Asphalt Green’s Post

Name: Asphalt Green on LinkedIn: As Water Safety Month winds down, we want to give you a peek behind the…
Uploaded: 2024-05-31T15:30:16.713Z
Channel: Asphalt Green

Asphalt Green

2,783 followers

4mo

As Water Safety Month winds down, we want to give you a peek behind the curtain of our efforts to make critical, life-saving swim lessons accessible to all, from launching our Wave Makers program to providing 400 scholarships to our AGUA swim team to further develop our adaptive swim instruction. We are honored to partner with USA Swimming, the Gray Foundation, Shekar Krishnan, and Julie Menin as we continue to teach thousands — of all abilities — how to swim.

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I grew up in the Bronx. Swimming was a sport that wasn't accessible to everyone. It was more for kids that were rich and and had money and I really didn't understand the concept of the water and the dangers of it all. Some diagnosis. It was hard for him to understand from an executive functioning perspective what water safety really means. As a child, I would stay close to the shoreline. Even if it's just a small body of water, there is the potential of drowning. When I was a little girl, my parents and I would go to the Jersey Shore and my dad and I would go into the ocean. But my mother, who never learned to swim, would be back on the farthest reaches of the sand. Because she was actually really afraid. That's something that stuck with me. So making swimming accessible to everyone has become a very important mission to me. 79% of children from low income families have little to no swimming ability. Drowning is the leading cause of death for kids under four in the second leading cause for kids under 14. Asphalt Green was founded to bring people together of all backgrounds and our swim programs bring everyone together in the pool. Take your marks. What you've taught 100,000 kids to swim. We've given away more than $40 million worth of free swim lessons. We run a waterproofing program that has taught over 35,000 second graders to swim. Waterproofing builds this otherwise inaccessible life skill into the school day. It makes it part of their routine, and at the end of it, it protects children against drowning. Not only do we want to teach kids to swim, but we want each child to be able to say what does excellence mean to them and if that means learning to be a great swimmer. Being part of the AGUA team can open doors for people. Since 2001, we have given out more than 400 scholarships to deserving children on our August swim team. Swimming has really changed my work ethic because there's been times where I'm like, I can't do this, but I learned from swimming that if I just push through that. That's really beneficial in the end, which has helped with my confidence both in and out of the water. The number one cause of death in children with an autism diagnosis is water related. This was a really big cause of anxiety for our family, so we wanted to give him the right tools to navigate water safely and that's what brought us to Asphalt Green. Asphalt Greens Mission, at its core, it is inclusive. We are making accessibility a priority across all of its programming by really putting a focus on training and hiring staff who have the education. Another huge thing that we're doing is listening to the community, to the families, to the schools that we're serving and how we can best individualize instruction for them. LaSalle Green was the first program where we felt the instructors really understood Riley's specific needs. They really were very patient with Riley and allowed him to go at his own comfort level. You don't put any pressure on our swimmers. They grow at their own pace, which is something that we had not experienced with other programs within. What if we are meeting the needs of neurodivergent kids? Then we are meeting the needs of all kids and we can make an impact that is universal. This is New York City. We are surrounded by water. It's kind of flabbergasting to me that we wouldn't teach our children how to swim. We were recently very lucky to receive a grant from the Grave foundation so that we could launch wavemakers. Council members Julie Menon and Shekar Krishnan came to us with this idea and we said you had a said hello. We took a not-for-profit institution in Asphalt Green, partnered with the city and then our foundation and we're going to impact several thousand kids. They want to show other urban areas throughout the country how to teach every kid how to swim. That's why we are partnering with USA Swimming. They're experts at helping spread swim lessons throughout America. So while we were working on Wave Makers, they have been so instrumental in helping us form how we would implement it and ultimately scale it up beyond New York City. It doesn't matter where you come from, swimming should be open for all. My dream would be that you cannot graduate. High school without knowing how to swim, and that should not be a privilege. That should be a requirement. The water is my personal escape. When I'm swimming, it's like nothing else matters. Swimming has brought me such great memories and such a great community. I felt a sense of freedom when I was in the water. That's definitely something that changed my life. We don't know exactly where we'll be in five years, but we know it's going to be someplace bigger than what we are now. We know that we're going to be expanding our footprint. We know that we will teach 10s of thousands of more. Kids to swim. We know that we'll reach people all throughout New York City, and we're going to do it through sports, fitness and play for all.

HYLZA MEDINA

Government Administration Professional

4mo

I was a swimming instructor the best job I ever had

Rochelle Cohen

Major Gifts Officer at Weill Cornell Medicine

4mo

I love this!

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Cynthia Trevor

4mo

Roberto Cedeno ! One of my old teachers :)

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We are excited to be pursuing our first strategic partnership with https://lnkd.in/gsvy4UwH We are bringing modern, cutting-edge tech to the swim lesson industry with our sole goal of growing the sport of swimming and teaching millions how to swim. You can now get Swum Pro free for 1 YEAR ($1,164 value) by going to https://swum.ai/, signing up as a coach and joining the 'SuperHero Swim University' Academy.

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