(ocean waves)
- When women come together, and support each other,
I think anything is possible.
Seriously, sisterhood, to feel that
is something that will kind of hug you
and make you feel safe.
And I felt so not safe in the skate scene
with men everywhere.
You'll see 50 girls coming down the boardwalk together,
people are literally like, "What is happening?"
When we all came together, I remember thinking,
"How did I get so lucky?"
I can't believe we all have the same mission.
Getting any woman on a board is a huge deal,
getting young girls on a board is bigger.
I'm Lucy Osinski, I'm the creator and co-founder
of GRLSWIRL, an all-women skate crew in Venice Beach.
(city traffic)
I started skateboarding when I moved here to Los Angeles.
I just thought you had to be a really cool,
badass Cali chick to get on a skateboard.
Coming from being a ballerina where I was
really fragile and meek and graceful,
I never saw myself as anything but that,
and then I got on a skateboard
and I suddenly felt really powerful and liberated,
and like it's nothing I've ever experienced.
I felt like a badass for the first time in my life.
Yeah, nothing exists when you skate.
I think being in Venice Beach as a woman,
you're already gonna get unwanted attention.
And then you add in the skateboard,
and it's just absurd, people just think
they can say anything to you
and it definitely doesn't feel good.
So I definitely wanted to have other women
to skate with, not just to kind of face
the male-dominated skate scene,
the craziness in Venice Beach, but to get support.
I started chasing girls down, like, if I saw a girl
on a skateboard in Venice I would just
skate towards her and be like,
"Join my text group, let's skate, I don't know!"
And I just made the text chain and called it GRLSWIRL,
and one night a group of girls,
we just all met up, and out of that big group
there was eight other girls who felt
just as passionately about what I was doing,
just wanted to get other women on boards
and inspire the feeling that we had,
which was freedom and liberation,
to other women by getting them on boards,
and we were like, "Let's build this."
We have a shared sympathy towards
the heavy male-dominated scene,
enough to the point where we feel
overly excited to open up our arms
and be extremely inclusive.
And we wanna make people feel like they're a part of this,
because we've felt not a part of it so many times.
(ethereal music)
We have group skates every two weeks
where any girl can come skate,
you could be any level, any age.
Okay everyone, boards on the ground!
Put your arms out, spread, get some space.
Toes to the sky, touch your toes.
We're adding 190 girls into the mix,
like, in our community, just locally.
You can imagine the kind of actual
grassroots community that has evolved from that,
that I've never, ever experienced anything like it.
Skateboarding started in Venice Beach,
the fabric of skateboarding is where we skate
every single day, you know.
And it's not an intimidating place
once you're there with other women,
but just to walk in there and not know anybody
and there's 50 guys and one girl,
it's like putting girls through the ringer
for something they love.
We're all working really, really hard
to grow GRLSWIRL, and you guys,
by coming out today, are a part of it.
We're all starting a revolution together,
getting women on skateboards, and you guys
are literally the center of it happening.
(crowd chatters)
We were doing a lot of photoshoots,
and I started to feel really like an influencer.
It was scary, and I was like,
"This is not what this is about."
What we came together for was to change people's lives
and actually get people on boards,
and teach people how to get on skateboards,
and so I was like, "We need to start
"amping up philanthropy yesterday."
And the girls that had a philanthropy went for it.
In the course of eight months,
we raised over $8000 for local non-profits.
And we're about to go to Mexico
to teach young girls at the border how to skate.
In this case, we needed donations,
so on Tuesday right after our group skate
we asked for girls to bring various donations,
from feminine materials to batteries,
and we were able to collect a lot of stuff.
- We're stoked to be able to bring them GRLSWIRL
and show them what we're doing here in Venice,
and uplift their spirits and just have a good old time.
- Woo, hey, all right!
- Hey, arriba!
Si, wow.
- Abajo.
Good!
- We're the next generation,
we're gonna inspire everybody else,
so we wanna make it the norm for a girl
to be on a skateboard.
So the freedom and overall badassness
and liberation I felt just getting on
the skateboard the first time,
I of course wanna share with every woman,
especially, you know, the girls at the border
who probably don't feel a lot of freedom right now.
Yeah, it's definitely something
that's really inspiring for me.
(crowd chattering)
We wanted to give girls the opportunity
of what we have, of starting our own community,
and philanthropy and all these things that we're doing,
we wanted to give them the tools
to do that in their own towns.
So we're starting GRLSWIRL memberships
and chapters around the world, actually.
In the one year goal, we really hope
that our business moves forward
in knocking down some gender boundaries
and making that clear across the board
that you can do what we're doing,
and empower each other through whatever you choose
if you come together as women.
Five years down the road, I hope
we're touring the world, teaching skate,
and building skate parks, and helping people,
and spreading the GRLSWIRL mission, man.