This is a talk I gave on July 4, 2026 in Telč, Czech Republic. In 2015, a skatepark arrived in Janwaar — a small, remote village in Madhya Pradesh with no reliable electricity and a school most kids skipped. Nobody asked for it. But under two rules (“No school, no skateboarding” and “Girls first”), the village began rewriting its own story: school attendance climbed, girls who’d never been allowed in public spaces started ruling the ramps, and a grieving 15-year-old named Asha Gond became India’s national skateboarding champion and the community’s own leader.
This talk — delivered at the SkateArt exhibition in Telč — distills that decade into four movements: Disrupt (introduce the unexpected without over-explaining it), Observe (watch who already leads before you try to lead), Co-create (give away control so ownership can take root), and Let Go (the founder’s real job is to become unnecessary). Nine underlying principles — from disobedience over compliance to we over me — run through each stage, offered not as theory but as lived proof from Janwaar, with a direct challenge to Telč: find your own skatepark, your own Asha, your own moment to step back.
Full talk follows below.
OPENING
Let me take you to a place you’ve probably never heard of.
Janwaar. A village in Madhya Pradesh, central India. A few hundred people. Dirt roads. No reliable electricity. A school that children mostly didn’t attend. A rigid social hierarchy that told girls, in particular, to stay home, stay quiet, stay small.
Nothing was supposed to change in Janwaar.
And then — in 2015 — everything did.
Not because of a government programme. Not because of a five-year development plan. Not because some expert flew in with a framework and a PowerPoint.
Because of a skatepark.
What happened in Janwaar didn’t come from a plan.
It came from nine principles — and four movements.
You’ll see all of them today. Not as theory. As a story.
PART ONE — DISRUPT
“Nobody asked for it. That was the point.”
We built a skatepark in Janwaar. Nobody had requested it. No committee had approved it. We simply asked: what happens if you put something completely unexpected into a place where nothing ever happens?
And then we waited.
The first ones to show up?
The kids. Of course. Kids always show up when something looks like fun.
But here is what nobody predicted: within weeks, the girls were skating first. Not because we told them to. Because of two rules — and only two rules — that I introduced from day one:
No school, no skateboarding.
And: Girls first!
That’s it. That was the entire programme.
No curriculum. No workshops on empowerment. No gender equality seminars. Just: if you want to skate, you go to school. And if a girl wants a skateboard, you just give it to her. Without discussion.
Suddenly, school attendance shot up. Girls who had never been allowed in public spaces were flying down ramps. Boys who had dropped out came back — because skateboarding required school.
We didn’t change the village. The village changed itself.
That’s the first lesson: Disrupt. Don’t ask for permission to do something unexpected. Don’t over-explain it. Don’t turn it into a project before it has had a chance to breathe.
Make it irresistible — and then get out of the way.
Two principles made this possible.
The first: disobedience over compliance. Compliance reproduces what already exists. The skatepark was an act of disobedience — against the development playbook, against the village hierarchy, against everything that said girls don’t skate. We didn’t ask for permission. We asked a question: what if?
The second: emergence over authorities. We didn’t install a leader. We created conditions for one to appear. Leadership reveals itself when the system has enough room to move.
What’s your skatepark?
What’s the thing in Telč that nobody asked for but everybody needed?
PART TWO — OBSERVE
“The answers were already there. We just had to shut up long enough to see them.”
After the disruption comes the hardest part. Harder than building. Harder than fundraising. Harder than any planning meeting you’ve ever sat through.
Watching. Listening. Not fixing.
When I first arrived in Janwaar, I had this idea of a skatepark and one question in my mind:
Can a skatepark disrupt a village like Janwaar?
I had ideas about community development. All based on my early learning from The Well in California.
I’ve never read a book about it.
I just had a few principles in mind which allow transformation.
And then a girl named Asha showed up.
Asha Gond. Asha was 15 years old back then.
Her brother had just died. And the family was in grief.
So was she.
But she came. And she fell in love with skateboarding. She made time for it. Even though her parents and actually the entire village didn’t want her, a girl, to skate.
She watched the boys skating . Then she stepped on a board. Fell. Got up. Fell again. Got up again.
She was fixed by the freedom the skateboard provided.
It made her “fly”.
Today Asha is India’s national skateboarding champion. She is a rapper. She runs the community organisation in Janwaar. She is a role model for many girls in India.
