Zach Bell learned how to skateboard with the help of his mother, Emily Coffey, who bought him his first board and shredded right beside him.
Late last year, Coffey passed away from lung cancer. Due to COVID-19 restrictions, Bell was unable to see her as she fought her battle in a nursing home.
“The last time I was able to see her was through a window, which is just absolutely horrible,” Bell said.
He channeled the desperation of wanting to be near his mother as she fought lung cancer into starting a fundraiser. Its aim is to give skateboards to children, especially female skateboarders.
[sc:text-divider text-divider-title=”Story continues below gallery” ]“I stayed up a little bit late one night and had the wheels turning. It just clicked,” Bell said.
Bell seeded the fundraiser with $500 he received after his mother’s death. He started a GoFundMe page and the donations began to roll in without much publicizing. One of the first was $300 from a friend of his mother’s whom she met while working at Notre Dame.
“My jaw just dropped. I’m like, ‘OK, so this is real.’ I took it to the next step and I was just like, ‘OK, Just send it to every family member, everybody who knew my mom,’” Bell said.
Bell then reached out to the skateboarding community, including the owner of Rhett Skateboarding, Jonathan Prather. He told Bell he would give him the skateboards at cost.
“He’s like, ‘Yeah let’s do this,’ because the whole idea is getting skateboards into the hands of the kids with no costs at all and no discrimination,” Bell said.
“I want to have girls kind of prioritized. But I do want to get them into the hands of girls and kids who want one, but their families cannot afford them.”
As of last week, the fundraiser had brought in $2,229 of the $2,500 goal.
On Dec. 21, Bell was heading over to Rhett Skateboarding to start building 10 boards. Juliet Shuck was able to get two skateboards to give her son, Link, and daughter, Aurora, on Christmas morning.
“I get to give a 9-year-old girl her first skateboard. When I finally figured out who the first one was, I was so happy,” Bell said.
With the money raised, Bell wants to give skateboards to children in Brown County and in Hartford City, where his mom and family are from. Bell has lived in the Brown County area for five years now.
Like in Brown County, kids in Hartford City do not have many opportunities to skate. Until recently, skateboarding was limited to one street in Nashville until Brown County’s first skate park, Victory Park, was built at Deer Run Park.
His brother, Adam, also is helping with the fundraiser and will distribute the boards in Hartford City. Adam visited Bell on Christmas Day and took half of the boards Bell had to give away in Hartford City on their mother’s birthday.
The brothers are working with local organizations in both areas to help identify kids who would want skateboards.
Bell said he has no concrete goal on how much money he wants to raise, but the more money he raises, the more boards he can purchase. As a further honor to his mother, Bell also designed stickers featuring her that will be put on the skateboards.
His fundraiser can be found by searching “Skateboards for kids!! Emily Coffey.” Anyone interested in getting a skateboard can contact him through GoFundMe or email him at [email protected].
“The qualifications are if the kid wants a skateboard, No. 1. That’s it. I’m not going to discriminate,” he said.
“It’ll be hard for me to say no. I’m not going to be like, ‘How much do your parents make?’ kind of situation. That’s not what I want to do. It’s just about getting a skateboard into a kid’s hand; therefore, my mom’s memory lives on. There’s only a few times in life where you get that feeling that you get from skateboarding.”
The adrenaline of going down a hill as fast as you can on a board is an excitement skateboarders can understand, and Bell hopes his fundraiser brings that to the lives of many children.
“It’s all about my mom living on through the excitement of these kids on the skateboard, and then the possibility that one of these kids absolutely falls in love with skateboarding,” he said.
“That’s what I would want.”
‘Very fearless’
Coffey passed away on Nov. 21, nearly a month before her 67th birthday.
“Her greatest joy came from being a mother and taking care of her boys,” her obituary reads.
She was passionate about skateboarding — something she began doing as a young girl when it was very much a male-dominated sport.
In the 1960s, Coffey had a neighbor who surfed in California. He returned to Indiana with a skateboard.
“Surfers pretty much invented the skateboard in a way to practice surfing. She rode that and liked it,” Bell said.
One day, Coffey and her two brothers, with boards in hand, went to check out a hill known as “Killer Hill.”
“Both of her brothers were too scared to get all the way down, but she did it and just, like, blew them away. I always thought that was so cool,” Bell said.
“She was very fearless.”
But being a female skateboarder was no cakewalk. “She was told ‘no’ a lot,” Bell said.
“She had such potential for skateboarding, or being in a rock ‘n’ roll band, or, like some of that energy. … They told her ‘no’ way too much. I just want to, in some ways, undo that.”
Bell received his first skateboard from Coffey when they lived in California for a time. “I remember having so much fun on it,” he said.
When he was a teen, Coffey worked at a skate shop, “and then I got into skateboarding big time,” he said.
“She is tied to skateboarding as much as any aspect of skateboarding for me because she introduced it to me. She spent a lot of money. … It takes a really good parent to buy $100 shoes and then let a kid go out and skateboard in it.’ Essentially it just destroys the shoe. She did that. She wasn’t critical, like, ‘You’re just going to scuff it.’”
Coffey did not shy away from skateboarding even as she was battling cancer and receiving chemo. She always wore checkerboard Vans to chemo treatments, according to the GoFundMe page.
Bell remembers a time two years ago when they both were “lazily skating” around his grandmother’s cul-de-sac. “She was tough. She flips over the board, it smacks her head, she puts her hand on the back of her head and just starts laughing, not going, ‘Ouch,’” he said.
“It’s one of those lessons that skateboarding teaches you, too. It’s a lot about getting back up.”
Coffey was a small, but mighty force to be reckoned with, Bell said.
“She loved kids. She was an artist. She loved music. Just a rad, rad person who really gave cancer a hard run for its money,” he said.
“She was a cool mom to other kids, too. My troubled friends lived with us. She was incredible.”
Coffey’s obituary says she also worked as a social worker at a homeless shelter in South Bend.
Bell said his ultimate goal is to have someone like famed skateboarder Tony Hawk see his fundraiser and share it, which will hopefully inspire others to start similar fundraisers to honor those they have lost.
“I have no (fundraising) limit, but I’m already happy. If I didn’t get a single donation after this, I’d still be stoked,” he said.
“The possibilities are endless. I just would love to see this develop into something that everybody could feel proud about. It’s not just about my mom. It’s such a good feeling to be able to do this during a crappy time.”
Because of COVID-19, Bell and his brother decided not to have a funeral for Coffey. Bell also lost his father to cancer in 2020 and was unable to have a funeral for him either.
“I haven’t gotten to clear out whatever a funeral clears out or does, like the grieving process, so the feeling I get from this is fantastic,” Bell said
He hopes this fundraiser can help other families who are also grieving.
“There’s a place where this could get big and flow to the right place. I just know with the right people and motivation, it could happen,” he said.
“It might not, but like I said, if I don’t get another donation, I’m happy.”
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Do you want to donate to Zach Bell’s fundraiser? The fundraiser can found by clicking here.
Do you know a kid who would enjoy a skateboard? Contact Bell through GoFundMe or by emailing him at [email protected].
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