Western Downs Chappies

Chiggy's Goes Rural: The Western Downs Tour

Chiggy's Goes Rural: The Western Downs Tour is a school collaboration with Chiggy's Skateboarding to bring skateboard workshops into Regional Schools and Communities. With the goal of developing resilience skills, and engaging with youth at risk of mental illness and/or disengaging with society.

This event started at Wandoan State School, where I'm the chaplain. Through my work supporting students in a social and emotional capacity, I started brainstorming on a way to connect at-risk kids back into the community... by utilising existing Council Resources (skateparks) to create an early intervention initiative which targets both mental health and social disengagement, as half of all the mental health conditions we experience at some point in our lives will have started by age 14, with 1 in 7 young people aged 4 to 17 years experiencing a mental health condition in any given year. These statistics only increase the further west you go, youth in regional and remote communities are at even greater risk of struggling with mental health due to limited access to professional help and physical isolation.

Why Partner With Us?

This event is community wide and will have a positive ripple effect on everyone.

By engaging with our local youth in this capacity, we are able to provide early intervention support to youth at-risk, through providing them with a positive and physical outlet (skateboarding).

We're supporting existing Council Initiatives, by utilising local resources, which will in turn pump more funding into our region... particularly, mental health and youth-intervention initiatives.


The Goal: To make this event accessible to as many regional students as possible... and unfortunately this requires money that school's simply don't have spare. With $10,000 we should be able to get into 8 Western Downs schools, across the week and provide these workshops at no cost to the schools or students. Whilst this is a big goal, every dollar counts and your generosity won't go unnoticed in the community.