their city and it's called Frosty Builds Skateparks.

Aaron Williams, Charles Degnan, Noah Silviera and Liam Keen then took their idea and decided to roll with it, bigtime.

They hand crafted 1,000 bars of skate wax, launched an Indiegogo campaign, and have raised more than $14,000 towards a $100,000 goal of launching a brand to offer a template for other communities to exact positive change in the community.

"Our short term goal is to build a skatepark in our city to prove any community can raise the funds it needs to change itself for the better using the right combination of ingenuity and grit," a campaign description states on their Indiegogo page.

But the long-term goal is to build Frosty Builds Skateparks, a brand that they hope to use the net profits to build public skateparks in cities that can't afford them around the country.

The boys, all friends, frequent Craft, a local skate and BMX shop and youth recreational hotspot that happened to be run by Susan Kirwan, Keen's mother. 

They noticed that local kids used skate wax to protect their boards from curbs, as well as to wax up surfaces they plan on using. They spotted a need, test-cooked their way to a skate wax recipe and soon began selling them out of Craft.

They worked on weekends and after school. Two of the boys were taking entrepreneurship class at the MET school, which assisted their efforts in obtaining the custom rubber molds they used to emblazon the logo on each bar.

Kirwan told the Woonsocket Call that one spot for the possible skatepark could be off Hamlet Avenue at the former Giancarlo's Restaurant site. Near the Blackstone Valley Bikeway, it presents an opportunity for Woonsocket to take another step towards reinventing itself at the same time it serves its youth with a safe place to go.

To buy a bar and contribute to the campaign, visit: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/frosty-builds-skateparks