A popular Utah company’s founder wants to tackle life’s challenges. With a skateboard.

Editor’s note • This article discusses suicide. If you or people you know are at risk of self-harm, call or text 988 to reach the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline for 24-hour support.

Daylight illuminates the skate park in Provo, bouncing off the sloped floor where kids glide over the smooth, old wood that has been sandblasted and restored.

The building is from the 1960s, so it has an industrial feel to it, aided by the corrugated rock and metal touches. Here, kids learn to skate, clad in helmets and tight knee pads, listening aptly to instructors. The rolling of wheels on wood becomes a soundtrack.

“It’s refined, but it also has some grunge,” said Colby Bauer, founder of Carry On, the nonprofit that operates Glenn Parker Skate Park. “It’s colorful, warm and really fun.”

That warmth extends beyond the sunlight — into the classrooms and through the hallways — where encouragement is bountiful and lessons about mental health are a priority.

This place was created for a good cause, but it was borne of a family tragedy.

In 1993, Bauer’s uncle, poet Glenn Parker, an anthropology student at the University of Utah, died by suicide. In the three decades since, the poet’s family has continued to grapple with his loss, which has had ripple effects — both positive and negative.

Now, the skate park, which opened this month, is named in his memory and seeks to help kids learn about mental health.

A family’s story

Carry On combines skateboarding and education on developing coping mechanisms for mental health, like growing confidence in a sport.

A team of experienced directors — led by Cole Parkinson and Davey Lowery — put together a curriculum for teaching these skills, and each skateboarding lesson has a dedicated training time for “mental skills training.”

Bauer, who co-founded Thread Wallets with his wife McKenzie, said the concept of Carry On was born in 2020, but it was a project “years in the making.”

“When my wife and I started Thread Wallets about 10 years ago,” Bauer said, “we knew we wanted to give back and find ways to partner with nonprofit organizations and just dive a little deeper into some social causes we were interested in.”

For Bauer, that cause was addiction recovery because his mother Cindy Parker is a recovering alcoholic and opioid addict.

Bauer and his mother can both pinpoint the exact series of moments that led her to turn to alcohol — starting with Glenn Parker’s death.

Cindy describes her late brother as “kind, talented and probably a little lost.”

“He had severe OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder), which limited him in things, because it kind of consumed him,” she said. “He was kind of a cosmic person, really special. He just had a different way of looking at life.”

Struggles with addiction

Cindy recalls going to Jazz games with her brother and taking him shopping. In 1993, she, her husband and their four children moved to Arizona. Six months later, they would get the call notifying them of her brother’s death.

“I felt guilty because I moved,” Cindy said. “For a long time, I really struggled with that.”

After her brother’s death, Cindy said her mother came to stay with them in Arizona, and bought a bottle of wine while she was there. After her mother left, the bottle stayed in Cindy’s fridge, half empty.

Cindy recalls when she “cracked” and drank the wine, even though alcoholism is something that ran in the family, and something she tried to steer away from.

“It just took all the pain away,” she said.

As the years went by, Cindy said, she wrestled with getting to what she considers the root of her struggles: an inability to express herself.

After an arrest at age 32, Cindy spent years going in and out of rehab. Her life took a dramatic turn in 2020, when working from home led her to drink more than usual and lose her job.

“It got so bad,” she said, “I was on the street because nobody — my kids [and] my mom didn’t want to be around me.”

As Cindy continued to turn to alcohol, Bauer said he had to drop his mother off at a homeless shelter.

Cindy’s turning point came early one morning while on the streets of Salt Lake City.

“Somehow I woke up and my arm bone … was broken in half,” she said.

Cindy still doesn’t know how she broke her arm. After the injury, she spent four months at the Odyssey House of Utah, which helps those with substance abuse problems and provides mental health treatments.

“That’s where I learned, finally, to go through the feelings about Glenn, about everything,” she said. “I let all the hurt, pain and responsibility I felt for his death go.”

Now, she’s almost four years sober.

Bauer said worrying about his mother was just one part of his chaotic life in 2020. During that time, he started reflecting on his own mental health journey, and how it connected to his mother’s addiction.

“The world was just really pressing on me,” he said.

After he started seeing a therapist, Bauer said he realized a lot of the roots of his problems — and his family’s — came from lack of understanding about mental health, which sparked the idea of focusing on a preventative mindset.

As he looked back on everything, Bauer said he started asking himself questions, like, “What if my grandma was taught mental health skills? What if my uncle Glenn was taught mental health and resilience skills? What if my mom was?”

‘Escape to the skate park’

In his youth, Bauer dealt with anxiety around his mother’s addiction by hitting the skate park. Growing up, he also joined a few organized sports, like soccer.

“What I think is the most addictive, or most therapeutic, is progression within any sport,’” he said.

Whether it’s improving an ollie by a hair, or learning to stick a landing, persistence gets you closer to a goal every day, Bauer said. That’s how he decided to combine the two areas — skateboarding and mental health.

“Skateboarding,” he said, “has all the natural ingredients to teach [kids] these beautiful skills.”

In spring 2021, Carry On launched its first program at a mini-skate park in Lehi within one of Thread Wallet’s warehouses. The turnout and response was so positive, Bauer said, he and his wife decided they needed to make their own skate park.

“A lot of these kids turn to skateboarding because they don’t have a safe home [or] maybe they’re faced with their own trials and traumas at home,” Bauer said, “and they’re just trying to escape to the skate park.”

Bauer said the programs are geared toward kids and teens ages 4 to 17, regardless of skill level. His goal is to have Carry On help kids worldwide, and to add other action sports to the repertoire, like surfing, rock climbing and mountain biking.

At Carry On, Bauer said he wants everyone to feel like the nonprofit’s team members “roll out the red carpet” for them.

“They can feel that light,” he said. “That’s the spirit of Glenn.”

Down the line, Cindy said the organization also wants to create a magazine for kids, focused on mental health.

Through this journey, both Cindy and her son have grown. Cindy said she needed to endure the darkness for Bauer to be able to bring the light of Carry On into the world.

“Glenn’s life ended early,” she said, “but it will never go in vain, because [of] what’s coming about because of it.”