Spotlight: Kyle Jewett

Kyle Jewett, a skateboard enthusiast who studied graphic design at Sault College, is combining his passions to take on various initiatives in Sault Ste. Marie that will support his local community and help others succeed.

He runs a small home-based design studio Swamp Wood Unlimited that brings Canadian built and custom designed pro quality skateboards to Northern Ontario.

This month, he was announced as one of the 7 new participants in our SENO CoStarter for Change program. With the support of this program, he will launch Sault Skate Park Co-op, an indoor skate park and lounge that will aim to provide an active community space for youth in Sault Ste. Marie.

Check out his story below:

Q: What inspires you?

A: For inspiration, I think it’s really just a matter of trying to do something that I myself find interesting and engaging — something that I can really share with others.

Q: What is the motivation behind your business?

A: For me, the motivation of my business is to culminate my passions into one thing that I can really bring to the community, while also monetizing in someway to support myself.

Q: Who do you hope to impact/reach through your business? Why?

A: As for the impact, it just came naturally as I was just trying to help out my group of friends and community members alike. I knew I wanted to do design work for artists and small businesses, and help them out as I owned a small business myself (Swamp Wood Unlimited).

When it came to doing other things such as event organization with longboarding and skateboarding events, it was more about getting something together for my friends & their friends, as well as other like-minded individuals in the community. The longboarding business just seemed to follow suit with what I was already doing, in that I wanted to facilitate these events with products that they could afford through my longboard business.

Q: Would you consider yourself a social entrepreneur? Why?

A:The whole term social entrepreneur is very new to me, but I would have to say yes.

I have always put my efforts into things I’m passionate about and that I could engage with community members — I just never really had a label for it before.

I wanted to help out in the community, and when I began finding these different seminars which portrayed the idea of social entrepreneurship, it really seemed to fit. I would have to say definitely yes after really learning about the term and considering all of my work.

Q: Does this term ‘social entrepreneur’ resonate with you? What words might you connect with more?

A: There really wasn’t any title that I could put to the work I was doing, so it’s a great term to hold on to. The whole idea that to be a social entrepreneur you have to be very socially conscious really resonates with me and I think fits perfectly with what I’m doing in the community.

Q: What barriers/challenges have you encountered?

A: Honestly, in the beginning I really wasn’t too concerned about doing things 100% legitimately, when considering the legalities, insurance and things like that. I really started taking the “outlaw” route because I just wanted to have events. It became a concern when I realized I really wanted to push it for all community members and not just my friends, and doing so would require the right knowledge and connections. In that sense, it took me a while to network around town and find those people that I could work with to host these events properly.

There’s also the misconception that anyone who wants to be an entrepreneur needs the time and money to get ideas off of the ground. There’s many projects I’d like to do, but it’s a matter of deciding what ones are the most important to me when looking at funding, etc. Just figuring out the logistics and deciding what’s important for me, my community and what’s truly plausible with the resources I have is the biggest challenge.

Q: How did you confront those challenges and barriers? What resources did you need? What resources do you project needing as you move forward?

A: Networking is extremely important. Some kind of central place where entrepreneurs can find all of the funding is a really important resource. A lot of time is spent skipping around between organizations to see what each have. Some sort of cohesive resource to delve in to say “okay I’ve applied for this, and this, but I can’t apply for this and this”, to narrow things down for someone who may have an idea but doesn’t know where to access these networks or supports.

Q: Who is your community of support? How important is a local, face-to-face community of support?

A: My community of support are mostly my good friends. That’s basically how it all started, so it’s progressed naturally and past that point I began networking with community minded organizations. I’ve just recently started reaching out to Algoma Public Health and working with the Arts Council on some projects.

Q: What would have made this process easier for you?

A: The SENO workshops themselves were extremely important, very informative and very helpful in terms of resources like that which were free and available to the whole community. The whole idea of getting people with the same mindset together in a room is so helpful in itself, more so than the curriculum. You get a lot of great ideas with this kind of environment, and also a support network through the workshops. If there’s a way to have even more and more of this, that would be the biggest support possible.

Q: What other community initiatives are you involved in?

A: Some event organization, facilitation, and promotion for many of the skateboard organization in the community. I run a lot of their facebook pages, and other promotional things needed. Also the “Lets Finish the Skatepark Project” has also been a deep passion of mine, getting under my skin the last couple of years because of how badly I want to see it resolved. My work touches on the idea of re-facing of a lot of alternative art, sports, and the people who are involved in it to remove some of the stigma of these ideas. My initiatives kind of expand from and work off of this idea around removing the stigma of actions sports, alternative art, and the people associated with it.

For more information, please visit his Facebook page.

Originally published at www.seethechange.ca.