Who are you and what do you do?
My name is Jenna Hirt. I’m a skateboarder and I also started the organization Donate for Skate about two years ago.
How and when did you get into skating?
I started skating in 1990. When I was a kid growing up in California I was surrounded by it and my friends all skated. I moved to Daytona Beach in high school, where Stone Edge skatepark was. It’s one of the oldest, longest running skateboard parks besides Kona. I bought a Matt Hensley at Stone Edge, started skating and never stopped. I pretty much grew up skating there, I’m super lucky because it was the Mecca for everybody who was anybody in skateboarding at that time in the ‘90s. All the older guys would come from different states, crews, and countries. They’d either stay for a week, a few weeks, a month, or would end up moving there to Daytona. I’m so lucky to have started skating under the influence of these older guys who were super agro.
Was it difficult to be a female skater at that time?
No, I didn’t even know that that was a thing. When I grew up skating at Stone Edge I was the youngest girl. There were girls like Jenna Bryan and Judy McDonald who I looked up to, but they were a couple years older. I was always little Jenna. Everyone was always drinking and partying, and I was only 13 or 14, but everybody looked out for me. It’s so funny looking back, but up until 10 years ago I had never skated with girls. Jenna and Judy would be there sometimes, but they were off traveling, they were skating contests. I was still in high school so I wasn’t traveling. I skated with all these older dudes. People that were just our friends. It wasn’t weird, I never really thought about it.
When did you start working with concrete?
For the last six years or something it seems like a lot of DIY spots have been popping up everywhere. Everybody wants to get their hands dirty, of course I want to skate it, so why wouldn’t I want to help out? At one point I was in India on the all girls skate India tour, and I was talking to Jonathan from Confusion. I don’t know how it came up, but he had mentioned there was a build that was happening in Ethiopia, and I was like “Oh my God, I would totally be down!” He just knew that I loved to travel and go to crazy places to skate. He had heard about that build with Make Life Skate Life and then he hooked me up with Jon Chaconas and that was my first full-on beginning to end build, I had never done that before. Ethiopia was a really cool introduction to building. From the get go you’re coming into a place where you’re not really sure who’s setting up the situation. Normally when I travel I have to figure everything out myself, like where I’m skating, where I’m eating, where I’m going, and this was the first time it was in someone else’s hands. There were also like 16 other people I didn’t know, but they’re all skateboarders. You make little connections, then it turns out that you’re skating with a bunch of fucking people that you’re having all these crazy experiences together and you’re already connected by day one because you’re all just like “what the fuck is going on?” and you figure everything out together.
You’re all over the map pretty regularly. Do you have a homebase?
I would say Florida. I have a camper and I do have property now. I’ll park my camper on my property when I’m in Florida. Last year I was on my land for probably two and a half months. I’m never really home, but it’s not home, it’s like I travel full time and I hand make my line of jewelry to make my money. I started doing that when I started skateboarding actually. Since 1990 I’ve been making my own line of jewelry and selling it, and skateboarding. It’s crazy to do something for 30 years. I started making jewelry because I needed gas money to get to the skatepark, and to be able to travel to skate. It’s like this cycle of which one follows which.
And you source all of your materials from your travels for your jewelry, right?
A lot of stuff I do when I’m traveling around the world is for fun basically, everything is for fun. Whether I’m helping out building a skatepark or bringing boards to other countries or just jumping off of a bridge somewhere in the middle of Greece. Wherever I’m at I look for markets, out of the way places, or different tribes and find really interesting areas. A lot of my more intricate pieces have like a pendant I got from the so-and-so market in Istanbul, or I went to Thailand and looked for tribes making silverware, or this one time I spent three days looking for a certain area around Shanghai with people in this tribe who make silver. Finally this person gave me directions “by the lady boys,” and I was like “oh, lady boys!” I got there and ended up going to this lady boy show. I was just this small girl and everyone else was in a group, like big parties. They singled me out and I got up on stage and all of a sudden me and these lady boys were doing splits and cartwheels. That’s the cool thing about when I’m traveling to find pendants and stuff, that when I do end up working it into my jewelry, I have these really cool stories too. There’s something about when you’re a girl traveling around with a skateboard by yourself, it’s sort of like a passport to anything. It’s really cool.