It wasn’t an easy journey.
But I went with her all the way >>> Skate Girl Asha…..
I did not plan Asha. I did not identify her as a “leader” and put her in a leadership programme. I just watched — and then followed her lead.
Observation is not passive. It is the most active, disciplined thing you can do as a community builder. It means resisting every instinct to jump in, solve, improve, redirect.
It means asking: what is already working here? Who is already leading, even without the title? What does this community actually want — not what we think it needs?
For Telč: you already have answers in this room. In the people who showed up today. Find the person who was first to say “let’s build something here.” Watch what they do when nobody’s looking. That’s your Asha.
Two principles live here.
Compasses over maps — I had a vision: kids who believe their lives can be different. I had no plan for how to get there. In complex systems the path cannot be known in advance. Only the direction.
And practice over theory — I gave the kids fifteen skateboards, showed them videos on a tablet, and stepped back. They took it from there. Every decision came from watching what was actually happening — not from what I had planned would happen.
PART THREE — CO-CREATE
“Control is the enemy of community.”
Here is the thing that kills most community projects. And I’ve seen it everywhere — India, Germany, Czech Republic, doesn’t matter.
Someone has a vision. People get excited. And then — slowly, quietly — the vision becomes a programme. The programme becomes a structure. The structure becomes a hierarchy. And the hierarchy decides who gets to speak, who gets to lead, who gets credit.
And the community dies.
In Janwaar, we had to learn this the hard way. There were moments — many moments — when I thought I knew better. When I wanted to step in and redirect things. When the “right” answer seemed so obvious to me.
But every time I stepped back and asked instead of told — every time I said “what do you think?” instead of “here’s what we should do” — something better emerged than anything I could have designed.
The Janwaar Way has a phrase for this:
Trust over control.
Participation over programme.
Ownership over dependency.
Co-creation means the community owns the outcome — including the failures. Including the wrong turns. Including the messy, uncomfortable moments when nobody agrees and everything feels stuck.
That feeling? That’s not a problem. That’s democracy. That’s community. That’s exactly where the good stuff comes from.
For Telč:
who is not in this room today who should be?
Who has been left out of the conversation — not out of bad intention, but because it’s easier to work with the people you already know?
Go find them. Bring them in. Let them mess up your plan. Your plan will be better for it.
Three principles run underneath this.
Pull over push — we never delivered skateboarding as a solution. We made space. The village pulled it toward itself. That’s why it held.
Systems over objects — the skatepark touched school attendance, gender roles, caste dynamics, family structures. We never tried to fix one thing. We put something into the system and watched what moved.
And resilience over strength — there were failures. Many. A resilient process doesn’t close down when something goes wrong. It pauses, reflects, and responds. Without that culture, nothing real gets built.
PART FOUR — LET GO
“The best thing I ever did for Janwaar was leave.”
This is the part nobody wants to hear.
At some point — if you’ve done the other three things well — your community won’t need you in the same way anymore. And that is not failure. That is the whole point.
In Janwaar, there came a moment when I realised things worked without me being there. Asha was running things. Arun — the skating coach — was training the next generation. The community had its own rhythm, its own rules, its own identity.
My job was to let go.
Not to disappear. Not to abandon. But to shift — from founder to supporter. From leader to witness. From “I built this” to “they built this.”
Two principles make this possible.
Learning over education — education is what institutions do to people. Learning is what people do to themselves. The Barefoot Skateboarders Organisation wasn’t built by teaching the kids how to run an NGO. It was built by watching them figure it out — and staying out of the way long enough for that to happen.
And finally: We over Me. This doesn’t mean the individual disappears. It means the strongest contribution you can make to a community is to become fully yourself — and then serve something larger. Asha became the leader not by dissolving into the community. By becoming more fully herself. And that self served everyone around her.
That shift is terrifying. And it is the most important thing you will ever do for the community you are building.
CLOSING
You are building something here in Telč. You don’t know yet what it will become — and that’s good. That’s exactly right.
Disrupt. Put something unexpected into the world and see what happens.
Observe. Watch who shows up. Listen more than you speak.
Co-create. Give the community ownership — of the successes and the mess.
Let go. Trust what you’ve built. Trust the people.
In Janwaar, a skatepark in the middle of nowhere produced a national champion, a community leader, and a village that rewrote its own story.
Nobody planned that. Nobody could have.
That’s the whole point.
Thank you.