Skating Blind.

There is an old adage that states “Nothing is impossible if you put you mind to it.”

Look around the action sports community. Bruce Cook is a paraplegic and he back flips a dirt bike in Nitro Circus. Aaron “Wheels” Fotheringham jumps his wheelchair on the giganta ramp. Recently, Action Sports Today featured Tanner Godfrey who was told he would never walk again after a dirt bike crash, jump his Polaris RZR into the record books.

Add Justin Bishop to this list of people doing what others would think impossible or crazy.

An avid skateboarder since a young age, Bishop was diagnosed at the age of 8 with retinitis pigmentosa, a genetic disorder of the eyes that will eventually leave him blind. Bishop still skated into his mid twenties when finally, that eyesight was completely gone.

“I really thought skateboarding was going to be a thing of the past for me,” said Bishop. “Who skates blind?”

Now at 32 years old, Bishop is back skating for himself but not just himself alone.

“Around the age of 30 I started to skate again,” said Bishop. “I got a job in Vegas at a placed called Sport Social. We teach kids who are on spectrum in a variety of things including skateboarding. I started back to skating using a beeper box as an audible marker for me to hear the direction I needed to go. I put out a video of me skating with it and Zappos and Not Impossible Labs saw it and reached out to me saying ‘We can do better.”

“Not Impossible Labs builds tech for the sake of humanity,” said Adam Dole, Executive Director Not Impossible Labs. “When we heard Justin’s story through Zappos, we knew that was the perfect fit for us and wanted to get involved. Our entire approach at Not Impossible Labs is about identifying absurdities in the world and saying that shouldn’t be right. That should be accessible to everyone. Skateboarding brings so much joy and purpose to Justin’s life and we could see how that affected others too and we wanted to make that possible.”

Not Impossible Labs crowd-solves issues of inability and inaccessibility to provide low-cost solutions that allow the most vulnerable among us to survive and thrive. They seek to identify an absurdity, defined as a lack of access or opportunity, or constraints of capital or resources, in our modern world with the bold intention to address that absurdity and commit to ambitious action to make real impact that seeks to Make the Impossible, Not Impossible.

“When we tackle a project our team of ‘misfit geniuses’ throw every resource we have at it, using anything they can think of to create a working prototype to build from,” said Dole. “There is no shortage of duct tape and zip ties. Then we build from there, whether is software hardware or a combo of the two. We want to be in a consistent position”

Not Impossible Labs disrupts the status quo through a cycle of collaboration and impactful innovation paired with Help One, Help Many storytelling. All change starts small. The big picture is just too unwieldy, too incomprehensible and seemingly immovable. But given something individual, quantifiable and personalize-able and, suddenly, our perspective shifts. Suddenly, it becomes possible. Enormous challenges and opportunities for change are explored through the cinematic journey of an individual, which grounds the issue in reality, inspires emotional connection, and compels further action to scale the solution.

Following the Not Impossible mantra of “Help one, Help Many”, Justin became the “One” to interact with the new Fazed Ray speaker technology.

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“The devices are portable,” said Bishop. “It allows me to take the device into an urban environment to set up and skate, rather than constantly needing to be in a controlled environment. A few months ago, I was skating and had the police called on me. When they showed up to kick us out, they were so curious about the device and my ability to skate being blind. They said to me, ‘That’s awesome, but you still have to go.’ It was a great feeling for me as a skater to still have the ability to get the police called on you. As a skater you have to learn and adjust. I am just like anyone else who skates. I still have to come to a park and learn the course just like everyone else. The muscle memory of skating doesn’t leave you, you just have to adapt to learn how to use it again.”

With the addition of skateboard street and park to the 2020 Tokyo Summer Olympics, one can imagine that the reality of skateboarding being added to the Paralympics is coming soon.

“I’m ready,” said Bishop. “I want that addition today. Skateboarding is made for the blind and I love being able to show an entire community of blind people the sport. Skateboarding is all about feel. If you can feel it you can skate it. Our sense of feel being blind is just a little different. I am not the only blind skater out there. There are so many other great skaters and we want to be able to show the world that even though we cannot see, we can still find a way to actively pursue our passions in life. I would love to be on the forefront pushing to make this happen. At times we are left in the dark in terms of accessible items to me and other blind people. Using technology to our advantage is key but many people do not use whats available. I want to use the platform I have to educate others on how to make the outside world accessible.”

“All that being said I’ll be in my 40’s when the Paralympics are in Los Angeles, so hopefully I wont be too old by then.”

We hope not either. Can’t wait to see you in LA.