How many completes for Donate to Skate do you think you’ve built and given away?
I’ve been able to bring nearly 250 completes to 12 different countries on 6 different continents. I’ve actually been to Antarctica. In 2010 I went on an expedition there, but I’m not bringing skateboards there. My thing that I like to do is bring completes, like entire skateboards. Anybody could bring some wheels or some bearings, but when you just bring that to a kid it’s like “how is this kid ever going to find the rest of these parts?” It’s never going to happen. I really enjoy being able to take actual completes to give to a kid.
How does customs work? How’re you getting through with boxes of product?
It’s different in every country. So far it’s been Peru, Nepal, South Africa, Morocco, Greece, the Maldives, Madagascar, Jordan, Nicaragua, and then Angola and Iraq with some of our friends from the builds. Everything’s gone fine through customs except I did have issues in Madagascar and in Nicaragua. In Madagascar I met these kids and promised I’d come back with boards. So I was waiting for the right time to go back because of these kids I had a super connection with, and I wanted to bring them some decks. I had already bought a flight to go to Iceland, but I decided not to go on that trip and ate the $300 for the flight so I could go to Madagascar and drop these 20 beautiful completes that Steve Van Doren had donated. When I got there, customs was not stoked and they held all my boards. I was lucky that I had friends there, these kids, and one of them met me in the capital and we went to the airport together the next day. It’s so good he was with me, because he had to translate. We were there for six hours at customs, and I basically had to buy back all these boards. I could only afford to get 13 of the 20 boards back because I only brought about $400 cash since I was only going to be there a week staying with these kids. The next week these kids raised enough money to get the rest of the boards so they drove me back to the capital for my flight. They were able to get the rest of the boards from customs and then they took a bus back three hours to their home and then I flew away. The way I look at it is you could stay at 5 star hotel for a week, or spend the same amount of money to bring boards to kids all over the world. It’s like $2500 to ship boards to South Africa. You can’t do it. But it costs $700 for a round trip ticket so just go on vacation and bring the boards yourself.
Yeah it’s pretty much a no brainer.
Yeah. Nicaragua was funny too, Chris Hogan and I went last November to bring boards. I had planned this for a while and was actually going to go in May to bring boards and then there was this crazy situation with the government and it got super sketchy, and it was not a good time to go, people were dying and fleeing. November was a good time, and we brought 15 boards. When we got to fucking Orlando, there’s this stupid trade embargo with Nicaragua where you can’t ship cardboard boxes, and my decks go in a box and the trucks and wheels go in another box. I had everything boxed up crazy with a million saran wrap rolls, a million duct tape rolls. they wouldn’t accept cardboard.
How can people reach out to donate or get involved in Donate for Skate?
If anybody wants to help me get completes to kids around the world, they can message me on Instagram @donateforskate or on Facebook and let me know what they have. I have a storage unit for all the stuff, and I had to move up to a 10×10 because I was running out of room. The main thing is the trucks. If I don’t have sets of trucks I don’t have completes. Last year I basically traveled myself out of stock, I went to too many places in too short of a time. In the last few months I brought boards to Madagascar and Angola, Nicaragua and Jordan. In December and I brought maybe 25 completes to Jordan and that was basically it. Right now, I just need trucks. New hardware is amazing too, so that I’m not re-working and re-threading rusty stuff. If anybody has brand new decks, like shop decks, or small board companies that would like to see that board in another country, anything 8.5 or smaller, I’d accept those too. If anybody wants to have any events, even just get togethers at somebody’s bowl, like “hey we’re having a barbeque. Bring any sets of trucks you have for Donate for Skate.” Put out a table somewhere or a box in your shop for if anybody’s buying new stuff. There’s lots of different ways anywhere around the country to collect stock. It doesn’t have to just be stuff that you have, you know? I’ve had a lot of friends have contests and put it on the fliers, stuff like that. It’s word of mouth, I like it to be as organic as possible. I’m only one person who can only do so much, and it’s way cooler and more fun that way.
